Sheer Class, Jim Lehrer’s Tenure and Exit from What Is Now the PBS NewsHour — the Professional Values that, if Emulated, Would Restore Journalism into the Democracy-Preserving Institution that It Once Was

© 2011 Peter Free

 

14 May 2011

 

 

The soul’s best role models tend not to be flashy people — professional honor matters

 

Jim Lehrer’s departure from the show he helped create has been a quietly self-effacing one.  Given the man’s accomplishments, that should mildly astonish us in this era of self-adulation.

 

His colleague, Robert MacNeil, put Lehrer’s understated, nurturing personal and leadership style into respect-filled perspective in a blog entry posted at The Daily Beast.

 

MacNeil pointed out that Lehrer has been successful in transmitting his personal credibility to the team of correspondents who replaced him: Jeff Brown, Gwen Ifill, Ray Suarez, Margaret Warner, and Judy Woodruff.  That’s never been done before.

 

MacNeil attributes Lehrer’s success in becoming an eminently trustworthy source of even-handed news to Lehrer’s professional code of journalistic conduct.

 

 

Jim Lehrer’s code — a pattern that could revive journalism back into the democracy-preserving institution it used to be

 

MacNeill said:

 

Jim’s sense of fairness is distilled in the personal code of conduct that he lives and works by as a journalist.

 

This is how he outlined it recently in a talk at the National Press Club in Washington:

 

1. Do nothing I can not defend . . .

 

2. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me . . .

 

3. Assume that there is at least one other side or version to every story . . .

 

4. Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am . . .

 

5. Assume the same about all people on whom I report . . .

 

6. Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise . . .

 

7. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories . . . and clearly label everything . . .

 

8. Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes, except on rare and monumental occasions.  No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously . . .

 

9. And . . . finally . . . I am not in the entertainment business . . .

 

© 2011 Robert MacNeill, Jim Lehrer’s Stealthy Exit, The Daily Beast (13 May 2011)

 

 

Are Lehrer’s values realistic today?

 

Perhaps — unless we have fallen so low as to be unable to recognize that the nation’s survival requires fact-finding and truthful reporting.

 

I suspect that, in the end, grasping after viewers does not require pandering to what is most detestable in our natures.

 

The routes the majority of the media took in discarding (i) fairness for bias, (ii) facts for fluff, and (iii) memory for instant forgetfulness were merely the easiest courses — just as immorality often is.

 

Our American public is not so homogenously stupid that it cannot recognize the worth of competent, thorough, and fair-minded media.

 

Shallow opinion in place of genuine journalism is admittedly emotionally titillating.  But facts-less rancor wears thin when Reality’s bite draws blood from the ignorant witless.

 

 

The moral — good codes of conduct guard us from our self-caused mire

 

Jim Lehrer’s guidelines for a journalist’s professional conduct are a guide to bringing sanity back to today’s insanely fact-disregarding, reality-avoiding political culture.

 

Choose your heroes wisely.