By Victor Greto
When Margaret Carlson picks up the newspaper from her Washington D.C. stoop every morning, she pretty much knows what’s going to be inside.
“I think it’s yesterday’s newspaper, because I’ve seen everything on my laptop already,” says the syndicated columnist and CNN analyst.
That’s a reality that newspapers face each day because of technology, journalists and experts say.
And it has radically changed the way news is presented to the public.
Carlson talked about that change and other changes going on in the news and broadcast media with three others at the Hotel du Pont as part of Forum USA Delaware’s series. The panel, whose theme was “The Media in Our Lives,” included Carlson, CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer, investigative journalist Charles Lewis, and Michael Powell, former chairman of the FCC. Ray Suarez, senior correspondent with The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, will moderate.
****
If Carlson pretty much knows what she’ll find at her door stoop, it’s a wonder native Delawarean Charles Lewis is able to pick up his newspaper at all, burdened as it is with the weight of its corporate owners.
“There is a crisis,” says Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, the largest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the world. “What’s happening is the ‘golden age of journalism’ ended some time ago.”
This came about, he says, when family-owned newspapers began selling their businesses to conglomerates.
“There were owners of newspapers who believed in good journalism, not just a profit, but in an obligation to serve the public, and quality mattered,” says Lewis, referring to the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post’s Watergate breakthrough of the early 1970s.
Now, huge corporations, from Viacom and Time-Warner to Disney and Gannett (which owns the News Journal), run many of the newspapers once owned by families.
“Over time, these publications began to go public,” Lewis says, “and as they went public, shareholders started demanding higher profits per quarter.”
This has resulted in higher revenues through thinned out newsrooms and less investigative reporting, he says.
“My answer was to create a non-profit alternative,” he says. “There is an argument that the future of journalism and opportunities for journalists may be the non-profit model, such as ours and [National Public Radio].”
But corporate profits do not mean that the quality of journalism is any less, says John Sweeney, Editorial Page Editor of the News Journal.
“The golden age of journalism is a myth,” says Sweeney, who has been with the News Journal for 22 years, 16 of which he served as public editor.
During the so-called “golden age,” he says, “it was news as broccoli.” That is, readers were fed what they were told was important by the journalists themselves.
Thanks to both the technology that makes more and different kinds of news available as it happens and to owners more responsive to readers, newsrooms are “more diverse, and they appeal to readers more” because of their diversity and because journalists spend more time discovering what people want.
“[Journalists] were the gatekeepers of information and elitist,” Sweeney says of times past. “You can’t be that way anymore, and that’s a good thing.”
Journalists are definitely responding to readers and viewers more, says Ralph Begleiter, University of Delaware professor of journalism and former CNN reporter. “We say we’re giving them what they want. But it’s not what they need, and that’s what worries me.”
Even more to blame for this than corporations, Begleiter says, are the advances in technology, which have given journalists and readers and viewers less time to digest the news and put it in context.
While Sweeney argues that the news media is better today because technology provides “more options for people who consume news,” Begleiter says that also is what cripples analysis.
Continuous streams of news results in instant commentary by both journalists and the public.
“If everything is flushed out through the sewer line of information, the responsibility to put it in context is to the public, but it doesn’t have the background to make it,” Begleiter says. “Journalists don’t have it, either, but they are trained to find it out, by calling and interviewing people.”
This cycle feeds upon itself, Begleiter says. “People are expecting the news faster and faster,” and by the time any thoughtful analysis has been produced, “they’ve moved on.”
****
Schieffer acknowledges the power of technology, but the greatest change in the media he’s seen in his three decades in Washington D.C. has been reflective of the negatively-charged transformation of political discourse.
“Politicians simply don’t know each other anymore,” he says. “When I first came up (to Washington D.C. in the late 1960s), you had these great friendships that crossed party lines. At the end of the day they all might have a drink together. It oiled the government and kept it running.”
The professionalization of campaigns, as well as the eternal quest to raise money has made politicians more dependent on special interests and giving them less leeway for compromise, Schieffer says.
TV, and the media in general, reflect this hardening.
“It happened before I think we realized it happened,” he says. “We’ve thrown common sense to the winds and lost our national sense of humor. We no longer listen to the people who haven’t made up their minds. Theatrics sells, but as it sells, it hardens people in certain positions.”
Begleiter sees the apotheosis of this hardening coming in the late 1990s, when the Fox News Channel began.
“They didn’t have an international news gathering organization yet, and they discovered they could make the same amount of money by putting articulate, lively and controversial people on the air talking, rather than smart, analytical people reporting and analyzing the news,” he says.
But Schieffer is neither maudlin nor in crisis mode about his business.
“It’s not a crisis, but we have to recognize that we’re in the midst of an enormous change in communications, and we don’t know where it’s going.”
****
Nor does one know in the future what can or can’t be said, at least over the public airwaves.
Michael Powell’s former role as head of the Federal Communications Commission put him in the spotlight when the agency fined CBS after Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl.
Powell’s decision, based on a 1927 indecency statute upheld by the Supreme Court, turned network heads at the time and has influenced broadcast television since.
“I think it was warranted under the law,” Powell said recently in an e-mail. “The American people, through their Congress, are free to circumscribe such displays as long as those laws pass constitutional muster.”
The current statute doesn’t ban content, he said, but restricts it to times when children are more likely to be watching.
“Broadcasting, in particular, has a higher public responsibility given that it utilizes the public airwaves,” he said, removing the government’s potential grip over the more freewheeling cable television.
But it’s exactly the public responsibility of media companies in broadcast journalism and the mainstream media that worries some of the panelists.
Because it’s the mainstream media that reaches the most people, Lewis says, that they have to keep asking the tough questions, no matter the content or the price.
“Journalists have got to serve their communities, which means asking tough questions in town and city and county and questioning those in power,” Lewis says. “Stop spiking stories that are inconvenient to advertisers and powers that be. If the public thinks they’re going to get the straight skinny, those readership rates might change.”
But that’s gotten tougher to do, says Begleiter, who has been observing from academia the business he left for several years now.
“Since the late 1980s, corporations that now own the news media no longer have journalism as a primary public service,” he says. “Does the Disney Coporation (which owns ABC) have a responsibility to report about Abu Ghraib? It sounds absurd.”
Not quite, Schieffer says.
“If I find out something that maybe Viacom (which owns CBS) didn’t want me to report, they know I would report it,” he said. “I’ve never had this happen, where they would tell us not to report. But if they did try to stop me, I could leak it to another organization. That’s why these companies can’t put those kind of pressures on reporters.”
You can do everything better in journalism, Carlson says, and the best way to do that is through thorough and accurate reporting.
“I get physically ill when I make a mistake,” she says. “The thought that the public might think we’re not trying to get it right is so wrong.”