There’s something a little disquieting about the admonitions in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s new book, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (Crown, 205 pages, $20). “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.” “It must serve as an independent monitor of power.” “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing.” Have the news media really fallen so low that such obvious truths need to be stated so explicitly?

“I would argue it’s a shame that they have to be said, but it’s long overdue,” replies Kovach. “They have to be said because a lot of journalists have been pushed along by events and laid them aside.”

Kovach, the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, has served as curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Washington-bureau chief of the New York Times. Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, is a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times and an alumnus of Newsweek. Together they have produced a timely book on how to reform the news media after a decade of scandal and titillation, in an era when corporate conglomerates have swallowed up all but a handful of media outlets.

Kovach, currently hobbling through Boston (he suffered a leg injury earlier this week), argues that, for the news media, the 1990s were similar to the 1920s. Both were times of great prosperity. Both eras were marked by revolutionary media technology — the radio in the ’20s and the Internet in the ’90s. News outlets in both eras dwelled on gossip and scandal. And by the end of the ’20s, Kovach says, “journalism was beginning to find its feet again,” with the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune becoming stronger and attracting a new generation of news junkies.

So can it happen again — even as news outlets from the New York Times Company’s Boston Globe to the AOL-owned CNN slash budgets in the face of a softening economy? Kovach is optimistic, saying that media moguls such as Disney’s Michael Eisner — who found himself the überboss of ABC News almost by accident — are slowly beginning to absorb the values of journalism. “Michael Eisner talks about journalism differently from the way he did four or five years ago,” Kovach says. “I think it’s all a matter of settling out.”

Kovach says The Elements of Journalism is intended for two audiences: journalists, “to remind them of what they got into journalism for,” and members of the public, who need help distinguishing between, say, Chris Matthews yelling at a guest, which may look like journalism or something like it, and the genuine article. He hopes the book will serve as “a bill of rights for the people who are the victims or the subjects of journalism.”

Bill Kovach will be in Boston this Thursday, April 12. At 10 a.m. he will be a guest on The Connection, on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM). At noon he will speak at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And from 7 to 8 p.m. he will be at the Harvard Bookstore, in Harvard Square.

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001