WHEN THE Los Angeles Times went through another round of newsroom layoffs last month, an editor sent an e-mail to remaining staff members urging them on, reminding them to swill caffeine-laden Mountain Dew and tell their editors to send "(expletive) stories" to the copy desk. Journalists, he wrote, don't get ulcers, they give them -- an obvious reference to our adversarial relationship with government. There is barely a newsroom in America where reporters aren't numb to layoffs anyway, so stop worrying and move on, she seemed to say.
But it isn't shrinking staffs, though, that have some of us worried. It's shrinking credibility. Britain's News of the World scandal may seem like a world away, but bits of it began to wash up on American shores in late July when staffers at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post were ordered by company lawyers to preserve any documents related in any way to phone hacking or payoffs to government officials. Not that anyone at the Post has been accused of breaking into someone's voice mail or passing bags of cash to bureaucrats, but Murdoch's attorneys want to be ready just in case. Later this month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is to meet with families of 9/11 victims about an FBI investigation into whether News of the World reporters tried to bribe a New York police officer to get victims' phone records.
Phone hacking appears to have been more common at News of the World than Murdoch's minions have let on. It was still unclear as of early last week what Murdoch knew and when he knew it, and when this year his son, Robert, received a company e-mail about the practice.
Unfortunately, this isn't a new issue. In 1998, the credibility of American journalism suffered tremendously when the Cincinnati Enquirer was forced to publicly apologize to fruit company Chiquita Brands International after one of its investigative reporters hacked into more than 2,000 voice-mail messages that served as the basis for an 18-page report showing tremendous corruption in Chiquita's Central American operations.
The paper's parent company -- Gannett -- paid $10 million to Chiquita before a lawsuit was even filed. But there is a dirty secret to the scandal. Much, if not all, of what the Enquirer reported about how Chiquita did business appeared to be, well, true.
But the end could never justify the means, nor should it. The glory-seeking reporter who hacked into the voice mail system, Mike Gallagher, did more than destroy his own career. The pall that settled over newsrooms for months, if not years, created a tremendous caution about aggressive, salient journalism.
If the News of the World scandal turns into a New York Post scandal, or expands to 9/11 victims just as the 10th anniversary of the attacks approaches, you can count on similar fallout. Journalistic ulcers will come not from layoffs and cutbacks, but from shame and embarrassment.
Where the public will be hurt is in the inevitable way that a reporter, somewhere, digging ethically, using public records laws, working sources, will get pulled back on a story. A story won't have to be killed, just slowed, for a wrongdoer somewhere to weasel away.
Maybe the reaction will be different. It's just a tabloid, some might say. (Hey, I am a New Yorker, I love the Post and the tabloid Daily News). But that seems doubtful. Critics of aggressive reporting are often its subjects (i.e. government officials) and they don't need much prodding. At a time when the layoffs and shrinking staffs of news gatherers never seem to end, this is no time for a scandal, even when we keep causing them ourselves.