Media bashing 101

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1996 by Joe Saltzman

NOT A DAY goes by that someone doesn't bash the news media. But nothing hurts more than when a respected member of the press slaps down his colleagues for false pride, arrogance, cynicism, and negativity.

Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, by veteran journalist James Fallows, trots out valid criticisms with vigor and commitment. The book itself never lives up to the cover's sensational copy charging that, unless journalism changes, it will destroy itself and severely damage American democracy. That kind of overstatement may sell books, but it doesn't do much to stimulate the kind of result Fallows seeks: that the real purpose of journalism--to give citizens the tools to participate in public life--be realized.

If we accept Fallow's contention that our democracy is being undermined, whose fault is it anyway? Just the news media's? What about the politicians who are trying to appease the same public? Or the public itself? Fallows skirts those questions in his overwhelming indictment of the news media. The real problem is that, when segments of the news media practice sober-minded, issue-oriented coverage, few bother to watch or read it. Editors of newspapers and producers of broadcast news programs survive a tough and uncompromising ballot box--who buys their product?

Much of what Fallows complains about results from media economics. More than ever, the immediate bottom line governs CEOs. They want viewers and readers any way they can get them--and the cheaper the better. If sportscaster-like coverage of politics and heavy emphasis on celebrity news brings in the crowds, few journalists will get a chance to do anything else.

Why is it so hard to blame the public itself for undermining American democracy? If most people would rather watch something other than basic political reporting or prefer to read nothing, what's the media to do? Who's kidding whom? Fallows says that hostility toward the news media shows up in opinion polls, in comments on talk shows, in waning support for news organizations, and, most of all, in a quiet consumer boycott of the press. Year by year, he writes, a smaller proportion of Americans goes to the trouble of reading newspapers or watching news broadcasts on TV.

But does this "boycott" really mean dissatisfaction with the news media? The main reason Americans spend less time reading newspapers and watching TV news could well be that they want to spend their limited leisure hours differently. Newspapers and TV news are no longer the only games in town. More and more households have two employed people working longer and longer hours with little time for relaxation, much less television news or a daily newspaper. The habit of reading a newspaper in the morning or watching a TV news show at night may be dying out. But lightweight entertainment news programs, on the other hand, are being watched by more and more people. And thousands skip TV altogether to cruise the web and the Internet for their information.

This doesn't mean that journalists, politicians, and government officials all shouldn't clean up their act. But in the end, Americans get the society and, yes, the politicians and the news media they deserve. Politicians and journalists aren't created in a vacuum. They spring from the citizenry. Journalism students learn that they must give their audiences the information they need to function in a democracy. And there are still professional journalists who live by that dictum. But what if the people just aren't interested?

This is not a new phenomenon. Journalists have been trying to figure out for centuries how to get the public to sample their wares. Editors have tried everything from huge headlines to comic strips to advice to the lovelorn columns. They have used giant pictures, bold graphics, large type, and color. Television producers have used good-looking anchors, you-are-there live coverage, sports, weather, entertainment packages, and quick sound bites. Some have even tried the kind of responsible journalism that Fallows argues for--covering the news to meet the needs of American democracy.

At best, they have been able to entice a small portion of the public. And in today's mass marketing, where 1,000,000 viewers are considered by TV businesspeople to be "no one," small audiences don't count. Fallows should blame the CEOs who have taken over the news media, drastically cut staff and downsized news pages to increase profits, and killed time-consuming investigative reporting because it is too expensive and troublesome.

Yet, there still are publications and news programs that do what Fallows suggests and they do it admirably. But only small audiences watch them. What is the journalist trying to hold onto his or her job to do? The revolution Fallows wants journalists to lead must take place not in cityrooms, but in boardrooms. Only when publishers and media CEOs treat the news as a public trust and not simply a commodity will the changes Fallows advocates become possible.