Two weeks ago, Georgetown University held a symposium about the state of journalism. When asked what the main problem facing the press is, Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Washington Post, came up with a surprisingly compelling and honest answer: Journalists need to learn how to apologize when they make mistakes.
Wemple’s comments (which can be found in this video) were as follows:
News organizations, when they put out these big stories, they put their soul into these pieces. And when they turn out to be [expletive] up, they can never, ever — it takes them forever to come to grips with it. So people on the outside say, “Why can’t you just admit this is wrong?” No, no! We sweated over this. We edited this five times. It went through 15 layers. We lawyered it. There is this emotional attachment to the work.
When news organizations drag their heels — take the [fake] gang rape story with Rolling Stone at UVA — it took them months or years [to admit it was false]. They finally had to commission an investigation.
I think that is what is common to most media crises. It’s not just the first mistake. It’s the refusal, the stubborn resistance to change or to correct. Editors will say, “When we make a mistake we’ll correct it,” but that’s just not often the case.
Wemple has hit on something profound. The media are not trusted, and all the conferences and articles in the world are not going to help them out of their hole. What will help is if the media industry learns to do what it once did with some honor: Apologize for mistakes.
Don’t laugh. The media once knew how to do this. The best example is the Richard Jewell story. In 1996, after Jewell, a security guard, discovered a bomb at Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and helped clear the crowd, he was declared a hero by the press.
Days later, reporter Kathy Scruggs was told by a law enforcement source that Jewell was the FBI’s foremost suspect. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran the story that made Jewell the villain. CNN reported the AJC article, and for the next 88 days, Jewell was hunted by reporters. He was one of the first victims of what would become known as “trial by media.” When his name was finally cleared, Jewell, who died in 2007, sued the New York Post, NBC News, and CNN and settled with all three.
In what today would be considered an astonishing move, CNN producer Henry Schuster actually wrote an apology to Jewell: “I made Richard Jewell famous — and ruined his life.”
Imagine a journalist in 2024 having this kind of integrity and self-reflection. Russiagate, the Covington Catholic students, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservatives who sounded the alarm about President Joe Biden’s health years ago and were mocked, the child who dressed up in face paint for the Kansas City Chiefs and was accused of using blackface — the list of those wronged by the press is long. Yet reporters now seem sociopathic, incapable of remorse or human feeling. They won’t ever simply apologize.
Scruggs, who reported on Jewell for the AJC, might not have apologized, but she had enough of a conscience that the Richard Jewell story haunted her for the rest of her life. “She was never at peace or at rest with this story,” Mike Kiss, one of her editors, once said. “It haunted her until her last breath. It crushed her like a junebug on the sidewalk.”
Scruggs is a symbol of the transition from one form of journalism to another — from the kind of responsible reporting that made her slow down long enough in 1996 to realize Jewell could not have been the bomber to the modern age of death by a thousand social media accusations. Scruggs and the contrite CNN producer who publicly apologized to Jewell have been replaced by the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Journalists are now like active alcoholics who simply will not admit to any wrongdoing — or even that they have a problem. The first drink was Watergate. The 1970s scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office was a great party for the press. The atmosphere in the media and on the Left was glamorous, filling writers with a sense of intoxicated invincibility.
For the past 50 years, the press have been trying to replicate the buzz from that time. Journalism is no longer a way to convey news from your community to the masses. It’s a means to destroy someone powerful and become a celebrity. Just as an alcoholic will start to cut ethical corners and need more and more booze for less and less effect, reporters post-Watergate became sloppy and even disinterested in facts. Mistakes and lies became more and more common.
Apologize? Forget it. They can’t even admit they have a problem.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.