Mrs. Graham was a towering figure in that highly self-referential world, and she accomplished much. May she rest in peace.
There is a passage in her 1997 autobiography, Personal History, that throws some important light on her journalistic creed. It is worth recalling at a time when the ideal of journalistic practice she espoused is threatened by the proliferation of infotainment, scandal-mongering and other journalistic perversions driven by calculations of the bottom line.
On the eve of the 1972 presidential election, the Post was aggressively pursuing Watergate, the story that would lead to President Nixon’s resignation and the convictions of some of his top aides. Not surprisingly, the White House was not only furious but deeply suspicious of the paper’s motives. One explanation sometimes proposed was that its publisher “hated” Nixon.
Getting wind of that, Mrs. Graham wrote to John Ehrlichman, one of those aides, to deny that she hated the President. She added:
“I also want you to know that the fiction doesn’t stop there. For the story suggests … that somehow editorial positions on public issues are taken and decisions made on the basis of the publisher’s personal feelings and tastes. This is not true … What appears in the Post is not a reflection of my personal feelings.”
I don’t doubt Mrs. Graham meant what she said. So did, and do, serious figures in American journalism generally when they say the same thing. But the story doesn’t end there. Leaving aside practitioners of trash journalism, numerous tribe that they are, the rest of it lies in something once said by the late Richard Harwood, a Washington Post editor, ombudsman and columnist for many years.
Harwood was participating in a conference organized to discuss how the media covered the Catholic Church. He denied that deliberate anti-Catholic bias was at work. But he acknowledged that something else was operative — something which he called a “secular” mindset and I would call secularistic.
Noting research which showed “weak” religious attachments among journalists with elite news organizations, Harwood said:
“That is true in my own case and is consistent with my impression of my colleagues. We were educated in secular institutions [and] are quite sensitive to changing fashions in secular intellectual thought…. I think that is what we are seeing today in our newspapers and in the other media. There is no question whatever that these media are secular institutions. There is no question that secular thought is the preferred body of thought within the media.”
Katharine Graham’s legacy (and the legacy of Richard Harwood and the many others who created today’s Washington Post) is one of the nation’s genuinely distinguished newspapers. That is very much.
As is true of other pillars of American journalism, though, the collective mindset of the Post is secular — or, more accurately, secularistic — to its core. And although some people think secular and secularistic are equivalents of “neutral,” they aren’t. Secularism is an ideology alongside others, and a news organization that views the world through its spectacles views it in an ideologically skewed way.
Mrs. Graham deserves enormous credit for what she achieved at the Post. But the great newspaper she left behind functions ineluctably as a mouthpiece of secularism. This is something those of us who don’t share that worldview cannot afford to forget.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
