For over two decades, BILL EMMOTT has been a fixture at The Economist, a publication whose reputation for incisive commentary on and reportage of business, economic, and political affairs has long been internationally acknowledged. Having first worked as a correspondent and editor in Brussels, London, and Tokyo, Emmott was appointed to his current position of Editor-in-Chief in 1993. In addition, he has authored three books on Japan.
HARVARD INTERNATIONAL REVIEW:
What considerations and values come into play when choosing the news stories that will form the content of a magazine such as The Economist?
In the broadest terms, there is always a balance between our desire to set the agenda and the pressure of the news itself upon us. When I say "setting the agenda," I mean writing idea-based stories in which we try to tell the reader that if they aren't interested in this particular topic, they should be, because it's more important than they realize. Examples of issues that we think readers should understand and which should have an impact on them include the issue of privacy on the Internet, dangerous-looking situations in Africa, or the concern over rising debt levels in economies on both sides of the Atlantic. They qualify because they're globally significant trends that are bubbling up underneath the day-to-day news that surrounds us.
Is news frequently tailored to presumed consumer interests, or is the process more objective, based only on what needs and deserves to be reported?
There has to be a balance between those two. Sometimes I will hold off on publishing an article until its subject is already on people's minds. Once that happens, our reporting will have more resonance with people because they can already relate to it. That is often the case with, for example, big set-piece events such as a conference on global warming. We could write about global warming at any stage throughout the year--science and objective fact do not change just because there is a summit. What changes is that the presence of this summit is liable to make readers more sensitized to the issue and therefore actually make the subject more appealing. I do prefer to analyze events well ahead of time, though, because I think that we should prepare people for big events, rather than exploiting the stories after the fact.
During a recent speech, you quoted Adlai Stevenson as saying that the job of an editor is to separate the wheat from the chaff and then publish the chaff. To what extent is that a reality?
It's not a reality. This was Adlai Stevenson's famous put-down of editors, and we can all recognize such "chaff" in newspapers and tabloids where there is a tendency to look for gossip and tittle-tattle rather than hard, underlying facts or themes. At The Economist, we very much position ourselves on the factual end of the spectrum. I recognize that readers are human beings and that they like to be entertained, and so we should sometimes publish things that are amusing or entertaining, but that's just recognizing the fact that intelligent people like to laugh. We position ourselves as "wheat publishers," and, indeed, we try to publish the wheat, processed into the finest bread that money can buy, just to take the metaphor well beyond the breaking point.
Have there been any stories that, in particular, have caused the media as a whole to tread the line between sensationalism and journalism?
All publications are tested in times of scandal; clearly the Clinton impeachment scandal was a classic in this respect. To cite an example from our own magazine, when Lord Jeffrey Archer was exposed last year as having persuaded someone to commit perjury on his behalf in a libel case, we followed the story up with a long article about the entire case, including quite a bit of gossipy material. That was close to the line; it was relevant to the case and to the question of whether this Conservative Party politician had broken the law, but it gave me some pause for thought because in seeking to illustrate these facts, it was incorporating a lot of personal details. We decided to publish it and got criticism from some readers saying that we had gone over the line and exploited the situation, but I think there was a legitimate public interest. Of course, all editors invoke this idea of a public interest when they defend their sensationalist stories, and often they do so rather pompously and self-righteously--and not always convincingly.
During the Clinton impeachment scandal, there were a number of moments during which the news media were very close to or across the line, but this was a case in which it was hard to work out where the lines were. I remember, for example, that one of our Washington editors wrote a story about the case including a mention of the famous semen-stained dress. I deleted this. First, it seemed to be second-hand reporting since we had no verification that this item existed, and second, it was going too far. It was gratuitous and salacious. As it turned out, the dress existed and was a key item in the case, and so, in hindsight, my decision was wrong, but I think that on the basis of the information at the time, it was correct. People were writing about the case with a sort of salacious delight under the cover of public interest in that it involved a president. This meant being able to write about otherwise taboo subjects. That's a dangerous point for magazines and newspapers: you can offend your readers quite easily.
Are there objective tests or standards to gauge which stories are appropriate for media coverage?
It's a very subjective process and one component of it has to be a sense of what readers will think. You should pay close attention to your readers on this, so the first question should be: are you likely to offend your readers or diminish yourself in their eyes? Beyond that, it's quite subjective. One must always ask about evidence and the reliability of facts in the cases, but beyond that, it's a matter of judgement.
Continually shortening news cycles, the proliferation of news sources, and increasing demand for news must have added to the difficulty of providing factual content. How has this greater supply of and more insistent demand for information affected journalism?
The long-term answer to that is that this siuation has forced our magazine to employ more people on staff in more countries around the world to obtain superior, original, high-quality analysis. Twenty years ago or more we would've been more likely to use local freelancers or staffers based in London or Washington to write about subjects based on secondary sources because there wasn't the ubiquity of information or the speedy flow of news. When I became the Tokyo correspondent to The Economist in 1983, the level of knowledge about Japan in our American and European readerships was very low, and the speed with which those readers obtained information about Japan was slow. I was able to take my time and choose the stories about which I wanted to report very carefully. That is no longer the case. Readers know more about foreign countries, and they learn things more quickly; this means that we have to invest more in the reporters we have.
