Spreading the news
--------------------
Media technologies still in their infancy are gaining fast on traditional
newspapers. The future for print looks bleak -- unless the industry can
transform itself.
By Andrew Ratner
sun reporter
Newton N. Minow says he has seen every side of the
media elephant.
He's been a board director of Tribune Co., which owns this newspaper. He
chaired the Rand Corp. as it helped develop the Internet - and says, "we didn't understand what it was all about at the
time."
He was a director of CBS-TV and chaired the Public Broadcasting System. Most
famously, he was head of the Federal Communications Commission when he told a
gathering of broadcasters in 1961 that television was a "vast
wasteland."
The producer of Gilligan's
"Where it all ends up nobody knows, but print, in my opinion, is not going
to recover. I think we know that," Minow said
recently, speaking from his law office in
Minow's judgment might seem odd when profits are
considered. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted in an editorial agonizing
over the future of newspapers last week, the weighted average of profit margins
for the newspaper divisions of major media companies as measured by Morton
Research Inc. climbed to nearly 20 percent last year - more than double the
average profit margin of the Fortune 500.
But that's only one piece of the story. Newspaper readership has been in
decline for years, and the pace of decline is accelerating, according to the
Audit Bureau of Circulation. Advertising revenues are stagnant, and newspaper
profits and stock prices are being propped up by cost cutting and stock
buybacks.
Angst about the future of newspapers has swirled for a long time, but concerns
gained strength this fall after a succession of job cuts at several large,
respected publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The
Philadelphia Inquirer and U.S. News & World Report.
Last week, three large institutional investors that, together, hold more than
36 percent of the stock of Knight-Ridder, one of the nation's largest newspaper
chains, expressed dissatisfaction with the price of that company's stock. They
suggested that a sale might be necessary for Knight Ridder
shareholders to realize a fair return on their investments.
The three - Private Capital Management, Southeastern Asset Management and
Harris Associates LP - sent letters to the Knight Ridder
board of directors urging talks.
The "board takes its fiduciary duties seriously and will respond in due
course," said Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon.
Industry analysts said the Knight Ridder investors
are triggering a showdown that could test the value of local media, where
newspapers still dominate.
While investors fret, the traditional media's self-image is increasingly shaped
through blogs and Web sites - pieces of the new media
that they worry about. Dire signs appear so doubtless, gallows humor has set
in: The Society for News Design included 3-D glasses in its recent journal
about ideas for survival.
Radio and television, print's old challengers, are facing their own struggles
and are trying to reinvent themselves in satellite and high-definition form.
Traditional broadcast television viewership is down,
and so are advertising revenues, as the age of the typical viewer moves up and
out of the desirable young-adult demographic zone.
Broadcast radio ratings and profits also have been sharply lower in recent
quarters as growing numbers of listeners turn to satellite radio and catch
their entertainment and news on iPods and cell phones.
Cable television, satellite radio, DVD movies, video games and the Internet are
all diverting younger viewers away from their favorite sitcoms.
Most threatening for traditional media companies long-term is an array of huge
and well-financed companies in telecommunications and technology with radically
different approaches to news and information.
The Wall Street Journal suggested last week that new media companies with local
designs - including Yahoo, Google or eBay - might be
interested in Knight Ridder. Yahoo "has moved
increasingly into original content and would like to develop its local
reach," said the paper. "Meanwhile, Google
Inc. has expressed interest in entering the classified-ad market, where
newspapers have deep relationships and continue to play a dominant role."
Yahoo recently hired a war correspondent to describe his visits to the world's
military "hot spots" on its Web site and promoted it like a Vin Diesel action movie.
Sprint-Nextel is promoting itself as an entertainment platform, not just a
phone network. Last week it joined with cable giant Comcast, Time Warner Cable,
Cox and Advance/Newhouse to announce a joint venture
to develop technologies that would enable cable subscribers to use cell phones
to watch live TV shows, program digital video recorders, and check home Email.
EBay, the online auction phenomenon, bought an Internet telephony service in
Newspapers continue to hold significant advantages. When the number of eyes on
newspaper Internet news sites is added to the number of traditional newspaper
readers, effective readership looms over other media. But, thus far, Internet
advertising provides newspapers with only a fraction of the ad revenue they
receive from advertisers in the actual paper.
Still, with nearly $50 billion in advertising revenue, newspapers make up the
second-biggest chunk of the $260-billion
A
Since then, newspapers have been hurt by the two defining W's of our age:
Wal-Mart, which spends little on newspaper ads, grew at the expense of
department stores, a major print client. And the Web helped erode newspaper
classified advertising, which plummeted to $4.4 billion in 2002 from $8.7
billion in 2000 as the job market chilled, Kubas
said.
Newspapers are becoming less of a habit for people for a wide range of reasons,
some sociological, some self-inflicted. On any given day, more adults are still
more likely to read a newspaper - roughly 110 million - than use the Internet -
75 million. But again, the trend lines are bleak: Newspaper readership has
fallen by one-third during the past 40 years and faster - by roughly one-half -
among young adults (age 25-34), according to various market research.
The Internet has stolen readers, goes the consensus, and yet the medium is an
infant that's only begun to flex its news muscles. "Pam Anderson,"
"Pokemon" and "Britney Spears"
top the list of most-searched terms since 1995, a reflection of a medium that's
mostly been about entertainment and commerce during its first decade as a
commercial network. The Internet, which added more Web sites this year, 17.5
million, than during the height of the dot-com craze, is beginning to become
more interested in the news.
The marketing world, too, has only begun to adjust. Consumers generally spend
as much time on the Internet - counting the time they spend on it at work - as
they do watching TV each day, yet companies still spend six
times as much advertising on TV as online, analyst Charlene Li pointed
out in a recent report for Forrester Research Inc. of
What might be most threatening to the traditional media is that their
risk-adverse managers are about to go up against innovative and global players
who aren't invested in the old models and who have already made gobs of money
transforming the way people communicate.
In one sense, the newspaper companies are in a predicament akin to that of
General Motors and Ford, United and Northwest, the very companies whose
troubles have dominated their business pages in recent years: It's not that
people have stopped consuming news, just as they haven't stopped buying cars or
flying in planes. Far from it. It's that the so-called
legacy companies grew large in a different era and can't easily escape its
economic and social assumptions.
"The number of smart people who left the newspaper industry in the past 10
years is legion. They could not take banging their heads against the industry
any more. The decision-making structure is not set up in a way that can react
to change," said Mark Del Vecchio, a former
wire-service reporter who now runs a Web site that deals in movie memorabilia.
Del Vecchio, who covered the Tiananmen Square
massacre in China for United Press International and became the first editor
for the Web site of The Hartford Courant, had tried in 1997 to persuade the
previous owner of the Courant (and of The Sun) to buy then-little-known eBay.
He had stumbled across the Internet auction site in his movie-collecting hobby.
He and a colleague visited eBay and found its few employees struggling to open
and record the mail sacks of checks rolling in.
As described in the 2002 book The Perfect Store, the former Times Mirror Corp.
probably could have had eBay for $40 million then, but the newspaper executives
declined to make an offer, mystified about how to value a business that owned
no trucks, buildings or inventory. By spring 2000, when Tribune
"We've all heard that in every industry there are folks who say, 'It'll
never happen. It's a lark. It's a bunch of geeks.' You heard every
permutation," recalls Del Vecchio, from his
Historians even have a term for it - "technological momentum." From
cars to personal computers, the powers that be have rarely produced the
breakthroughs that alter behavior and the marketplace. More often than not, they
try to impede them politically.
"Large organizations tend to favor inventions that improve the existing
product line," said Thomas P. Hughes, a renowned sociologist at the
From Thomas Samuel Kuhn, who popularized the concept of "paradigm
shifts," to the urban planner Lewis Mumford,
futurists and historians have long studied the patterns by which one device
succumbs to another. But even the best in the field acknowledge that
predictions about technological revolution are often wrong. For every business
or industry that died because it couldn't adjust and compete with new
technology or a better product, is another that somehow defied common wisdom.
TV didn't kill radio. The telephone didn't slow the use of mail service. We are
deep in more paper, not less, in the computer era.
While print's days might seem numbered, even the greatest of visionaries can be
wildly off in predicting the impact of technology. Orville Wright projected in
1917 that aviation would make warfare obsolete because the ability to see from
the sky would negate surprise attacks, Richard Rhodes recounted in his 1999
book Visions of Technology. Polaroid inventor Edwin Land foresaw a postwar
technological economy that would eradicate urban slums that had festered since
Dickens. And some embraced radio in the 1920s as the deliverer of international
understanding, world peace and the remedy to, of all things, political
demagoguery.
"The most powerful effects are usually the unintended consequences,"
said Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his writing on nuclear
weapons - perhaps the cause of the greatest of all unintended consequences, he
said, because their awesome might curtailed world-scale war.
He anticipates that within a decade people will have portable
"roll-up" computer sheets able to receive news - and will have lost
all privacy within two decades as the Internet's ability to mine data such as
medical records increases.
Online newspapers will become more transparent - and compelling - by
increasingly showing how they researched a story, including posting original
documents and not just presenting the final product, he said. "The
newspaper's basic structure, to go out there and dig out the stuff, is what
people will always need."
Newspapers will have to find a way to transform their business model, and
staffing, over time from print to online. Internet advertising doesn't produce
nearly as much revenue as print, but the profit margins can be higher, said
John Morton, the well-known newspaper analyst who runs Morton Research Inc. in
"Never underestimate an industry that's been around for 400 years,"
said Pablo J. Boczkowski, a
"People assume that new media replace, when they more often than not
displace, old media," said James L. Baughman, a mass communications
professor at the
But if an obituary for newspapers is premature, the signs of ill health - not
just short-term measures of profit and circulation, but more structural
weaknesses - can't be dismissed. It's not just that young people have drifted off;
patterns of life have evolved to the detriment of newspapers just as they did
for the
Last week, NBC announced that its evening newscast, once the network's most
influential and profitable news show, would be posted on its Web site,
available at any hour anywhere.
The afternoon newspaper - more dominant than morning papers by circulation
until about 25 years ago and by sheer number of publications until just a few
years ago - mostly stopped working in a world of two-income households, long
suburban commutes and the service economy's longer hours. Now, families have
less time to read in the morning too.
It would be ironic (or maybe explanatory) that the Information Age has been
less kind to newspapers than the Industrial Age. People say they no longer have
time for the product, but the length of the day is the same as ever.
andrew.ratner@baltsun.com
What Belongs on the Front Page of The New York Times
By JACK
ROSENTHAL
THE Good Gray
Times: it surely was that. Black and white for certain; read all over, maybe.
For decades, the front page of The Times each day packed 12 articles into eight
narrow columns of type, relieved only by occasional photographs and maps. Page
1 in 1900 had nearly 10,000 words of text; in the 1950's, about 4,500.
How
times - and the face of The Times - have changed. Page 1 today typically
contains six articles, with about 2,200 words of text, arrayed in an artful
vertical and horizontal mix, with three or four color illustrations and a box
promoting five or six articles inside.
Page
1 has also steadily changed in another substantialway:
content. The Times has long prided itself on its coverage of geopolitics,
whether foreign turmoil,
The
Times has done less well in adapting to other concerns of readers. They ask
why, for instance, does a paper that made much of Whitewater, a real estate
deal that occurred before Bill Clinton's presidency, now fail to give Page 1
prominence to the financial improprieties at Halliburton under Dick Cheney? Why does The Times put so many articles about Abu Ghraib on Page 1? Why a feature on young Japanese-Americans
rather than real news about the failings of federal gun control?
Such
questions often reflect the asker's politics, geography or age. In any case, it
is reckless to second-guess the choice of one article over another for Page 1
without at least knowing at what hour a particular article developed and how it
compared in importance with other news of that day.
Dan
Okrent's appointment as the first public editor
offers a way for readers with such concerns to make themselves heard. He has
appraised Page 1 news judgments before and I'd be surprised if he does not do
so again. An appraisal is also in order of the Page 1 process, including its
shortcomings. Two notable ones are navigation and explanation.
The
very comprehensiveness of The Times's coverage often
makes readers - and some editors - long for a compass to direct them across
acres of newsprint. And in this all-news-all-the-time environment, when many
readers already know what happened before they pick up the paper, their need is
for help in understanding it.
What Page 1 Does
The
Times's front page performs several traditional
functions. At a glance it gives readers a summary of the most important events
of the day, in obvious order of importance, in comparison with other days. On
big news days, the editors are always ready to break out big headlines (MEN
WALK ON MOON;
On
big news days, the choices are pretty obvious. It's
slow days that test the depth of The Times and other quality media. All-news
channels and stations are not known for exhaustive reporting of old
governmental wrongs or new social rites. The Times's
front page last Monday, a slow day, included exclusive articles of both kinds,
one reporting that the F.B.I. has been questioning political demonstrators, and
one registering a turn in teenage fashion from punk to preppy.
Page
1, like The Times, reflects the interests of a readership that is better
educated, more curious and more dispersed. Women, for example, were once
catered to -- patronized, one might say today -- inside The Times with the Four
F's, a daily page titled food, fashion, family and furnishings. Now, topics
like diet, divorce and retail rivalries regularly win front-page attention.
Who Decides What Goes Where
Promptly
at noon and again at 4:30, about 18 editors gather around a long oval table to
hear what each of the major departments recommends for Page 1 the next morning.
The executive editor and managing editors encourage discussion. When there's
not much going on, every editor remembers the unspoken first law of journalism:
big news or no news, you gotta run something.
Especially
on slow days, heads of the various departments at The Times look for the
opportunity to present
original reports. These may disclose a new aspect of a continuing story, like
the federal investigation into who leaked the name of Valerie Plame of the C.I.A. to a
When there's a major occurrence, The Times,
like other papers, will assign multiple reporters to multiple facets. Last Sunday's
coverage of Hurricane Charley included five articles occupying half the front
page and two full inside pages. In instances like this, a decent regard for
readers with limited time or interest suggests giving them navigation help, a
brief summary of those articles, for instance, starting on Page 1. The Times
created such a feature on a bigger scale for A Nation Challenged, its special
section after 9/11. That daily summary became an art form all its own.
What's Behind the News
Starting half
a century ago, The Times began publishing news analyses to give reporters a way
to supply expertise or context when the facts alone tell only part of the
story. These are known internally as Q-heads, after their typographic
designation. From the start, Times editors have taken pains
to see that these articles do not express opinion; that's the province of the
editorial and Op-Ed pages.
Some
readers express impatience with anything other than traditional news. Yet
readers who know the news before morning constitute a large and growing
fraction of the readership. The Times calculates that one of every six readers
also consults The Times on the Web, and there is an unknown but surely
substantial overlap with broadcast news programs. The new all-news environment
thus generates the need for
explanation. The same imagination that creates room on Page 1 for
crystal-clear graphics could do so for more written background, context and
insight.
To
advocate more explanation may be just glib. When a reporter is writing on
deadline soon after an event, there may not yet be anything more thoughtful to
contribute. In any case there's no time to ask or ponder, no matter what some experts
may instantly declaim on cable news. The Times in fact now encourages writers
to interpolate more analysis into their primary reporting rather than ask
readers to consult a separate article.
More
Page 1 news analysis is, in any event, only one answer. Another is to call
front-page attention to explanatory material inside the paper. There may also
be new ways to present analysis and explanation, escaping from formats devised
for the clanking Linotype machines that disappeared from The Times's fourth floor 25 years ago.
One
way or another, simply presenting the news, no matter how accurately or
attractively, leaves many readers unsatisfied. When so many of them have
already been exposed to the bare bones of the news, what The Times can best
offer them, starting on Page 1, is more meat to chew on.
Jack
Rosenthal, president of The New York Times Company
Foundation, was a senior editor of The Times for 26 years.
BAD NEWS
By RICHARD A. POSNER
Published:
The New York Times Book Review
THE conventional news media are embattled. Attacked
by both left and right in book
after book, rocked by
scandals, challenged by upstart bloggers, they have
become a focus
of controversy and
concern. Their audience is in decline, their credibility with the public
in shreds. In a
recent poll conducted by the
of the respondents
thought that most news organizations, if they discover they've made a
mistake, try to ignore it
or cover it up, and 79 percent opined that a media company
would hesitate to carry
negative stories about a corporation from which it received
substantial advertising
revenues.
The industry's critics agree that the function of
the news is to inform people about social,
political, cultural, ethical
and economic issues so that they can vote and otherwise
express themselves as
responsible citizens. They agree on the related point that
journalism is a
profession rather than just a trade and therefore that journalists and their
employers must not allow
profit considerations to dominate, but must acknowledge an
ethical duty to report the
news accurately, soberly, without bias, reserving the expression
of political
preferences for the editorial page and its radio and television counterparts.
The critics further agree, as they must, that 30
years ago news reporting was dominated
by newspapers and by
television network news and that the audiences for these media
have declined with the
rise of competing sources, notably cable television and the Web.
The audience decline is potentially fatal for
newspapers. Not only has their daily
readership dropped
from 52.6 percent of adults in 1990 to 37.5 percent in 2000, but the
drop is much steeper in
the 20-to-49-year-old cohort, a generation that is, and as it ages
will remain, much more
comfortable with electronic media in general and the Web in
particular than the
current elderly are.
At this point the diagnosis splits along political
lines. Liberals, including most journalists
(because most journalists are liberals),
believe that the decline of the formerly dominant
''mainstream'' media has
caused a deterioration in quality. They attribute this decline to
the rise of
irresponsible journalism on the right, typified by the Fox News Channel (the
most-watched cable television news channel), Rush Limbaugh's radio talk
show and
right-wing blogs by Matt Drudge and others. But they do not spare the
mainstream
media, which, they
contend, provide in the name of balance an echo chamber for the
right. To these critics,
the deterioration of journalism is exemplified by the attack of the
''Swift boat''
The critics describe the attack as consisting of lies propagated by the
new right-wing
media and reported as
news by mainstream media made supine by anxiety over their
declining fortunes.
Critics on the right applaud the rise of the
conservative media as a long-overdue
corrective to the
liberal bias of the mainstream media, which, according to Jim A.
Kuypers, the author of
''Press Bias and Politics,'' are ''a partisan collective which both
consciously and
unconsciously attempts to persuade the public to accept its interpretation
of the world as
true.'' Fourteen percent of Americans describe themselves as liberals, and
26 percent as conservatives. The corresponding figures for journalists are 56 percent and
18 percent. This means
that of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or
conservative, 76 percent
consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of
the public that has a
stated political position.
So politically one-sided are the mainstream media,
the right complains (while sliding
over the fact that the
owners and executives, as distinct from the working journalists, tend
to be far less
liberal), that not only do they slant the news in a liberal direction; they
will
stop at nothing to
defeat conservative politicians and causes. The right points to the ''60
Minutes II'' broadcast in which Dan Rather paraded what were probably
forged
documents concerning George
W. Bush's National Guard service, and to Newsweek's
erroneous report, based on a
single anonymous source, that an American interrogator had
flushed a copy of the
Koran down the toilet (a physical impossibility, one would have
thought).
Strip these critiques of their indignation,
treat them as descriptions rather than as
denunciations, and one
sees that they are consistent with one another and basically
correct. The mainstream
media are predominantly liberal -- in fact, more liberal than they
used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed.
Rather, because the
rise of new media,
itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has
caused polarization,
pushing the already liberal media farther left.
The news media have also become more sensational,
more prone to scandal and possibly
less accurate. But note
the tension between sensationalism and polarization: the trial of
Michael Jackson got tremendous coverage, displacing a lot of political
coverage, but it
had no political
valence.
The interesting questions are, first, the why of
these trends, and, second, so what?
The why is the vertiginous decline in the cost of electronic communication
and the
relaxation of
regulatory barriers to entry, leading to the proliferation of consumer choices.
Thirty years ago the average number of television channels that
Americans could receive
was seven; today, with
the rise of cable and satellite television, it is 71. Thirty years ago
there was no Internet,
therefore no Web, hence no online newspapers and magazines, no
blogs. The public's consumption of news and opinion used to be like sucking
on a straw;
now it's like being
sprayed by a fire hose.
To see what difference the elimination of a
communications bottleneck can make,
consider a town that before
the advent of television or even radio had just two
newspapers because
economies of scale made it impossible for a newspaper with a small
circulation to break
even. Each of the two, to increase its advertising revenues, would try
to maximize
circulation by pitching its news to the median reader, for that reader would
not be attracted to a
newspaper that flaunted extreme political views. There would be the
same tendency to
political convergence that is characteristic of two-party political
systems, and for the same
reason -- attracting the least committed is the key to obtaining
a majority.
One of the two newspapers would probably be liberal
and have a loyal readership of
liberal readers, and the
other conservative and have a loyal conservative readership. That
would leave a middle
range. To snag readers in that range, the liberal newspaper could
not afford to be too
liberal or the conservative one too conservative. The former would
strive to be just liberal
enough to hold its liberal readers, and the latter just conservative
enough to hold its
conservative readers. If either moved too close to its political extreme,
it would lose readers
in the middle without gaining readers from the extreme, since it had
them already.
But suppose cost conditions change, enabling a
newspaper to break even with many
fewer readers than
before. Now the liberal newspaper has to worry that any temporizing
of its message in an
effort to attract moderates may cause it to lose its most liberal readers
to a new, more
liberal newspaper; for with small-scale entry into the market now
economical, the
incumbents no longer have a secure base. So the liberal newspaper will
tend to become even
more liberal and, by the same process, the conservative newspaper
more conservative. (If
economies of scale increase, and as a result the number of
newspapers grows, the
opposite ideological change will be observed, as happened in the
19th century. The introduction of the ''penny press'' in the 1830's
enabled newspapers to
obtain large circulations
and thus finance themselves by selling advertising; no longer did
they have to depend on
political patronage.)
The current tendency to political polarization in
news reporting is thus a consequence of
changes not in underlying
political opinions but in costs, specifically the falling costs of
new entrants. The rise
of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the
left. CNN was going to
lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made
sense to increase its
appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their
political preferences.
The tendency to greater sensationalism in reporting
is a parallel phenomenon. The more
news sources there are,
the more intense the struggle for an audience. One tactic is to
occupy an overlooked
niche -- peeling away from the broad-based media a segment of
the consuming public
whose interests were not catered to previously. That is the tactic
that produces
polarization. Another is to ''shout louder'' than the competitors, where
shouting takes the form of
a sensational, attention-grabbing discovery, accusation, claim
or photograph.
According to James T. Hamilton in his valuable book ''All the News
That's Fit to Sell,'' this even explains why
the salaries paid news anchors have soared: the
more competition there
is for an audience, the more valuable is a celebrity newscaster.
The argument that competition increases
polarization assumes that liberals want to read
liberal newspapers and
conservatives conservative ones. Natural as that assumption is, it
conflicts with one of the
points on which left and right agree -- that people consume news
and opinion in order
to become well informed about public issues. Were this true, liberals
would read conservative
newspapers, and conservatives liberal newspapers, just as
scientists test their
hypotheses by confronting them with data that may refute them. But
that is not how
ordinary people (or, for that matter, scientists) approach political and
social issues. The issues
are too numerous, uncertain and complex, and the benefit to an
individual of becoming
well informed about them too slight, to invite sustained,
disinterested attention.
Moreover, people don't like being in a state of doubt, so they look
for information that
will support rather than undermine their existing beliefs. They're also
uncomfortable seeing
their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with their
economic welfare, physical
safety or religious and moral views.
So why do people consume news and opinion? In part
it is to learn of facts that bear
directly and immediately on
their lives -- hence the greater attention paid to local than to
national and international
news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals,
violence, crime, the
foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily
entertaining. And they
want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and
elaborated by more
articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and
many relish, a partisan
press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the
Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ''a good thing if some news
organizations have
a decidedly
political point of view in their coverage of the news.''
Being profit-driven, the media respond to the
actual demands of their audience rather
than to the idealized
''thirst for knowledge'' demand posited by public intellectuals and
deans of journalism
schools. They serve up what the consumer wants, and the more
intense the competitive
pressure, the better they do it. We see this in the media's coverage
of political
campaigns. Relatively little attention is paid to issues. Fundamental
questions,
like the actual
difference in policies that might result if one candidate rather than the
other won, get little
play. The focus instead is on who's ahead, viewed as a function of
campaign tactics, which are
meticulously reported. Candidates' statements are evaluated
not for their truth
but for their adroitness; it is assumed, without a hint of embarrassment,
that a political
candidate who levels with voters disqualifies himself from being taken
seriously, like a racehorse
that tries to hug the outside of the track. News coverage of a
political campaign is
oriented to a public that enjoys competitive sports, not to one that is
civic-minded.
We saw this in the coverage of the selection of
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's successor.
It was played as an election campaign; one article even described the
jockeying for the
nomination by
President Bush as the ''primary election'' and the fight to get the nominee
confirmed by the Senate the
''general election'' campaign. With only a few exceptions, no
attention was paid to the
ability of the people being considered for the job or the actual
consequences that the
appointment was likely to have for the nation.
Does this mean that the news media were better before
competition polarized them? Not
at all. A market
gives people what they want, whether they want the same thing or
different things.
Challenging areas of social consensus, however dumb or even vicious
the consensus, is
largely off limits for the media, because it wins no friends among the
general public. The
mainstream media do not kick sacred cows like religion and
patriotism.
Not that the media lie about the news they report;
in fact, they have strong incentives not
to lie. Instead,
there is selection, slanting, decisions as to how much
or how little
prominence to give a
particular news item. Giving a liberal spin to equivocal economic
data when conservatives
are in power is, as the Harvard economists Sendhil Mullainathan
and Andrei Shleifer point out, a matter of describing the glass as
half empty when
conservatives would
describe it as half full.
Journalists are reluctant to confess to pandering
to their customers' biases; it challenges
their self-image as
servants of the general interest, unsullied by commerce. They want to
think they inform the
public, rather than just satisfying a consumer demand no more
elevated or consequential
than the demand for cosmetic surgery in
people determine policy
through deliberation on the issues. In his preface to ''The Future
of Media'' (a
collection of articles edited by Robert W. McChesney,
Russell Newman and
Ben Scott), Bill Moyers writes that
''democracy can't exist without an informed public.'' If
this is true, the
view). Only members of
the intelligentsia, a tiny slice of the population, deliberate on
public issues.
The public's interest in factual accuracy is less
an interest in truth than a delight in the
unmasking of the
opposition's errors. Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of
the Swift Boat
veterans, while taking gleeful satisfaction in the exposure of the forgeries
on which Dan Rather
had apparently relied, and in his resulting fall from grace. They
reveled in Newsweek's
retracting its story about flushing the Koran down a toilet yet
would prefer that
American abuse of prisoners be concealed. Still, because there is a
market demand for
correcting the errors and ferreting out the misdeeds of one's enemies,
the media exercise an
important oversight function, creating accountability and deterring
wrongdoing. That,
rather than educating the public about the deep issues, is their great
social mission. It shows
how a market produces a social good as an unintended byproduct
of self-interested
behavior.
The limited consumer interest in the truth is the
key to understanding why both left and
right can plausibly
denounce the same media for being biased in favor of the other.
Journalists are writing to meet a consumer demand that is not a demand
for
uncomfortable truths. So
a newspaper that appeals to liberal readers will avoid exposés of
bad behavior by blacks
or homosexuals, as William McGowan charges in ''Coloring the
News''; similarly, Daniel Okrent, the first
ombudsman of The New York Times, said that
the news pages of The
Times ''present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex
marriage in a tone that
approaches cheerleading.'' Not only would such exposés offend
liberal readers who are
not black or homosexual; many blacks and homosexuals are
customers of liberal
newspapers, and no business wants to offend a customer.
But the same liberal newspaper or television news
channel will pull some of its punches
when it comes to
reporting on the activities of government, even in Republican
administrations, thus giving credence to the left critique, as in Michael Massing's ''Now
They Tell Us,'' about the reporting of the war
in
officials for much of its
information about what government is doing and planning, and is
reluctant to bite too hard
the hand that feeds it. Nevertheless, it is hyperbole for Eric
Alterman to claim in ''What
Liberal Media?'' that ''liberals are fighting a near-hopeless
battle in which they are
enormously outmatched by most measures'' by the conservative
media, or for Bill Moyers to say that ''the marketplace of political ideas''
is dominated by
a ''quasi-official
partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration.'' In
a sample of 23
leading newspapers and newsmagazines, the liberal ones had twice the
circulation of the
conservative. The bias in some of the reporting in the liberal media,
acknowledged by Okrent, is well documented by McGowan, as well as by
Bernard
Goldberg in ''Bias'' and L. Brent Bozell III in ''Weapons of Mass Distortion.''
Journalists minimize offense, preserve an aura of
objectivity and cater to the popular taste
for conflict and
contests by -- in the name of ''balance'' -- reporting both sides of an issue,
even when there aren't
two sides. So ''intelligent design,'' formerly called by the
oxymoron ''creation
science,'' though it is religious dogma thinly disguised, gets almost
equal billing with the
theory of evolution. If journalists admitted that the economic
imperatives of their
industry overrode their political beliefs, they would weaken the
right's critique of
liberal media bias.
The latest, and perhaps gravest, challenge to the
journalistic establishment is the blog.
Journalists accuse bloggers of having lowered
standards. But their real concern is less
high-minded -- it is
the threat that bloggers, who are mostly amateurs,
pose to
professional journalists
and their principal employers, the conventional news media. A
serious newspaper, like
The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that
interposes layers of
review, revision and correction between the reporter and the
published report and that to
finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and
hence on the good will
of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great
extent on circulation)
readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of
ways. But in addition,
with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every
serious error is a
potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many
stories to permit adequate
checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error -- like
requiring more than a single
source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on
anonymous sources -- that
cost it many scoops.
Blogs don't have these worries. Their only cost is the time of the blogger, and that cost
may actually be
negative if the blogger can use the publicity that he
obtains from
blogging to generate lecture fees and book royalties. Having no staff, the blogger is not
expected to be accurate.
Having no advertisers (though this is changing), he has no reason
to pull his punches.
And not needing a large circulation to cover costs, he can target a
segment of the reading
public much narrower than a newspaper or a television news
channel could aim for. He
may even be able to pry that segment away from the
conventional media. Blogs pick off the mainstream media's customers one by one,
as it
were.
And bloggers thus can
specialize in particular topics to an extent that few journalists
employed by media companies
can, since the more that journalists specialized, the more
of them the company
would have to hire in order to be able to cover all bases. A
newspaper will not hire a
journalist for his knowledge of old typewriters, but plenty of
people in the blogosphere have that esoteric knowledge, and it was they
who brought
down Dan Rather.
Similarly, not being commercially constrained, a blogger
can stick
with and dig into a
story longer and deeper than the conventional media dare to, lest their
readers become bored. It
was the bloggers' dogged persistence in pursuing a
story that the
conventional media had
tired of that forced Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader.
What really sticks in the craw of conventional
journalists is that although individual blogs
have no warrant of
accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better
error-correction
machinery than the
conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of
information are pooled
and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are
there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers
who specialize, but, what is more,
readers post comments that
augment the blogs, and the information in those
comments, as
in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland
at the speed of electronic transmission.
This means that corrections in blogs
are also disseminated virtually instantaneously,
whereas when a member of
the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks
to communicate a
retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions --
usually printed
inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have
forgotten the article being
corrected -- but also of network television news. It took CBS
so long to
acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake because there are so
many people involved
in the production and
supervision of a program like ''60 Minutes II'' who have to be
consulted.
The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is
obtuse.
The blogosphere has more checks and balances
than the conventional media; only they
are different. The
model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic
market pools enormous
quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized
character, its lack of a
master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge
possessed by each of its
participants.
In effect, the blogosphere
is a collective enterprise -- not 12 million separate enterprises,
but one enterprise
with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with
almost no costs. It's as
if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many
of them experts, all
working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no
advertising.
How can the conventional news media hope to
compete? Especially when the
competition is not
entirely fair. The bloggers are parasitical on the
conventional media.
They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media,
often at
considerable expense,
without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is
striking in the case of
those blogs that provide their readers with links to
newspaper
articles. The links enable
the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper.
The legitimate gripe of the conventional media is not that bloggers undermine the overall
accuracy of news reporting,
but that they are free riders who may in the long run
undermine the ability of the
conventional media to finance the very reporting on which
bloggers depend.
Some critics worry that ''unfiltered'' media like blogs exacerbate social tensions by
handing a powerful
electronic platform to extremists at no charge. Bad people find one
another in cyberspace and
so gain confidence in their crazy ideas. The conventional
media filter out extreme
views to avoid offending readers, viewers and advertisers; most
bloggers have no such inhibition.
The argument for filtering is an argument for
censorship. (That it is made by liberals is
evidence that everyone
secretly favors censorship of the opinions he fears.) But probably
there is little harm and
some good in unfiltered media. They enable unorthodox views to
get a hearing. They
get 12 million people to write rather than just stare passively at a
screen. In an age of
specialization and professionalism, they give amateurs a platform.
They allow people to blow off steam who might otherwise adopt more
dangerous forms
of self-expression.
They even enable the authorities to keep tabs on potential
troublemakers;
intelligence and law enforcement agencies devote substantial resources to
monitoring blogs and Internet chat rooms.
And most people are sensible enough to distrust
communications in an unfiltered
medium. They know that
anyone can create a blog at essentially zero cost,
that most
bloggers are uncredentialed amateurs, that bloggers don't employ fact checkers and don't
have editors and that a
blogger can hide behind a pseudonym. They know, in
short, that
until a blogger's assertions are validated (as when the mainstream
media acknowledge an
error discovered by a blogger), there is no reason to repose confidence in what
he says.
The mainstream media, by contrast, assure their
public that they make strenuous efforts
to prevent errors
from creeping into their articles and broadcasts. They ask the public to
trust them, and that is
why their serious errors are scandals.
A survey by the
the press declined
from about 85 percent in 1973 to 59 percent in 2002, with most of the
decline occurring since
1991. Over both the longer and the shorter period, there was little
change in public
confidence in other major institutions. So it seems there are special
factors eroding trust in
the news industry. One is that the blogs have exposed
errors by
the mainstream media
that might otherwise have gone undiscovered or received less
publicity. Another is that
competition by the blogs, as well as by the other new
media,
has pushed the
established media to get their stories out faster, which has placed pressure
on them to cut
corners. So while the blogosphere is a marvelous
system for prompt error
correction, it is not
clear whether its net effect is to reduce the amount of error in the
media as a whole.
But probably the biggest reason for declining trust
in the media is polarization. As media
companies are pushed closer
to one end of the political spectrum or the other, the trust
placed in them erodes.
Their motives are assumed to be political. This may explain recent
as too critical of
the government and Democrats increasingly regarding them as not
critical enough.
Thus the increase in competition in the news market
that has been brought about by lower
costs of communication
(in the broadest sense) has resulted in more variety, more
polarization, more
sensationalism, more healthy skepticism and, in sum, a better
matching of supply to
demand. But increased competition has not produced a public more
oriented toward public
issues, more motivated and competent to engage in genuine self-
government, because
these are not the goods that most people are seeking from the news
media. They are seeking
entertainment, confirmation, reinforcement, emotional
satisfaction; and what
consumers want, a competitive market supplies, no more, no less.
Journalists express dismay that bottom-line
pressures are reducing the quality of news
coverage. What this
actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a
service are forced to give
the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud
professionals, think the
consumer should want, or more bluntly, what they want.
Yet what of the sliver of the public that does have
a serious interest in policy issues? Are
these people less well
served than in the old days? Another recent survey by the Pew
broadcast outlets, including
that bane of the right, National Public Radio, are attracting
ever larger audiences.
And for that sliver of a sliver that invites challenges to its biases by
reading The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal, that watches CNN and Fox,
that reads Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman and
everything in between, the increased
polarization of the
media provides a richer fare than ever before.
So when all the pluses and minuses of the impact of
technological and economic change
on the news media are
toted up and compared, maybe there isn't much to fret about.
Books Discussed in This Essay
Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues, by
Jim A. Kuypers.
Praeger. Paper,
$28.95.
All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information Into News, by
James T. Hamilton.
The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century, edited
by Robert W.
McChesney, Russell Newman and Ben Scott. Seven Stories. Paper,
$19.95.
Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American
Journalism, by
William McGowan. Encounter. Paper, $16.95.
Now They Tell Us: The American Press and
Review. Paper,
$9.95.
What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and
the News, by Eric Alterman. Basic
Books. Paper,
$15.
Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, by Bernard
Goldberg.
Perennial/ HarperCollins. Paper, $13.95.
Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media,
by L. Brent
Bozell III. Three Rivers. Paper, $13.95.
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for
the Seventh
Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and,
along with the
economist Gary Becker, the
author of The Becker-Posner Blog.
Published: 07 - 31 - 2005