By Danny Schechter
When MediaChannel.org launched on Feb. 3, we had high hopes for media coverage given the uniqueness of our enterprise and the range of our ambitions. But when C-SPAN couldn't make it to tape our roundtable, and other big media guns were otherwise preoccupied, I wasn't sure if it was because of the snowstorm that erupted at our witching hour, or if the paucity of press attention was just another reflection of media's reluctance to carry criticisms of their own practices. Happily, we did generate some "hits," to use the PR parlance, with other buzz hopefully to come. Much of the initial interest may be thanks to the enthusiastic endorsement we received from Walter Cronkite. Never underestimate the power of celebrity to attract attention in our star-obsessed culture.
Fortunately for us, in Cronkite's case, he is famous for being more than just famous.
This is not say that media people in the trenches don't want to talk about media. They do so constantly, and endlessly, in pubs, bars and conferences, on the subway and on
the phone. And sometimes, there is a revealing quality to what is said. Our own recent roundtable featured The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, New York Magazine's Michael Wolff, The New York Observer's Chris Byron, Oxygen Media's Farai Chideya, Jonathan Alter from Newsweek and NBC, and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discussing the future of the media order after the Time Warner-AOL merger. They all had different views, but all shared concerns about the uncertain future of journalism. Highlights from the discussion will soon be available here on MediaChannel.org.
That same theme—the future of journalism—was also the subtext for many conversations among media people at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where I had the chance to schmooze with a few of this planet's most prominent editors and writers. The Forum, which brings over a thousand CEOs and high government officials to its annual meeting in the Alps, offers special programs, lunches and dinners for media types to interact with big name speakers and experts in intimate settings. I've critiqued the coverage in earlier columns but I also had a chance talk with some other reporters about our own shortcomings.
When you position yourself as a media critic, it's hard not to feel a bit superior to the press covering an event like this. You are looking for issues they aren't covering. You are focused on picking away at their mistakes. And if you are, like myself, representing a still unknown entity like MediaChannel, you bring with you a bit of animus and envy against BIG media and their corporate counterparts. This is an us/them tension that is hard to avoid and tough to transcend.
At the same time, I was struck by how willing many media insiders were to discuss their own fears and experiences, often in a reflective manner. Increasingly, many journalists are besieged, attacked from without with charges of one bias or another and then undercut from within by editors and executives who often want less from them, not more. Media bosses want shorter stories and news reports that read like everyone else's. ("How come Newsweek got that and we didn't?" or "Look what the wires are leading with" are common mantras.)
Pressures towards uniformity are strong, particularly in an environment where access to bigwigs is relatively easy for those who play by the book. Business writers tend to buy into business logic. You don't get far in that world by being a contrarian or critic of capitalism. There is a collegial culture of conversation that takes the edge off confrontational interviews and softens hard hits. And, of course, corporate types bring their high-priced PR apparatus with them. They are media monitors, too—and when they don't like what they read, when they consider you too "negative," you fall off the official welcome wagon pretty quickly. This is a problem that all beat reporters have: a conflict between serving as a stenographer for the powerful and conduit for their ideas versus being a watchdog for the public interest. (See our recent reports on U.S. election coverage.) In the case of business journalism, studies have found that many top journalists who are liberal on social issues are quite conservative on economic issues, often hostile to labor unions or ideas like universal health care.
Journalists who cover businesses also work for businesses and know first-hand about bottom-line pressures. When some of the A-list guests dropped out of our Davos media sessions because of schedule conflicts or whatever, we reporters were often stuck with each other. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the institutions we work for and the way the media world is changing. The Time Warner-AOL merger was a jumping-off point. At first, the several business reporters argued that the deal was well covered by the U.S. press, but later agreed with me when I noted that the coverage dealt more with stock prices than the social implications. These same points were later made on this side of the Atlantic at our own MediaChannel discussion.
American journalists talked about the fallout from media mergers. Reporters from top business magazines predicted that journalism has little future in the current media world because the big money is made on the entertainment side, not in the news grind. Some predicted that AOL-Time Warner might soon spin off its less profitable news operations (Time, CNN, etc). This triggered a real debate on the likelihood, or even inevitability, of such an outcome.
Journalists from around the world joined the conversation to raise other, more pressing realities like censorship and corruption. An Asian journalist told me that business executives who do press events in China are expected to give presents to the journalists who cover them: no envelope, no coverage. The former editor of the South China Morning Post told me he was never informed why his contract wasn't renewed, although most insiders think it was because he refused to allow his publisher to steer the paper towards rationalizing Beijing's policies. A business editor in France confessed that large industrial groups own the business magazines there and use them blatantly to further their own interests. A former top editor in Sweden is now teaching journalism because he resisted pressures to dumb down news. A radio journalist from Mexico told us how political parties there not only run political ads but buy and pay for panel shows and editorial coverage. A TV journalist in Chile explained how public television there has become as commercialized as its commercial competitors. A newspaper editor in Kosovo spoke about his fight to remain independent of the KLA and Serb interests. An executive with the Media Loan Fund from Prague described how vigilant his organization had to be when making loans to media enterprises in Russia to insure that they were not dominated by local oligarchs. Many countries, similar tales.
Listening to all of these stories, complaints, and hopes was very invigorating. For me, it underscored the importance of what we are doing with this web site to offer independent perspectives on global media. It also argued for the importance of building bridges between what was once called the "alternative" press and the more conscious sectors of the mainstream. As Walter Cronkite explains in his statement, the challenge today is no longer just to fight to protect journalists, but to work to protect journalism.
- Danny Schechter, "The News Dissector," is the Founder and Executive Editor of the Media Channel and author of News Dissector (Electron Press, February).
