Disappearing Ink?
How Business is Buying
Out Journalism
By Charles Fountain
It is a sad and frightening thing to lose one's faith. I am not talking
here about faith in God; I remain a practicing Catholic. (God knows I need
the practice; I have never been quite able to get it right.)
The faith I am losing-and it erodes ever more with each passing week
and month-is a secular faith in the news, where baptism came in the form
of the box scores in the Springfield Union in the days when Ted Williams
had just left the Red Sox to their long summers of discontent, and I took
solace in the faraway magic of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Eventually
and inevitably, I became aware of the stories on the front page, too-exotic
stories of Titan rockets and Mercury capsules and larger-than-life fliers
like Alan Shephard and John Glenn; uplifting stories of a dynamic young
president from my own state who stood up to the Russians in Cuba and spoke
so fetchingly of noble ideas like the Peace Corps and equal rights for
the Negroes in the South.
Most of these front-page stories I'd heard of first and followed most
closely on television. The voices of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Frank
McGee, John Chancellor, Dave Garroway, Frank Blair, and Jack Lescoulie
echo across the years, and I am once again a boy lying on the living-room
floor before the blue light from our cabinet-model Zenith. Watching in
wonder as we sent men into space; watching in horror as children in Birmingham
were clubbed and sprayed with fire hoses; watching in prayerful vigil as
we buried that dynamic young president from my own state. I wonder now:
are there any news stories that engage kids these days?
The news had become a habit by the time I got to college and discovered
Tom Winship's Boston Globe-where George Frazier's intoxicating mix of elegance
and nastiness widened my horizons and expanded my vocabulary, and Ray Fitzgerald
gave exquisite voice and dimension to the passion I still held for sport.
And there was more. Particularly, there were stories about the war in Vietnam,
and stories about campus protests opposing it. These were stories and these
were writers that made a difference in my life. The sacrament of confirmation,
if you will, in my faith that journalism was a vital and necessary element
of a full and useful passage through our days.
This all happened without my realizing what was happening. I never thought
of journalism as a career until six months on active duty with the Army
National Guard denied me the opportunity to watch an evening newscast and
see a daily paper. I'd spend my Sundays in the Fort Leonard Wood post library,
reading a week's worth of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. When I was returned
to the civilian world I sought work as a reporter, and was lucky enough
to get it. It was the time of Watergate. And here were people scarcely
older than I was-Woodward and Bernstein-reporting the hell out of a story
that would change America. You remember Woodward and Bernstein. They were
the guys played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the movie. Dustin
Hoffman and Robert Redford! We all walked a little taller in those days-at
once proud and humbled to be a part of such a noble calling.
Today, journalism's just a business. News is just a product. Now I'm
hardly the first guy to lament the parlous state of the present. There've
been disaffected, generally long-in-the-tooth reporters mumbling about
how "it ain't like it used to be" since somewhere around the
1830s. That's because journalism has always been a business. When readers
of the New York Herald in the 1830s complained that the ads for a snake-oil
salesman named Dr. Brandreth were vulgar and distracting, Herald publisher
James Gordon Bennett responded tartly. "Send us more advertisements
than Dr. Brandreth does," he said to readers. "Give us higher
prices-we'll cut Dr. Brandreth dead-or at least curtail his space. Business
is business-money is money. We permit no blockhead to interfere with our
business."
One hundred years after Bennett, William Randolph Hearst ruled his vast
empire from a cliff side in California with a daily spate of cables, telegrams,
and letters to the minions scattered across the country. The correspondence
survives in Hearst's papers at the University of California-hundreds of
communications nearly every day. And for each communication dealing with
news or newsroom issues, there are a dozen dealing with advertising, circulation,
and profit.
Journalists are loath to admit that journalism has always been a business,
however; just as we are loath to admit that news has always been a product.
But that's what it is, something for the merchant to stock on the shelves
in order to lure the customer through the door. There is nothing at all
wrong with this. The problem comes when every merchant stocks the same
merchandise. News has always been an intensely local matter. An individual
matter, even, with each newscast, each newspaper possessed of its own singular
personality and audience.
But no more. News is being packaged and sold like fast food and khaki
trousers. Hey, if it works for McDonald's, if it works for the Gap, it's
bound to work for Dateline NBC or the local Gazette-Tribune, right? So
let's give the people what they want. Here's what research says they want:
shorter stories, more graphics, more color. Stories people can use: health,
lifestyle, personal finance. Oh yes, lots of personal finance. Hurtling
towards early retirement, we baby boomers need every piece of information
we can get on how to keep those 401(k)'s growing.
Following the focus-group dictates of the reader is bound to make for
a satisfied customer. But just as letting a child pick the family menu
is likely to result in a diet weighted towards pizza and ice cream, allowing
the reader to pick the news is inviting sustenance laden with fat, sweets,
and empty calories. Whatever happened to trying to provide a comprehensive
record of what happened in the world and some understanding as to what
it all means? What about Joseph Pulitzer's creed that the highest mission
of a newspaper is public service?
We are overwhelmed with this information. Big metro newspapers like
the Boston Globe or the New York Times publish more information in a single
daily issue than any reasonable reader would get through in three days.
There are a half-dozen different twenty-four-hour cable news channels,
and in the event we've missed any of it, it's all digitized and available
at our convenience on the Web. But what merit has all this technology if
it merely delivers up a thousand different profiles of Gwyneth Paltrow
or turns a simple moron like John Rocker into a national cause célèbre?
Journalists have forever talked about "the wall between church
and state." It meant that the newsroom was sacrosanct; news decisions
were made by journalists alone, and if some news story ruffled the feathers
of an advertiser or a friend of the publisher, then that was just a part
of the price of doing business. In the best organizations, the wall was
made of reinforced concrete topped with razor wire.
Today it would seem the concrete and razor wire has gone the way of
the Berlin Wall and that the church-state wall in the newsroom is more
like a picket fence over which neighbors can have a friendly conversation
and perhaps invite one another over for a visit.
Last fall the Los Angeles Times published a special supplement on the
opening of the Staples Center, the new home of the Lakers and Kings professional
teams and the site of this summer's Democratic National Convention. After
the issue came out, reporters and editors at this most respected of American
journalistic institutions learned that the publisher and the chairman of
the board had secretly entered into an agreement to share profits from
the special section's advertisements with the Staples Center. The architect
of this sleazy deal, and the man perhaps most identified with the easily
traversed church-state wall in newsrooms today, was Mark Willes, until
recently chairman of the Times Mirror Company, the corporate parent of
the LA Times.
Willes is a newsroom Darth Vader. He came to the Times from General
Mills five years ago and told skeptical journalists that selling newspapers
was no different from selling Cheerios and they'd better get used to it.
They haven't, particularly at the Times, where the Staples deal triggered
an angry newsroom mutiny and prompted a thirty-seven-thousand-word mea
culpa in the paper that concluded that "the Times's credibility and
integrity-ultimately the only commodities a newspaper has to offer-have
been severely compromised at a time when public confidence in the press
is already in deep decline."
Were this a singular transgression it might be excused or overlooked,
but it's happening with alarming frequency and with no accompanying explanations
in most cases. For six years, WBAL-TV in Baltimore has run a popular series
on women's health on its evening newscasts. Its partner in the deal is
Mercy Medical Center, which sponsors the segments and provides access to
doctors as sources for the stories. The reports conclude with the Mercy
Medical Center phone number. WBAL station manager Bill Fine insists that
there are no constraints on reporters; they are free to pursue whatever
sources and highlight whatever hospitals they wish.
Newsworthy stories? Sure. Good publicity for the corporate partner?
That too. Good journalism? Difficult to say sometimes, what with the specter
of a profit-for-publicity quid pro quo clouding the reporting, writing,
and news judgment.
Whatever conflict may have arisen in the past at the church-state wall
could generally be resolved by a conversation between two people: publisher
and editor, or station manager and news director. But the publisher today
is a boardroom full of suits whose sole concern is the stock price and
the next quarterly earnings statement. A boardroom full of suits doesn't
know a church-state wall from a 6-4-3 double play and cares even less.
And the media companies get bigger and bigger. Even the small is large
these days. Here in New England, more than one hundred small daily and
weekly newspapers are owned by the Community Newspaper Company, an arm
of Fidelity Investments. Like other such companies around the country,
Community has streamlined its costs by regionalizing its newsrooms; in
other words, a half-dozen or more papers are published and edited out of
one common newsroom, sharing staff and overhead. If you're a PTA member
or a Little League representative with an announcement for your local weekly
newspaper, you're as likely as not going to find that paper published in
some industrial park two or three towns distant. This is not the sort of
thing that fosters a sense of connection between reader and paper.
Nearly twenty years ago, in a book called The Media Monopoly, author
Ben Bagdikian told of a world in which virtually all of America's information
would be controlled by just fifty corporations. Reviewers, while acknowledging
the merits of his arguments, also dismissed him as something of a Cassandra.
It seems now his estimate was low. In March, the Tribune Company, which
owns the Chicago Tribune and twenty-five different broadcast properties,
reached agreement to buy Times Mirror, which owns the Los Angeles Times,
Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and a truckload of smaller newspapers and magazines.
This news comes just three months after the America Online purchase of
Time Warner, a company with the potential to creep into virtually every
crevice of a citizen's communication and information life. AOL Time Warner
has not only a vast network for reporting the news-Time magazine and its
myriad sister publications, etc.-but will also control the means of delivering
information-cable television as well as AOL itself.
The week following the merger, in a letter to readers, Time Warner's
editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine, and Time's managing editor, Walter
Isaacson, insisted that nothing at Time would change, and that most news
organizations these days were but a part of some bigger whole. "These
need not be corrupting," they wrote. "Nor does bigness, in and
of itself, make a company good or bad. What matters is the values of the
people who work there."
That is precisely the problem. For the values of the employees will
always come to reflect the values of the company. Success in the company,
after all, comes from satisfying one's boss. With myriad companies in the
field, every journalist was likely to find some company consistent with
personal values. But with a few intertwined corporate Goliaths dominating
the horizon there is only one corporate value: profit. A worker in the
vineyard can shape his values to assist the company in earning those profits,
or leave.
The alternatives to servitude with the big companies stink for any journalist
wishing to face each day with health insurance and a sense of where the
mortgage payment is coming from. Salaries at small stations and independent
publications have always been terrible, and today even the big guys are
getting by with fewer and fewer full-timers, instead filling the air time
and the white space with copy from unsalaried, benefits-free "correspondents."
Such a life provides independence in the same way homelessness does.
If your aim in life is to sell cheap hamburgers, you can do it despite
McDonald's; and if your aim in life is to report and write in a way that
is consistent with the values we still try to teach in journalism school,
you can find any number of ways to do that. But it's going to be a tough
sell either way.
Sea changes in journalism tend to be epochal. This last one was more
than a quarter-century in coming, and if there is a swing back towards
the product driving the profit and not vice versa, it's going to likely
be another quarter-century or more in coming. In the meantime those of
us who hope to not lose all our faith must look for signs where we can
find them. It is not all bad. The New York Times is better than it's ever
been. Ted Koppel and Nightline crystallize public debate and illuminate
issues in a way that is both engaging television and substantive journalism.
(But who the hell stays up till midnight anymore?) The fire that once drove
people like Edward R. Murrow, Charles Collingwood, and Eric Sevareid still
burns at National Public Radio, where they're not afraid to do a seven-minute
story on Sierra Leone; where Daniel Schorr-still at the top of his game
deep into his eighties-provides a direct link to the glory that was once
CBS; and where voices like Alex Chadwick, Susan Stamberg, and Scott Simon
demonstrate afresh that in the right hands, and loosed from the shackles
of ratings and ever-larger profit, radio still-as Murrow once said of it-"can
teach, it can illuminate . . . it can even inspire."
And sometimes we can find substance in the most unlikely of places.
Don Imus conducts a remarkably erudite morning radio program, if you can
excuse the insufferable self-indulgence and get by the penis jokes and
the skits that are borderline and sometimes across-the-line racism. The
heart of his show, however, is political satire that is biting, insightful,
and, at its best, wickedly funny-complemented by an intelligent and ongoing
discourse with authors, journalists, politicians, and assorted others.
These are extended interviews-witty, revealing, self-effacing, and disarming
conversations, with Imus setting his own ego aside, allowing and encouraging
his media-savvy guests to talk with a sincerity and humanity they generally
do not reveal anywhere else. Contrast a week of Imus with a Sunday morning
full of what Calvin Trillin has dubbed the "Sabbath Gasbags."
You'll not believe that many of these ponderous pundits are the very same
people who are so human on Imus. And Imus does all this while reaching
millions of listeners and earning tens of millions of dollars for his radio
syndicate and the stations that carry his program.
Now-what does it say about contemporary journalism when Don Imus is
our man for all seasons?
Charles Fountain, an associate professor of journalism, wrote about
the undefeated 1963 football team in the September 1998 issue. During 199899,
he was a fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York.
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