Op-Ed: PBS' Lehrer Defends Elite Press Corps' Gatekeeper Role

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Speaking on the University of Texas campus recently, Lehrer, anchor of “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” took the opportunity to diss the blogosphere as “talkers, commentators, not reporters,” and to praise the controlled corps of embedded reporters and canned talking heads who comprise the corporate press as the only legitimate purveyors of information.

“The talk show hosts are reactors, commentators, not reporters,” he told his large audience of journalism students, bigwigs and assorted locals. “The comedians are entertainers, commentators, not reporters. The search engines search but do not report. And iPods and MP3s are mere machines, as are cable television and satellite radio. All of them, every single one of them, have to have the news in order to exist. In the beginning, there must be a news story.”

Lehrer left no doubt as to where those stories would come from: “It has to start with one of us real newsmen, one of us journalists who was there or who read the original documents…who did whatever it took to make the news in the first place.”

He urged the audience to appreciate that “almost everything out there that matters—up close and far away—most straight knowledge of it comes from the people who simply report the news.”

Missing was any acknowledgment of the army of independent researchers and reporters who have turned to the Internet in order to escape the mainstream media's censorship. Apparently, Internet-based journalists don’t count as “real” for him.

Lehrer said the role of the news gatekeeper, far from going away, is going to be bigger than ever in the future.

“There’s an increasing amount of news noise—and noise about the news: out there in the blogosphere, the satellite, the iPod, and other spheres,” he said. “People are busy. They want some professional, unbiased assistance sorting through it all, to help determine what’s important and what is not so important…that’s what we journalists have always done.” Although some details might change: “Like it or not, there will always be a need for animals like television anchors who announce the end result of the sorting.”

In answer to a question proposing that slipping reader- and viewership might owe to a disconnect between what the gatekeepers think is important and what their audience does, Lehrer responded that journalists are hired to make judgments: “There’s an awful lot of stuff out there. People need some help sorting through it all.” During a typical 24-hour cycle, 1500 stories (not including “the Britney stories, sports, basic weather stories”) might come across the newsdesk, of which perhaps 300 or 400 will be used. “Somebody’s got to go through all that.”

In 2007, most major US news outlets attached inordinate importance to the sagas of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Anna Nicole Smith and her baby.

Ironically, Lehrer maintained that the gatekeepers must be credible. “The key to the gatekeeper is to establish the trust of the people who watch the broadcast or read the newspaper or whatever,” he said. “Without that, it’s never going to work.”

see Project Censored 2007