Staying optimistic with Jane Mayer

by Josephine Stratman

Jane Mayer has exposed a lot of darkness.

The New Yorker staff writer has published pieces revealing corruption in the Bush administration, the political influence of the Koch brothers and shady conversative organizations attempting to derail a Supreme Court nomination. Still, she stays optimistic.

“I may be naive, but I really do think that in a democracy, people actually have to have facts and they have to have information, otherwise they can’t make good decisions, and the government is us,” Mayer said. “…I do really believe in the basic idea that the press is essential in democracy.”

She said that while this doesn’t mean we live in a perfect world, journalism provides the “ingredients for reform” in the U.S.

“It’s not meant to try to make everybody depressed or cynical,” she said. “The hope of the muckrakers heart, I think, is that people will care, and they will fix what seems unfair or corrupt.”

Perhaps unexpectedly, Mayer got her start in journalism at small papers in Vermont. One of her first jobs in the field was as a hospital news reporter for the Rutland Herald in Rutland, Vermont, where she started every shift logging who was born and who died the night before.

She doesn’t see her work now as all that fundamentally different.

“People call me an investigative journalist, but truthfully I don’t actually really think it’s any different from just being any other kind of reporter,” she said.

The real difference, she said, is time to dig deeper.

Mayer said that despite the acclaim of being the Wall Street Journal’s first female White House correspondent, she didn’t like having to work “like a demographer with no ability to set what the news is.” Simply taking notes on the latest the president or press secretary said wasn’t fulfilling, because it wasn’t creative, she said.

She was able to break out of this cycle a bit by setting up a rotation system where she and other reporters would trade off in order to give room to pursue enterprise stories — something Mayer suggests for young reporters in jobs that demand near-constant filing.

Earlier in her career, Mayer was able to find more room to be creative by finding a less high-profile beat. When she first went to the Wall Street Journal, Mayer covered the television industry. Compared to the steel or auto industries, the paper didn’t have a high demand for television news.

“I could write stories that were really fun and interesting, because they just didn’t care that much about the beat,” Mayer said. “So, I would counsel people to, when everybody’s zigging, go and zag.”

The world young reporters are entering is vastly different from the one Mayer entered. The 24/7 news cycle, higher demands of reporters online and on social media and need to glean clicks and pageviews create a lot of pressure.

“Those pressures really are in direct competition with anything long form, anything thoughtful, anything that might be nuanced,” she said. “…It seems to me that the common denominator, the way that you can break through without debasing yourself is to do great reporting.”

That speed also comes at the risk of making mistakes — something no reporter is above. What’s most important, Mayer said, is fixing them.

“It’s not about us. It’s about getting the record right, and getting the facts to people, so we try to fix them,” she said. “I think that’s a real difference between the mainstream press and the more propaganda outfits.”

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