In an important and lucid new book, “Breaking the News,” James Fallows argues that the media establishment is where the military and the auto industry were 20 years ago-“still in the denial stage.” This critique of the press ignores the fact that the public basically gets the media it deserves, and that “the media” are not monolithic. But it moves smartly beyond the usual attacks on sensationalism and bias to the more profound problems in the conventions of modern American journalism, especially the emphasis on conflict. Simply put, what’s “hot” too often takes precedence over what’s meaningful, and the consequences for democracy are serious. “By choosing to present public life as a contest between scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion,” Fallows writes, “the news media brings about that very result.”
Most of the abuses that Fallows identifies have been examined before, but he brings fresh clarity and passion to the task. With pitiless logic, he cuts through the phony media culture: the pointless predictions game, where the pundits are usually wrong; the reporter-as-performer, engaging in TV shouting matches now imitated at the local level; the lazy-minded news judgment of the spoon-fed White House press corps; the snide “attitude” that often substitutes for substantive reporting; the weak rationalizations for taking lecture fees from special interests, which can total as much as $40,000 a pop for big names like ABC’s Cokie Roberts; the frequent failure to disclose relevant interests (here’s mine: I worked briefly for Fallows in 1978 and was interviewed for his book).
Fallows argues that many journalists have a twisted definition of their role. Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings said on a PBS show examining a hypothetical wartime situation that they would continue taping enemy soldiers firing on American troops even if they could have saved lives by warning U.S. forces that an ambush was coming. “You don’t have a higher duty,” Wallace said. You don’t? One of the pleasures of this book is its impatience with the empty pieties of the news business.
But it is the coverage of health care that Fallows views as “the press’s Vietnam.” Whatever your view of the Clinton plan, the misreporting was astonishing. Elizabeth McCaughey wrote a highly influential piece in The New Republic saying that the Clinton plan did not allow people to buy their own health care outside the system. George Will passed on to millions the claim that doing so could land patients in jail. The McCaughey article eventually won a National Magazine Award and catapulted the author to the lieutenant governorship of New York. The only problem with it, as Fallows establishes, was that it wasn’t true. No matter. It was “hot” and “talked about.” That was enough.
Fallows names names, though he impishly omits an index so that self-involved journalists will have to read the book to find themselves. Many of the dozens of reporters he sideswipes–including a few at NEWSWEEK–may be a little sore. We shouldn’t be. Journalists need to look past the personal shots and the occasional misinterpretations of the news business to the underlying validity of his message.
Of course, by skipping a balanced analysis in favor of a bracing jeremiad, Fallows misses some subtleties. “It is sexier and easier to write about Bill Clinton’s “positioning’ on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is ‘handling’ the need to cut Medicare, than to look into the issues themselves,” he writes. This basic point is dead-on. While scores of journalists mob Gingrich, several cabinet departments don’t have a single reporter assigned to cover their activities full-time. The problem is that the categories of “substance” and “politics” are less tidy and distinct than Fallows suggests.
Officials often say they respond to policy in crass political terms because they expect the press to report issues that way. But the debasing of civic culture is ultimately a chicken-and-egg question: does it begin with the press, the politicians or the public? It’s the interaction of the three–more complex than Fallows’s polemic suggests–that leads to the substance gap. In other words, when looking for the sources of public cynicism, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The public and the politicians may claim they want a sober-minded, issues-oriented press. But consumers don’t tend to vote for that at the newsstand or with their channel changers. Fallows never properly sorts through the commercial pressures on editors who struggle to make civic-minded stories sell. And the politicians are hardly blameless when they write memos, as Gingrich’s PAC did a few years ago, urging that opponents be routinely described with words like “sick,” “pathetic” and “greedy.” (The Democrats play this game, too.)
Fallows is mistaken to suggest that the questions ordinary people ask politicians are invariably better than those asked by reporters. Citizens rarely pose effective follow-ups or hold public figures accountable. But at least their questions are relevant to something real, and it’s here that the book rings especially true. Reporters need to recognize that almost no voters ask about the game of politics; they ask repeatedly about how issues and positions will affect them. For journalists to insist on conflict over the harder-to-explain stories about how policy affects real people’s lives can be deeply alienating to voters. Yes, the people are often hypocritical; they say they want issues, then opt for circuses. But journalists have to move past viewing real substance as squishy, boring or “off the news.”
Fallows is not arguing for more dull journalism, but for something much harder–a real effort to turn the important into the compelling; to connect a once idealistic profession to the better angels of its audience. This is difficult to execute, but it can be done. The most hopeful section of the book explains a movement called “public journalism,” which, pre-Fallows, began spreading among American newspapers. The idea, practiced in various forms, is to listen much harder to what the community wants from its media, then reshape coverage to meet those needs. Dozens of newspapers this year are structuring their entire campaign coverage around the substantive questions that readers ask instead of the usual horse race.
The most common defense offered by journalists under attack is that the market rules. But the market likes a mix between entertaining and informing–you can have O. J. Simpson and the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill. A good show like “Nightline” routinely equals or beats Leno and Letterman. The New York Times prospers. Quality sells. What never works is complacency. Something has gone wrong between Americans and their sources of news. Journalists have to face that, and think harder about the true purpose of our work.
PHOTO (COLOR): Sizzle over substance
In “Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy” (304 pages. Pantheon. $25), James Fallows indicts American reporters for spending too much time covering conflict and far too little informing an increasingly disenchanted public. A highlight: ..MR0-
AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL, DAILY PUBLIC-AFFAIRS NEWS CONCENTRATES HEAVILY on what the president said and did that day; how well–or badly organized his staff seems to be; whether he is moving ahead or falling behind in his struggle against opponents from the other party; and who is using what tactics to get ready for the next presidential race. Each time the chairman of the Federal Reserve opens his mouth, he usually gets on the evening network news. When the local school board selects a new superintendent of schools, that announcement, and the comments of the new superintendent, are played prominently in the local news.
A case could be made that some or all of these events are really the most important “news” that a broad readership needs each day. But you could just as easily make a case that most of these often ceremonial events should be overlooked and that a whole different category of human activity deserves coverage as “news.” Instead of telling us what Newt Gingrich will do to block Bill Clinton’s spending plans for education, the “news” might involve the way parochial schools work and ask whether their standard of discipline is possible in public schools. “[But] the ideology of mainstream journalism is, when there is conflict, there is news. When there is no conflict, there is no news,” says Cole Campbell, editor of the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk, Va. “That is ideological, and it is out of touch with how people experience life.”
Today’s journalists can choose: Do they want merely to entertain the public or to engage it? If they want to entertain, they will keep doing what they have done for the last generation. Concentrating on conflict and spectacle, building up celebrities and tearing them down, presenting a crisis or issue with the volume turned all the way up, only to drop that issue and turn to the next emergency. They will make themselves the center of attention, as they exchange one-liners as if public life were a parlor game. They will view their berths as opportunities for personal aggrandizement and enrichment, trading on the power of their celebrity. And while they do these things, they will be constantly more hated and constantly less useful to the public whose attention they are trying to attract. In the long run, real celebrities–singers, quarterbacks, movie stars–will crowd them off the stage. Public life will become more sour and embittered, and American democracy will be even less successful in addressing the nation’s economic, social, and moral concerns.
