Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2005 by Raymond L. Fischer

BAD NEWS: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All

BY TOM FENTON REGAN BOOKS, HARPER COLLINS 2005, 247 PAGES, $25.95

Four decades as a journalist and foreign correspondent for CBS News make Tom Fenton one of the most experienced reporters in America today. Recipient of four Emmy Awards, Fenton retired in 2004, thus giving him time to write Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. The subtitle pretty much says it all.

Fenton's "bad news" concerns the broadcast news industry's "sliding blithely downhill" since the end of the Cold War. Sept. 11,2001, marked a "moment of truth" for Fenton when he realized the broadcast news industry finally had collided with a "brick wall" that the media should have anticipated. Among the many failures exposed by 9/11, Fenton bemoans the failure of the broadcast news industry to realize the signs in time to alert the public. For more than 10 years, Fenton and many of his fellow American foreign correspondents had tracked Al Qaeda operations, but network news rarely reported what they had unearthed because the "gatekeepers" did not consider the developments newsworthy. In failing to release Al Qaeda news from abroad, domestic media abrogated its obligation of public trust. America suffers a news gap which, at this point, very well might present a danger for all Americans.

Fenton primarily attributes the news gap to the failure of media management to recognize the importance of news stories from around the world. A drastic reduction in the number of foreign correspondents and the reliance on "stringers" and "parachute reporting" (journalists and photographers "dropping" in on a story at the last minute) also exasperate the situation. Media gatekeepers no longer understand their roles or their duty to the public. According to Fenton, "the barbarians are inside our gates" and the threat to security makes hard information invaluable.

Appropriate to the time of the war with Iraq, Fenton dissects the differences between reporting in peacetime and during a war. Fenton not only discusses how to report on the situation in Iraq but identifies a second enemy correspondents encounter: the incompetence of an American news media industry plagued by underfunding, dumbing down, and pandering to ratings. Politicians, who have for years denied the U.S. was at war, now are trying to wage a war without "waking us up"; the media must not let it happen.

In one of the best chapters, Fenton explains how the news media has changed over the years and why it has lost the public's respect. When he first went to work for CBS News in 1970 in the Rome Bureau, the idea that news should make a profit never was a priority. The situation has changed drastically for seven reasons: the status of news as a profit earner; deregulation of broadcasting; decline of the industry's codes of standards; obsession with ratings; expense of maintaining foreign bureaus; emphasis on packaging, rather than gathering, news; and most crucial of all, corporate ownership of the news media.

Fenton indicts the "culture of spin" with distorting the facts about the most pivotal life-altering public events. Facts are necessary before any judgment, but the world is so "dizzy with spin" that facts are all but obliterated. He charges that the politicians are at fault, but places the blame on the news media. Politicians do not believe Americans can handle complex truths and the news media basically agree--they have "conspired to infantalize, to dumb down the American public."

Fenton interviewed several members of the "big broadcast networks" including Andy Rooney, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Bettag, Sandy Socolaw, Don Hewitt, and the retired Walter Cronkite. When asked to assess the media's failure to serve the public effectively, the anchors were reluctant to criticize their own companies. Asked about media bias, Rooney acknowledged the media is biased and liberal; Rooney recommended Bernie Goldberg's recent book Bias. Cronkite said he no longer watches CBS Evening News on a regular basis because 'there is nothing there but crime and sob sister material that is scandal sheet and tabloid material for the most part." Fenton deplores the amount of money (in the millions) paid to those "at the top." He blames former ABC News president Roone Arledge, who changed the entire equation by offering Barbara Waiters $1,000,000 a year. Salaries have escalated from there--money that could be spent gathering "hard news" around the world.

Fenton speculates on where the Edward R. Murrows and Walter Cronkites have gone and when the new "great foreign correspondents" will appear. The news industry's decline parallels the reduced number of foreign correspondents. Both problems began in the 1990s for the same reasons: underfunding, arrogant insularity, contempt for the viewer's attention span, loss of mission, corporate greed, the collusion between corporate power, and a spineless FCC.