How Well Are the Media Serving American Society?

Allan C. Brownfeld

            Allan Brownfeld covers Washington D.C. as a freelance reporter.

            In a democratic society, the decisions we make as citizens can be no better than the information upon which such decisions are based. In this sense, the media play a crucial role, what some have called the “fourth branch” of government.

            Unfortunately, the evidence of media malfeasance is growing—beyond the questions of actual falsehood or plagiarism, as in the cases of Jayson Blair of The New York Times, or Stephen Glass of The New Republic.

            British historian Paul Johnson laments the “huge change in the public perception of those who bring us news and views.” In the past, notes Johnson, the media were widely viewed as

. . . beacons of enlightenment and progress . . .generally identified with knowledge and improvement, helping to produce a responsible citizenry. . . . Now, the general view of the media is almost entirely negative. It is associated with ignorance, lies, malicious invention and scurrility.

            A Los Angeles Times poll found that 67 percent of respondents agree with the statement, “The news media give more coverage to stories that support their own point of view than those that don’t.” Polls conducted by the Gallup, Harris and Yankelovich organizations have all shown a similar decline in public confidence in the news media. In The Times poll, fewer than 25 percent of the respondents said the media generally do a“ very good job” in presenting the news fairly and impartially.

            A report issued in March 2004 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that,

Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and generally more harmful to democracy than they were in the 1980s.

One example: those who believe news organizations try to cover up their mistakes rose from 13 percent to 67 percent.

If public trust in the media has been declining for 15years, this report suggests there’s some reason for that, that it’s kind of a rational response . . .

says Tom Rosenstiel, the group’s director.

            In newspapers, 22 companies control 70percent of the circulation, In local television, 10 companies own the stations that reach 85 percent of the U.S. On the Web, more than half the 20 most popular news sites are owned by one of the 20 biggest media companies. Diversity is rapidly shrinking.

            The group examined a month’s worth of network newscasts, newsmagazines and 16 newspapers with five days of programming on three cable networks and online news sites.

            Half the lead stories on local T.V. networks were about crime or relatively routine fires and accidents. In fact, since 1993 the homicide rate nationwide has dropped by 20 percent. Yet in the same period, the coverage of murders on ABC, CBS and NBC evening news has increased by 721 percent, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

            The three major newsmagazines have gone soft, with a 25 percent decline in pages devoted to national affairs and a doubling of entertainment and celebrity stories. Such infotainment material accounted for 37 percent of Newsweek’s content, 31 percent at Time and 6 percent at U.S. News and World Report. The number of health pieces more than quadrupled.

            Except for “60 Minutes,” the network newsmagazines “in no way could be said to cover major news of the day,” the study says. When it comes to cable news, 60 percent of cable segments were “repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information.”

            Cable “news” often seems obsessed with the celebrity story of the moment—Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, or murder cases such as that of Laci Peterson. William Powers, writing in National Journal, notes that,

There’s one thing the (media) trade has gotten really good at. It’s a skill that’s on florid display these days. .. . I’m talking about the media’s ability to take a single news story and blow it up to such gigantic proportions that it appears to blot out the rest of our collective reality.

            Commentator Lou Dobbs provides this assessment:

We have become a nation obsessed with gossip and disguised as news. Otherwise intelligent, thoughtful adults can without hesitation tell you the color of Janet Jackson’s tear-away bustier, cite the carat weight of the penitential diamond ring Kobe Bryant gave his wife, and describe the legal history of Michael Jackson’s accuser’s family. Janet Jackson’s breast exposure received three times as many Internet searches as the 2000 election and 25 times as many as the Mars rover, according to the search engine Lycos.

            In Dobbs’ view,

While many news organizations continue to focus on gossip-tainment, they are all but ignoring such serious issues as our out-of-control national deficit, the depths of our government’s under funded liabilities, which is up to tens of trillions of dollars, and the exporting of hundreds of thousands of American jobs to cheap overseas labor markets. Not to mention what is no less than an immigration crisis. Our society has reached a point at which none of us would be surprised if the average individual is more likely to know the name of Michael Jackson’s defense attorney than President Bush’s defense secretary. Even the war on terrorism has lately met with flagging interest on the part of the media. On the day that Michael Jackson surrendered in California, there were two terrorist bombings in Turkey, protests in Miami over the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and a coalition-building trip to London by President Bush. Yet the event that dominated the news that day was the pop star’s legal battle. Michael Jackson’s legal fate has little bearing on most Americans’ safety, their pocketbooks, or their children’s future.

            L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research center, says:

News media is becoming more and more indistinguishable from tabloid outlets like the National Enquirer. Circulation of the National Enquirer, in fact, far outpaces that of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. . . . The more you pander to the lowest common denominator, the more you drop that lowest common denominator. And the more that the descent continues, at a certain point, it’s incumbent upon society to ask itself if this is how serious it really wants to be. . . . It begins with the news-gathering organizations getting back into the news.

            In the book The News About The News, Leonard Downie, Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser report that in the late 1970s Los Angeles television stations traded in their Sacramento bureaus for helicopters. The payoff—choppers tracking police highway chases on Los Angeles freeways at prime time—came only some years later with the advent of

. . . camera stabilizers and powerful lenses that zoom in on targets from thousands of feet away. But now it defines a good Southern California T.V. news day.

In 1998, station KTL Abroad cast live the moment when a driver set his truck on fire and shot himself. Television industry consulting firms now offer client stations prepackaged stories that they can plug into newscasts—a mix of “investigations,health probes, consumer alerts” and other “hot topics,”

            Radio and television talk shows often provide more heat than light by presenting argument and debate between those holding the most extreme positions on any given subject and ignoring those with more moderate, nuanced views who, in fact, usually represent the vast majority of Americans. To appear regularly on radio or T.V., a commentator usually has to have an easily predictable position—liberal or conservative, Democrator Republican, in favor of the current administration or opposed to it. Any journalist who thinks each issue through and comes to individual conclusions is not wanted. Those who want to achieve fame and fortune through such venuestail or their opinions to what the market demands.

            Susan Estrich, a law professor, Fox News commentator and formerly a top campaign aide to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, tells of being invited to appear on a T.V. talk show to discuss the question of affirmative action. The producer said, “I hear you’re against affirmative action.” Estrich replied,

I am, I explained, most of the time. The Supreme Court has ruled that quotas and set-asides are unconstitutional most of the time. But I do believe in special efforts at outreach. And I believe that there may be a very limited number of cases where there is a clear pattern of past discrimination and a compelling interest in diversity.

There was a long pause. The producer said, “Would you say you are for or against?” In the end, Estrich was not invited to appear because her opinions were not conveniently on one extreme or the other,

This, she declares,

. . . is not how we should be addressing issues of consequence. Turning every issue into a yes-no proposition, as articulated by two people representing the furthest extremes and pushing the most emotional buttons, has turned moderation into a no-man’s land in American politics. Instead of finding the common ground most Americans yearn for, we define the opposing camps. The media do not do this because of any ideological bias. They do it because it’s the easiest way to produce hot television, hot radio, hot talk. . . . It’s not the media’s job to solve society’s problems, but it is also not their role to make things worse.

            The media cannot even tell us that standards have deteriorated because that is what the market demands. The business is shrinking—perhaps as a result of the performance we have seen. Audiences are down by a third at Fox News, while CNN and MSNBC both have lost about half their audiences, according to a Nielsen ratings released in April, 2004. Fox had 2.2 million viewers in prime time a year ago; the figure now stands at 1.4 million, for a drop of 36 percent. CNN had 1.6 million prime-time viewers in 2003—now down to 806,000 a drop of 48 percent. At MSNBC there were 666,000 prime-time viewers last year; now it has 333,000, or a drop of 50 percent.

            “The audience knows the difference between real news and news sparkle, no matter how glitzy the graphics are,” said Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

            Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says:

If young people aren’t reading newspapers, we contributed to that. If network news hasn’t innovated beyond adding a third hour to the “Today” show, we contributed to those problems. We didn’t bring them all on ourselves, but we made them worse.

            The decline in the media is neither good journalism nor good business. Those who have presided over this decline must, at some point, ask themselves what they have been doing and why. Neither we—nor they—have been well served.     Ω

“Possibly subtler factors entered into the weakening of Athens. The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns. In the earlier states of a nation’s history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious, and sexual. As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtlety, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the willingness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.” —Will Durant, The Life of Greece, (page470)