Memo to Bob Iger: News Still Matters

Dear Bob:

As you take over the Disney Co., along with the theme parks, the merchandise and the movies, you also take over a news division that is in trouble. And it’s not just ABC News that’s in trouble -- all of the network news divisions are. Ratings are down. Public disdain is up. Tom Brokaw left NBC; Dan Rather left CBS. And now, at your shop, Ted Koppel has announced that he will be leaving ABC News at the end of the year.

It’s been many years since the myth that news mattered for its own sake was shattered. It’s a business. Everyone who works in broadcast journalism understands that now.

But when the person who applies makeup to a star anchor makes more money than a correspondent who is risking his or her life in Iraq or some other international hot spot, maybe the business side of news is out of whack too.

Long hours are spent trying to figure out what the viewers “want” and how to give it to them. Many of the news magazines stopped being about news long ago, turning instead to celebrities and crime, or better yet, celebrity crime.

The morning shows, after a brief dip in the shallow end of the news pool, now seem like little more than promotional platforms for their parent companies.

The evening broadcasts are still struggling with a steady loss of viewers, while they try to decide just what mix will stop the hemorrhaging. Less foreign coverage? More health tips? Gas prices, in or out?

While I was running “Nightline,” I was criticized for making it too serious. It was argued that audiences don’t want to be challenged at night -- they want to be reassured. Well, my feeling was it’s a serious world, and we ignore that at our peril.

Increasingly it seems that many viewers don’t necessarily want just “the news.” They want to be told that whatever they believe is right and that anyone who disagrees is wrong. If they have problems, they want to be told that it’s someone else’s fault. And the cable networks are more than eager to say just whose fault it is. Plenty of people are making a lot of money and gaining fame by saying just those things.

Gone are the days when someone might actually want to hear the “other side,” maybe because people are worried about hearing something that might actually make sense -- or worse yet, something that might cause them to reconsider their opinions.

No, it’s much simpler to denigrate, to throw charges of “bias” at their heads, brush them back. Now just covering the “other side” is seen as damning evidence of bias, if not treason.

So what should you do? Maybe the answer is actually pretty simple. Maybe it’s time to just do the right thing. Accept that news won’t make a lot of money, and stop requiring that it does.

Maybe it’s time to stop worrying about what the audience wants, and instead try to present what’s really important, to inform, stimulate, challenge.

Maybe it’s time to just cover the news and hope for the best. Elie Wiesel once said the role of the journalist is to “speak for those who have no voice.” That’s a group that is steadily increasing both in this country and around the world, and it’s greater than any network audience.

We have tried speaking for those coveted 18- to 34-year-old males, for the powerful, for the stockholders. None of that seems to have worked. So now the question remains. Who will you speak for? Who will any of us speak for?