[lbo-talk] the Prozac newsroom

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Apr 7 13:09:21 PDT 2003


Yale Daily News - April 7, 2003

News celebrates 125 years with gala BY WILL SULLIVAN Staff Reporter

As a reporter for the Yale Daily News, humorist Calvin Trillin '57 said, he learned that fairness and balance were essential.

"I always say I learned the first lesson of journalism at the Yale Daily News," Trillin said. "Which was we try to be equally inaccurate about both sides."

Trillin was one of about 500 former Yale Daily News board members who returned to campus over the weekend to celebrate the paper's 125th anniversary. Events included a banquet and seven panels discussing the evolution of journalism and the issues facing modern reporters. Graduates from as far back as the class of 1941 reminisced about their own years as Newsies throughout the weekend.

"At Yale I went to a few classes," Lanny Davis '67 said. "But I graduated from the Yale Daily News."

Davis spoke during an afternoon plenary session panel about the "egg and chicken" relationship between politics and journalism. In addition to Davis, a lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the panel included fellow former presidential consultant David Gergen '63 and three journalists -- Dana Milbank '90, Robert Semple '59, and John Stacks '64 -- and was moderated by professor emeritus of history Gaddis Smith '54. Yale President Richard Levin welcomed the panel and said technology has forced him to become more media savvy.

"The campus is no longer a world apart," Levin said. "I can no longer expect to say anything to a Daily reporter without expecting to see it in The New York Times."

The panelists discussed the changes necessitated by the 24-hour news cycle, where cable news can provide up to the minute access and print journalists scramble to compete. Washington Post White House correspondent Dana Milbank '90 said the Bush administration has been especially clever in using this demand for immediate news by sending out small bits of information.

"There's no time to question it, or Fox or MSNBC are going to have it," Milbank said. "By the time we catch up and say, 'Maybe that's not true,' we're already on to something else."

Milbank said reporters have become complacent and given up their aggressive style. He called this situation "the Prozac newsroom," and joked that 40 percent of Washington Post reporters were on some kind of anti-depressant. But Davis said reporters had become more aggressive, particularly in digging for scandals and personal details.

[rest at <http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=22429>]



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