Remarks by S.V. Dáte at the benefit for the Wakulla Independent Reporter

Wakulla Springs State Park Lodge, Crawfordville, Florida, July 3, 2007

1. I'd like to thank the sponsors tonight for inviting me, and all of you for coming out tonight.
   
   1. Most of all, though, I want to thank independent journalists like Julia.
   2. Me, no matter how much the politicians don't like me, and no matter whose office I might get thrown out of, at the end of it all, I still have an employer who provides me health insurance and paid vacation, and the paycheck comes every Thursday.
   3. What Julia does is a lot braver, and my hat's off to her.
2. Can I say before I start that I told my boys this morning that I was speaking at a dinner where people paid $35 each to come listen to me — now, I know you're really here to support Julia, but I didn't tell them that part — and they stared at me for a while like I'd grown a third head, and then they started laughing and said, Daddy, we still wouldn't listen to you even if YOU gave US $35.
3. I wanted to speak briefly tonight about a couple of issues of concern to journalism, but then reserve most of the time for questions. I'm thinking that, given this group, you might have a few — about the previous governor, about the new governor, about this book — value priced, by the way, at $29 including state and local option sales taxes, with the proceeds, $9 and 16 cents, going to Julia's cause.
4. First is all the vogue in media circles, and it's the one that I don't think is so bad.
   1. This is the problem of declining circulation, at this rate we'll have nobody left in 10 years … TV is killing us … the Web is killing us … the sky is falling.
   2. I used to work at the Orlando Sentinel, which even a dozen years ago was at the cutting edge of the hand-wringing.
   3. They renamed all of us content-providers, and had us sit in information pods, and made us write user-friendly, "news you can use…"
   4. I THINK NEWSPAPERS NEED TO GET OVER IT, and get back to doing what we ought to be doing best, which is insight, analysis and, sometimes, plain old stenography of our self-government in action.
   5. Basically, I think we're at a news delivery crossroads, NOT at the extinction of the news business.
   6. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're ALMOST at the point where we really NEED a business model that's more effective that putting all our news for free on the Web.
      1. i. Think about it. All the people who say newspapers are finished because they get all their news on the Internet. Well, where do you suppose Yahoo and Google and everybody else is getting their stories? News leprechauns?
      2. Maybe it's time the establishment media, newspapers, television, wire services — all the people who go out there and actually report news — maybe it's time we go on Internet strike for a day.
         1. For one day, we should provide no news to the Internet. None. Then let's see all the bloggers sitting at home in their underwear, all of these "NEW media" who like making fun of us "OLD media" — let's see them offer all their brilliant insights and pithy commentary about THAT.
   7. The Wall Street Journal has figured it out, and it's time the rest of us do, too. We provide a quality product, and it's time we end the loss leader and put a market driven price on it.
5. The second problem, unfortunately, won't be so easily fixed. It is much more insidious, and it represents a far graver threat to the Republic.
   1. Because, let me be so bold as to suggest that that's the only REALLY important thing we journalists do, and that is provide a critical service to this continuing experiment in self-government.
      1. We got the First Amendment protection for a reason, and it wasn't so we could provide 24/7 coverage of Paris Hilton. It was because the framers understood that the free flow of information was critical, and that's why we're right up there with freedom of religion and assembly. We're even ahead of guns.
      2. To illustrate the problem, let me pose this:
         1. If you ask one pre-school what 2 plus 2 is, and he tells you 5, and you ask another one, and she tells you 7 É does that mean the answer is 6?
         2. Because, as you know, that's how journalists are supposed to see it nowadays: One person tells you one thing, and another tells you another, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
      3. Of course, the truth is NOT somewhere in the middle. The truth is wherever the truth is. Maybe it's in the middle. But it's way over here, and maybe it's way over on the other side.
      4. The truth is somewhere in the middle notion is being pushed, I will respectfully suggest, by political groups in this country that have no use for real journalism, or truth, or for that matter, honest dissent.
      5. They are about winning, and they have learned that they can win better if they control the public debate.
         1. They have made reality and truth wholly subjective, and blurred the primacy of facts.
            1. Let's be clear here: we're not talking about whose god is better or even about whether chocolate chip ice cream is superior to strawberry.
            2. We're talking about de-legitimizing facts — facts about government, facts about science, facts about everything. Because when you do that, then all that matters is getting the most vocal minority to shout down everybody else.
      6. I saw this first-hand, during my years covering Jeb Bush — from his voucher program to his tax policies to his outsourcing fixation. If you focused on facts, you were called bias, and treated as a pariah.
         1. Let me provide one example of how this has corrupted our business. This is from the Bush-Cheney re-election in 2004: The Ron Susskind story about the president's faith published in the New York Times magazine.
            1. Reporter felt that the story was "over the top," and therefore incredible.
               1. I had read that story, and I'd been amazed at how just about everybody in it was speaking openly, on-the-record about the White House's decision-making process. And, in retrospect, the story was not only credible, but absolutely dead on target.
               2. Yet a respected political reporter from a respected Florida paper felt compelled to diminish it. Why? Because it made a forceful case, using facts, and concluded, using facts, that the truth was not SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE.
            2. I will respectfully suggest that this mentality is not serving our profession or our nation particularly well. It's something I discussed at great length in my book about Jeb. In fact, I felt the topic was so important that I wrote an entire chapter about it: "Who Wants to Know?" — because that's the answer we too often got from the Jeb Bush administration when it came to open records: Who wants to know?
         2. This is from the closing pages of that chapter:

      In Tallahassee, Jeb divided and conquered the press corps, intimidating some, giving special access to others, to get out his message — all the while making it more and more time-consuming and ever more expensive to pry loose public records.

      And by the end of his second term, nobody, apart from maybe a few dozen journalists and maybe an equal number of editorial writers, cared. Not even a little bit. Which is another way of saying that when Jeb finished his second term having markedly diminished Floridians' right to know about their own government, much of the blame must be borne by Floridians themselves.

      It's a harsh indictment, but there it is. Maybe journalists must share in the blame, for not effectively explaining why when Jeb was stonewalling us, he was actually stonewalling the general public. I say "maybe" because I'm not remotely persuaded this is true, even though it has become quite fashionable to blame the media for their lack of relevance. Usually this is attributed to scandals in recent years involving fabricated stories and forged documents and so forth, but I think this misses a more basic point. The difference between the media today and the media fifty years ago, I think, is that the media today have much more precise means of determining what Americans want to read in their newspapers or see on television. It's not only political candidates who use focus groups and polling.

      Are Americans more ignorant of their government because the news media do a worse job of covering it? Or do the media do a worse job covering politics and government because Americans don't care about those things as much? As politically correct as it might be to blame both equally or society as a whole, as someone who has watched the business from the inside for two decades, I think I must blame the news consumer. In a competitive market such as journalism, the customer is always right, and in this area the customer has shown that he values information about movie, television and sports celebrities and their entertainment events more highly than information about his school board and his governor. If you doubt this, come look at the respective travel budgets at your hometown newspaper for its state capital bureau and its sports department. Compare the typical salaries at a metro newspaper for the county commission reporter versus the gossip columnist. If readers demanded more in-depth coverage of the state legislature than they did the pro basketball team, trust me, editors and publishers would respond. If viewers demanded more coverage of their Congress than the latest missing white woman, believe me: the cable news networks would turn on a dime.

      With the Florida open government laws as clear as they are, there was a simple way for the news media to obtain the public records that anyone in the public is entitled to receive in a timely manner: take Jeb to court. It would have been a clear-cut case. The language was not ambiguous. Years of case law were on our side. So why didn't it happen? Lawsuits are costly and time consuming — and our readers really didn't care if they got the information or not. The public records in question were not about Britney Spears. They weren't about the Miami Dolphins.

      And so, the end result is that people like Jeb, who have mastered the modern art of "message," can advance their careers with a minimum of scrutiny and analysis. Voters by and large know about Jeb only what Jeb wants them to know, countered to an extent when the opposing party puts out its own paid message during election times. Since Jeb thus far has been far more competent at getting out his message as well as flat out louder than his Democratic opponents, to date it has been no contest. Should Jeb ever find himself in the White House, Americans can expect a government-in-the-dark- closet policy that makes his brother's administration look open and forthcoming in comparison. Will anyone other than the usual whiners like us in the news media care?

      Unfortunately, if history is a guide — no, probably not.

b.    Now, my wife suggested that that is far too depressing a passage to finish with, so let me end by sharing some fan mail that I got back in January. This was before the book even came out, when The Washington Post approached me about writing an op-ed piece speculating on what a Jeb Bush presidency might be like in its seventh year, had he won his governor's race in 1994 and George W had lost, rather than the other way around. So I did. And I must report to you that, somehow, many readers came away with the idea that I was endorsing Jeb for president.
1. In fact, they felt quite strongly about this. There were more than 300 responses, but let me offer a Top Five list, in the interest of time:
2. Number Five: This may be the single most idiotic article I have ever read in the Washington Post. Well — some might see a statement like as a criticism. But I look at it, and I see the words single and most — and I've got to tell you: I definitely see a superlative in there.
3. Number Four: Is this column the humiliating payoff of a lost wager with a sadistic friend?
4. Number Three: One question: What color is the sky in your home planet?
5. Number Two: If he is not guided and motivated by your piece would you promise to personally encourage him ? Just precisely what I would recommend and endorse to the nation right now or maybe even in 2012: another Bush. Just a brilliant piece - brilliant. I'd sit by the phone and wait for my Pulitzer nomination if I were you.
6. And the number one best response, from a reader in Broomfield, Colorado: I could not finish reading your awful, simply awful, column. You idiots just won't give it up will you? The Bushes [expletive deleted] up the world, mainly the U.S. You should be ashamed of yourself, I'm quite sure your mother is. Please go away. You and your ilk have failed, you are a failure. Go away. ...
   P.S. There is a Colorado Blue Spruce in my front yard that is way smarter than you.