By Bruce W. Sanford
(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999)
The following was excerpted from Chapter 9: "The Power of Journalism"
The mighty voices of the Eastern High School Choir are belting out "The Impossible Dream" to begin "The Credibility Breakfast." This is not the right music for a devotional meal organized to bring editors to battle. The leadership of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) has billed the breakfast as a major event at its 1998 annual convention in Washington. It will launch a new four-year campaign to restore the credibility of the nation's newspapers — to make the "believability of newspapers the central concern of our newsrooms, ahead of profits. Ahead of what corporate thinks of us," as the organization's president, Sandra Mims Rowel the editor of the Portland Oregonian, says with resolve. Still, the music is wrong. But for the ecclesiastical limitations, "Onward, Christian Soldiers" would be more appropriate.
"Haven't we been talking about 'credibility' forever?" Chuck Lewis, the friendly head of Hearst's Washington bureau, grimaces as he heads toward the ballroom. This is the same line you hear from any editor with more than 3.2 years of experience. But it flows more from defensiveness than weariness. Actually, they have been talking about credibility for a long time. Ten years earlier, at the same journalists' convention that saw Donna Rice bolt for the door, terrified of the beast, William Burleigh, then head of the E. W. Scripps Company's newspaper division and later Scripps's CEO, delivered a keynote address calling for a focus on "our fundamental responsibility to be accurate, fair, credible and balanced."
One should never underestimate the earnestness of journalists. Inside the ballroom, with the choir crescendoed and the army fed, Sandra Mims Rowe launches into a battle hymn of astonishing effectiveness.
"If this is a time when the destructiveness and tawdriness of mass media hang like a curse over even the best-intentioned newspaper editors, it is also a time when changing values and new media players should prompt us to seek higher ground," she says. This seems to be a suggestion that newspapers don't have to ape Matt Drudge or dress up as a bearded lady in order to compete for attention on the carnival midway of the Internet. Then Ms. Rowe takes aim:
"As [our] profits have hovered near all-time records, many companies have not invested in journalistic training significantly enough to demonstrate their commitment to the highest standards. Nor have beginning salaries at most papers become competitive with those in other professions. It is now left to editors to provide the leadership within their companies, to demonstrate the true relationship between quality journalism and long-term success in the marketplace . . . We must stand unflinchingly for what we believe-with owners and publishers."
Rowe is correctly targeting corporate honchos and their preoccupation with revenue growth and expense control. "Credibility is not about selling more newspapers," she declares. "It is about building the quality and integrity of our news."
She is pointing the way home. Not just for journalism but for the frightened communications businesses as well. The executives of the media companies are sweaty-palm anxious. At the turn of the century, the old paradigm of the mass media commanding a mass audience is fading. Newspaper readership is flat or declining. Television audiences are shrinking so steadily and the cost of entertainment programming is escalating so stubbornly that the major commercial networks would be unprofitable without their ownership of local stations in major markets. Fresh cable channels, from MSNBC to HGTV (Home & Garden Television) and Arts & Entertainment, are balkanizing television viewership. The new Yukon of the Internet soaks up the limited time that people have to absorb news, information and advertising messages. The new paradigm for the media business is "niching" — cultivating a fragment of the world with a specialized product appealing to a specialized interest or audience: newsletters on health or investing from the robust Phillips Publishing International; the Food Channel, now run by a former president of CBS News; the new "daily edition" on-line of The Wall Street Journal which entitles the reader to a twenty-four-hour pass to the newspaper's interactive edition — sold in early 1999 for $1.95 as opposed to 75 cents for the newsprint edition or $59 per year for the Internet edition (which is about one-third the cost of a print subscription). The economics of the World Wide Web may be weird, but no periodic surfer will go untapped.
In fact, the mass media, whether newspapers, magazines, television or radio, are marooned on an isthmus where the tides are lapping away the single thin connection to the mainland. In the 1990s only the new breed of "sexsational" stories — the John Bobbitt, O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky melodramas — permit them to cobble together something temporarily resembling a mass audience. Both the public and journalists sense the contrivance. Certainly, part of the explanation for the contradictory attitudes in 1999 toward President Clinton ("he lied to us but we approve of his performance in office") was the public's realization that the media were using "sexsation" to corral an audience. And the exhaustion and disgust with the impeachment process was as palpable with journalists as with people in Trenton or St. Louis. "What if they gave a scandal and nobody came?" asked Linda Greenhouse, longtime Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, after the impeachment farce concluded. The rhetorical question summed up the fervent hope of many Washington journalists that their editors would reduce reliance on "sexsation" to seduce an audience. After all, the public's boredom with the Oval Office scandal after a few months showed how hard it is to sustain "sexsational" ardor.
Sandra Rowe is not the only leader in the media to tap into the high anxiety within her business and insist that companies devote more money to journalism and journalists (as opposed to technology and mergers). The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation has embarked on a three-year project from 1998 to 2000, the "Journalism Ethics and Integrity Project." The effort will conduct eighteen regional forums for the public and journalists to discuss electronic journalism. "Reinforcing core journalism values" and training on "ethical decision-making skills" are both the buzzwords and the objectives for these sessions. Other groups with a similar sense of urgency and nearly identical goals have sprung up on an ad hoc basis. With one mass mailing in September 1997, Bill Kovach, the head of Harvard's Nieman Foundation, and Tom Rosenstiel, the former media reporter for the Los Angeles Times, rounded up 1,076 members for a new organization called the Committee of Concerned Journalists. The committee declared itself "worried about the future of the profession." It was hell-bent on "creating a national conversation among journalists about core principles." The "conversation" would have three purposes: to renew journalists' faith in the principles and function of journalism; to create a better understanding of those principles by the public; and "to inform ownership and management of the financial as well as the social value" of the principles. "We must clarify what journalism means--and remind ourselves why we were called to it in the first place — or it will cease to mean anything," the committee announced ominously. Unsurprisingly, given the mood, the committee quickly collected journalists ranging from authors David Halberstam and Alex Jones to editors like John Carroll of the Baltimore Sun and Jane Healy of the Orlando Sentinel and local news directors like Lucy Himstedt from Montgomery, Alabama.
"We wouldn't have gotten all these people five or six years ago," says Tom Rosenstiel, now director of the pointedly named Project for Excellence in Journalism. Rosenstiel believes that when the media's credibility problems with the public began to creep onto the radar screen some fifteen years ago, the reaction among journalists was "let's fix it." This business model coincided with the push inside companies to have journalists become better MBAs, to enlist them in the battle to sustain profit margins in the face of shrinking revenue bases. Bonuses were tied to financial, not editorial, performance. A cultural change swept through newsrooms everywhere. The advertiser, not the reader or viewer, became the paramount concern. The shift in the syllogism had a corrosive effect on journalists. "Nowadays," says Rosenstiel, "when the public is angry with the press, the journalists' reaction is 'l agree with them."' Hence, the arrival of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "We need to reclarify the distinction between movies, talk radio and journalism," according to Rosenstiel. This will not be an easy assignment so long as Don Imus hobnobs on-air with network anchors and CNN correspondents drop into films like Contact (with Jodie Foster) for cameo appearances. Yet, the task is not so much to restore the image of journalists to the stereotypical portrayal in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (hard-drinking rascals who on good days rise above themselves). Rather, journalists want to recover a sense of their own importance, even centrality, to the larger universe of the communications world.
It is interesting where the money is coming from to support this "recapturing" of the profession. It is not, in the main, gushing from the media companies. Instead, it is cascading in million-dollar grants from what might be collectively termed "the billion-dollar foundations"--the Pew Charitable Trust in Philadelphia, the Freedom Forum (formerly the Gannett Foundation) in Washington and New York, the Robert R. McCormick/Tribune Foundation in Chicago, the Knight Foundation in Miami, even the Ford Foundation. Many of the assets of these wealthy foundations derive, of course, from the estates of journalism's barons, Colonel McCormick, for instance. In effect, the capital gains of the past are being plowed into restoration projects for the future. "There is an enormous amount of change facing communications companies," says Vivian Vahlberg, Director of Journalism Programs for the Robert R. McCormick/Tribune Foundation. "We're trying to provide the tools to steer journalism through these changes so it can emerge intact at the other end." The research of all the billion-dollar foundations shows a consistent disconnect between the public and journalists; as Vahlberg describes it, "the public didn't believe journalists were living up to their own standards and values while journalists feared that the public didn't care about or want any values," just entertainment. Listening to the zeal of both the foundation executives and the leaders in journalism, you know that this new movement represents much more than just what Wall Street calls a "technical correction." At the heart of the movement lies a simple theme (as well as an implicit threat): journalism is the product offered by media companies and unless it is practiced and produced at its best, the franchise will fail.
— Bruce W. Sanford, a partner with the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, is one of the most accomplished press lawyers in the United States. He lives in Washington, D.C.
This essay was excerpted from the book "Don't Shoot The Messenger — How Our Growing Hatred of the Media Threatens Free Speech For All of Us" by Bruce W. Sanford. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted with permission of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
BUY THIS BOOK | BROWSE OTHER BOOKS IN THE BOOK CORNER
