ADVOCACY JOURNALISM
The third era in Vermont journalism arrived in Vermont in the 1960s with the advent of advocacy journalism.
It was a reporting style whose beginnings are often linked to the Watergate scandals of the 1970s, but it was actually well under way in Vermont and other places by the mid-1960s due in part to the civil rights movement. In Vermont it was practiced by an increasing number of reporters, who believed newspapers should be instruments of change and reform, and some editors like Kendall Wild of the Herald who were willing to give them room to pursue good causes.
The Free Press’s top State House reporter of that era, Victor Maerki, (who later became a senior legislative aide for former U.S. Sen. Robert Stafford), believed down to his toenails the job of the journalist was to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”; he taught reporters who worked for him to follow his lead and act on it. I didn’t work for or against Maerki, but I had many a fight with him on the telephone as a reporter.
This was usually because after he went into government work, he was always testing reporters to see if they knew anything, or at least enough to make them worthy of his time and information. Talking to him was always a learning experience.
Mavis Doyle of Hardwick was probably the best-known graduate of the Maerki school of journalism. She worked first for the Times Argus, then for the Free Press, then for the Herald, and was admired, feared and occasionally detested by politicians wherever she worked, as was Maerki in his reporting days. Reporting in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mavis was most widely known for her encyclopedic memory and for sources willing to tell her where many of government’s bones were buried.
Her competitive spirit and keen instinct for news were so well refined that those of us who worked with her had to worry as much about her beating us to a story as we did about the competition getting ahead of us.
One day, late in a legislative session in the early 1970s, a prominent state senator suddenly left the Senate in the middle of a hot debate. I found him in an unannounced meeting of a Senate committee quietly attempting to attach an amendment to a flood-plain bill. The amendment would have removed all electric cooperatives in the state from the jurisdiction of the state Public Service Board. Since the senator also represented the co-operatives as their legal counsel, and the amendment had no relationship to the environmental bill at hand, I knew I was onto something.
Somehow, however, Mavis had learned of the move before it had even begun to happen, had already told the governor, and extracted a promise that such an amendment would never see the light of day. She not only already had the story, she had more of the story than I did, and it was happening right under my nose.
Those were the days when we didn’t think twice about reporting whatever we could overhear and later confirm about secret meetings going on behind closed doors: listening at keyholes, staking out hotels where candidates for top state jobs were being secretly interviewed, and routinely working fourteen hours a day, because that was what we thought it would take to get more stories than the competition. State House reporters then, unlike now, covered most major actions of committees, including many of the debates in those committees, in addition to most floor action dealing with most bills.
Lawmakers had to read all the dailies just to learn what they themselves had actually done the day before. Not to read about it could put a lawmaker at a distinct disadvantage, particularly if the story he failed to read included news that his own pet bill was in trouble.
There were problems with this sort of aggressive, advocacy journalism, however. The use of unnamed sources in the reporting of controversial stories was more prevalent than it is today. That led to the public perception that along with our aggressiveness might come unfairness and bias. Because more sources were not identified, fairness could not be so easily judged.
Out of this era came many notable alumni. Among them, in addition to Maerki and Doyle, were former Rutland Herald State House reporter Anthony Marro, a Pulitzer prize winner at Long Island’s Newsday and later its top editor; former Herald State House reporter Stephen Terry, who later became an influential aide to Sen. George Aiken before returning to Vermont journalism; the Herald’s Jane Mayer, who went on to become a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal and is now a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine; Colin Nickerson, who went from the Herald and childhood roots in Vermont to beats for The Boston Globe that included the Persian Gulf War, Canadian politics and the Ethiopian famine; and Robert Sherman, a former reporter for the Herald and Times Argus, who became an
investigative reporter for Jack Anderson before returning to Vermont.
‘THE ERA OF MORE BALANCE AND FAIRNESS’
Advocacy journalism gave way to the “let’s be balanced and fair” stage. Part of this is a result of today’s somewhat different editing and reporting problems, as well as basic economics.
This change has been a mixed blessing. The good news is, there seems to be less personal bias of reporters in the news stories you read today.
There are far fewer unidentified sources. The stories are more balanced, but it also seems that there is less passion, less depth, less sense of outrage about genuine injustice, and less willingness on the part of reporters to spend the time it takes to go after a complicated story and report it thoroughly.
Many Vermont newspaper editors today, like their counterparts elsewhere, are trying to tell more stories in fewer words because they have less space to waste and a more diverse readership. They must do more things for more readers, avoiding heavy emphasis on any one subject like government coverage, for example. They are also under intense pressure to attract and hold the attention of readers who are increasingly drawn to more visual television (and now, in 2009, the Internet).
At the same time, newspaper publishers, editors, and reporters are under pressure to hold down costly overtime, which when used effectively helps a newspaper be more than just a nine-to-five operation. Less overtime can mean less in-depth coverage and already explains, in part, why even the important money committees of the Vermont Legislature are not given the extensive, daily coverage now that they once were. On the one hand, many readers probably did not read that daily coverage when it was there. Yet, because legislators did read and often heed it, Vermont newspapers had more influence on day-to-day legislative actions when those committees were being extensively reported on. In turn, the Vermont public was better served. There was a greater likelihood in the days of advocacy journalism that bad public policy in the making could be challenged and corrected sooner.
CONCLUSION
Newspaper reporting today in Vermont has tended to become fairer than it was, but also more superficial, less passionate and less interesting, with more recent financial pressures also making it more difficult for newspapers to be in as many places as they once were. I am worried that Vermont newspaper work is increasingly an ordinary nine-to-five business rather than a profession with a unique responsibility to serve the public interest and expose injustice. It is becoming more subject to outside economic forces that, increasingly, seem to be out of the control of even publishers.
As a result, newspapers cannot be as responsive to the news judgments, diverse personalities and good-faith crusading of reporters, editors and publishers who run them.
At least three things are to blame: a volatile economy, a shift to out-of-state chain ownership and financial control of many Vermont newspapers, and most recently in 2009 a media market that is increasingly fragmented and in competition for the same advertising dollar.
It’s a growing imbalance that journalists and readers alike need to be deeply concerned about.
Editor’s note: Nick Monsarrat of Charlotte has been a newspaper reporter, editor and journalism teacher in Vermont since 1969.
