Copyright 2002 Times Publishing Company St.
Petersburg Times (Florida)
February 24, 2002, Sunday
SECTION: PERSPECTIVE; Pg. 1D
LENGTH: 1355 words
HEADLINE: THE
REAL MEDIA BIAS: PROFITS
BYLINE: MARGO
HAMMOND
BODY: In Bias: A CBS
Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, a book that has been on the New
York Times bestseller list for the past 10 weeks, former CBS reporter and
producer Bernard Goldberg argues that the quality of the news we receive has
declined. Why? Because of a liberal bias in the media.
Now this week in a new book, two journalists coming from what most fans
of Goldberg's book would consider the very bastion of liberal bias offer their
own indictment of journalism. But don't expect a rebuttal of Goldberg's thesis.
In News About the News: Journalism in Peril, Leonard Downie Jr, the executive
editor of the Washington Post, and Robert Kaiser, a Post associate editor, are
not interested in whether the press is liberal - or conservative, for that
matter.
Their operative word is profits.
The real bias in media these days is not ideological but
financial, as Downie and Kaiser amply demonstrate through a careful examination
of newspapers, local stations and national networks. Too often, news decisions
are subjected solely to an accounting test: "Does it make money?"
That's an ominous trend for our society. In a democracy,
giving the media the role of watchdog is one of the best ways to hold government
and powerful institutions accountable for their actions. News matters. But fewer
and fewer media institutions are engaging in it, say Downie and Kaiser.
Newspapers have shrunk their reporting staff and the space
they devote to news. Very few have bureaus in their state capitols. The staffs
of local television stations have been cut to the bone. National television
networks have closed their foreign bureaus. Cable stations offer endless chatter
and little substance.
All these decisions have sprung
out of a media world which increasingly is in the hands of mega-corporate
interests. In other words, most news organizations, which once served to keep
tabs on those in power, are now powerhouses themselves. They are concerned not
with public service, which they see as too costly, but with filling up air time
(and newsprint) as cheaply as possible.
That means
instead of hiring investigative reporters to keep politicians honest, newspapers
settle for expanded lifestyle sections that please advertisers. Instead of
reporting on what government is doing, local stations offer "action
news," segments that appear to be investigative reports ("Pollution in the
Rivers, Tune in at 5") but which are really pre-packaged formulas bought from
consultants. Instead of in-depth reports from abroad, national networks and
cable stations offer up endless entertainment features and talk shows that shed
more heat than light.
Crammed with celebrity
interviews, disaster and crime reports, punditry and manufactured news, the
media is not so much an arsenal against ignorance. It's becoming a weapon of
mass distraction.
It wasn't always this way, as Downie
and Kaiser point out. For most of the first two centuries of American history,
the country's newspapers were deeply rooted local institutions. So were
television stations. "Some were public-spirited, others merely provincial, but
everyone in town knew who the owner was and where to find him," they write.
Now, "most newspapers, television networks and local television and radio
stations belong to giant, publicly owned corporations far removed from the
communities they serve."
And don't think this will
change any time soon. With the ruling last week that paves the way for cable
operators to own television networks, the concentration of media
ownership into the hands of a few entertainment monopolies will only
become more intense. And with it will come even more quarterly profit pressures
from Wall Street.
"Media owners are accustomed to
profit margins that would be impossible in most traditional
industries," write Downie and Kaiser. "For General Motors, a profit margin
of 5 percent of total revenue would mark a very good year, but the Tribune
Company of Chicago, which owns newspapers and television stations located all
across the country, wants a 30 percent margin. Many local television stations
expect to keep 50 percent of their revenue as profit. Protecting such high
profits can easily undermine the notion that journalism is a public service."
Downie and Kaiser are not opposed to news organizations
making money, mind you. They receive their paychecks, after all, from the
Washington Post, whose profit margins regularly exceed 15 percent and often go
above 20 percent of total revenues (their own figures). But at the Post, they
argue, those increased profits have not been made at the expense of serious news
gathering. It is when newspapers are willing to sacrifice quality to meet the
increasing demands of stockholders for more profits that the larger society
stands to lose.
"Newspapers must get better, not worse,
to retain the loyalty of readers, and thus the dollars of
advertisers," they write. "If they fail to get better, newspapers will
continue to shrink - in size, in quality, in importance. This would be tragic,
because no other news medium can fill the role that good newspapers play in
informing the country."
If that sounds like a bias
toward print journalism, it is. Freely admitting they are not the best people to
criticize the Post, the two Post veterans do take note of their own newspaper's
deserved reputation for journalistic excellence. They also praise the newspaper
that writes my paycheck - the St. Petersburg Times - pointing out that its
unique financial structure (it is independently owned by a local nonprofit media
institute) allows it to be "run for the public's benefit." On the other
hand, they bemoan what they call the "profit-driven big chains" such as
Gannett and Knight-Ridder, and the tendency of even well-respected newspapers to
blur the lines between advertising and news. They take the Los Angeles Times,
for example, to task for its notorious deal with the Staples Center, in which
the newspaper shared advertising revenues from a Sunday magazine that purported
to be news. The Times case was so egregious that its own editors later published
a report critical of the newspaper's Staples decisions.
Downie and Kaiser's most vitriolic attacks, however, are reserved for
the electronic media, particularly local television. "The owners and managers of
local television stations feel little obligation to provide coverage of
government, politics or civic affairs in return for the free airwaves they use,
or the First Amendment protections they enjoy," they write. Whatever
happened to the notion of public service?
There was, of
course, a time last fall when it looked like that notion might be revived.
During the days and weeks that followed Sept. 11, news organizations seemed to
forget about profits and concentrated on serving the public. Television networks
suspended commercials. Newspapers put out extra editions and expanded their news
holes to accommodate badly sought after information about terrorism here and
abroad.
Will such newfound interest in serious news
last? Will the owners of news organizations now be convinced that it is in their
best interest to encourage better journalism and spend more money on covering
the news? Downie and Kaiser, who were finishing up their book just after the
terrorist attacks, were cautiously hopeful. But the bulk of their research,
obviously completed well before Sept. 11, indicates that it will be an uphill
battle.
CBS' Goldberg is certainly skeptical. "On
September 11, 2001, America's royalty, the TV news anchors, got it
right," he wrote in a brief note added to his bestseller Bias after the
terrorist attacks. "But it shouldn't take a national catastrophe of unparalleled
magnitude to get the news without the usual biases."
Goldberg and other media critics continue to lay the blame for media
mediocrity on the press' liberal or conservative bias. But in criticizing
the media elites, Goldberg could have just stopped after the phrase "to get the
news." The more pressing problem is not whether the news we get is slanted,
right or left. It's whether we get any news at all.
GRAPHIC: DRAWING, ROSSIE NEWSON; PHOTO; The set of
a television newscast features the stations news logo, '2NEW$ '; Leonard Downie
Jr and Robert Kaiser