The Legendary Molly Ivins on How Reporters Can Get the Truth Out
"Today you just tell the readers a little bit of the truth. That's all we got room for."
Legendary Texas journalist Molly Ivins was once asked to share her beliefs about being a reporter. Below is a short excerpt of the essay she wrote:
In-ism has become so acute that a reporter can be generally defined as a person who knows, but doesn’t tell. You can find more about what’s going on at the state capitol by spending one night drinking with the capitol press corps that you can in months of reading the papers those reporters write for. The same is true of city hall reporters, court reporters, police reporters, education writers — any of us. In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what’s going on. You can’t find it in the papers.
There is a degree to which the structures and values of the Establishment press are responsible for this phenomenon. Reporters learn early on that there are certain central truths they cannot tell readers — for example, the governor of Texas is definitely a dimwit. Such truths are invariably denounced as subjective or even subversive observation and are edited out forthwith.
But reporters, in general, tend to fall in with the Establishment’s limitations on truth with alarming complaisance. It is as though we had internalized the restraints. Desipte the fact that most of us object to them intellectually, we obey them unconsciously after a while. There’s not a major newspaper I know of in this country that’s going to let you tell it like you find it. But that’s no excuse for giving up. You have no business sitting around with your friends over beers telling them what really happened at today’s city council meeting. The very least you owe yourself and your readers is to try to get out what you know. Playing the get-the-facts-straight-and-let-the-truth-go-hang-itself game is management’s bag. Your obligation, your responsibility is not to the management of the Houston Post, the Houston Chronicle or the Houston Whatever. It is to yourself, to your own standards of excellence, and to your readers. If your readers don’t know as much as you know about your beat, you’re a failure. So damn many of us write about the surface and save the juicy stuff for our friends; we can dine out on what we don’t put in our stories.
You know and I know that it’s not easy to get the truth into newspapers — so much of it is not family fare. But you can’t have been in this business for a year without learning at least the basics of all the gimmicks there are for getting the stuff through. The curve ball, the slideroo, the old put-it-in-the-17th-graf trick. Tell your editor the opposition will have the story in its next edition. Show ‘em where The New York Times, or better yet, the Dallas Morning News, has already done this story. If you haven’t got enough points with management to pull off a strong story on your own, give it to one of your colleagues. Find another angle on it. Localize the hell out of it. Disguise it as a feature.
Or, you can use the Janis Joplin-Zarko Franks take-another-little-chunk-of-their-ass-out technique. The inimitiable Zarko, the Chronk’s city editor, was grousing one day about all these g.d. kids he’s got working for him who want to tell the Truth allatime, fer Chrissakes. “I tell ‘em,” said Zark, “you can’t tell the truth, honey, this is a daily newspaper. Every day these kids wanna write ‘War and Peace.’ I tell ‘em, look, baby, today you just tell the readers a little bit of the truth. That’s all we got room for. Then tomorrow you go back and you pick up another little piece of the truth. And the day after that, another piece. You’ll get it eventually, but you ain’t never gonna get none of it if you shoot for the whole wad every day.”
If all else fails, pass your story along to the Texas Observer.
You can read the full essay in the chapter “The Perils and Pitfalls of Reporting in the Lone Star State” in the compilation, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” available in paperback or e-book on Bookshop.org.
