One size fits none - development of politically correct slant in newspaper reporting - Special Section: The Decline of American Journalism

National Review, June 21, 1993 by James W. Michaels

OVER a casual drink, a junior editor at one of our prestigious dailies assumed a lofty tone when my wife characterized his newspaper as liberal. "I would prefer to say," he sniffed, "that we comform to community standards."

What standards? Which community? His community and that of many of today's newspeople is the one Joseph Schumpeter called the New Class--people who owe their jobs to the economic surpluses produced by capitalism but who were taught in schools to dislike and distrust the market. The old hard-drinking Front Page types are history, replaced by people with a tendency to think of themselves as a priestly class, elected by no one but believing themselves to be of the elect, and dedicated to helping make the U.S. more egalitarian, more multicultural. Despite some superficial gestures toward balance, politically correct thinking permeates the news and cultural coverage in most of our daily newspapers.

But is politically correct news good business? Apparently not. The daily newspaper industry is in shock, unable to attract young readers and suffering the probably permanent loss of many traditional advertisers.

The easy explanation for the decline of the dailies is TV. Television news is undemanding, has gorgeous newsreaders, and doesn't clog the garbage. But TV and a mentally lazy public aren't the only things turning people off newspapers.

Though saturated with TV, Americans have not stopped reading. During the years when newspaper circulation has been flat, magazine sales have increased by half and are heavy among younger people. For newspapers the real problem is not a non-reading public but their own failure to attract new customers to replace those who die or move away. The half of the American people who still read newspapers are the greying half.

At least part of the blame for the growing irrelevance of newspapers rests on those liberal enforcers of "community standards." They have made the American newspaper a mirror for their own beliefs, prejudices, and aspirations rather than those of potential readers. They fill the papers with articles about racism, sexism, homophobia, and the plight of the poor and the homeless. Fair enough. But how often do they delve into those things that really touch the lives of the great middle class that is their audience? Not much. I could fill this issue of NR with accounts of good stories passed up by newspaper editors who could only see through politically correct spectacles.

So you don't read many newspaper articles about small business people coping desperately with the proliferating apparatus of the state. About how racial quotas hurt young white males and create racial tensions. About how senseless environmental restrictions drive industry out of your community. About teachers' unions driving up the cost of schools and driving down the quality.

MY THESIS is this: If newspapers hope to survive they would do well to be less concerned with a liberal social agenda and more with the lives, hopes, and fears of their potential readers.

A significant exception tests my rule that newspapers are out of touch with their readers. The Washington Post is the most profitable paper in the United States. For good reason. Its political correctness and enthusiasm for big government are in tune with affluent people in that one-industry town of pols, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. Its interests--in both senses of the word--are their interests.

The Washington Post is often a role model for newspapers elsewhere but in the wrong way. What editors should learn from the Post is how to cater to their readers. What is good and palatable for Federal Government workers isn't necessarily good for private citizens in Cleveland or Chicago, New Orleans, Seattle, or Denver.

In a strange twist of history, it was TV that created the politically correct, monopoly daily newspaper. American newspapers once displayed--as British newspapers still do--a wide diversity of opinion, ranging from The Daily Worker to Colonel Bertie McCormick's FDR-hating Chicago Tribune.

Newspapering was a profitable and fun business but it wasn't Wall Street scale. What changed things was the newspaper industry's response to the spread of TV.

With the loss of advertisers to TV, publishers solved the problem of remaining profitable in a shrinking market by consolidating. With fewer overall advertising dollars around, some weaker newspapers failed. Others merged with stronger newspapers-- this with the full cooperation of Congress, which, ever responsive to dispensers of publicity, permitted mergers of competing newspapers so long as they could show that one of the papers might otherwise fail. Today there are few two-daily cities left. This winter three more became one-paper towns: San Diego, San Antonio, Tulsa.

Meanwhile, the newspaper industry had become the darling of Wall Street. Dominant dailies were no longer in a hotly competitive, low-profit business. They had become unregulated public utilities. Newspaper stocks soared in the 1970s and early 1980s, and dominant or monopoly newspapers changed hands at escalating prices. Warren Buffett bought the Buffalo Evening News in 1977 for $35 million; today, its competition out of business, it is worth several hundred million even in the current slump.