Instant Consensus : How Media Gives Stories Same ‘Spin’

It was a springtime of remarkable consensus for the American media, an institution that has traditionally (if not always justifiably) prided itself on its independence, iconoclasm and diversity.

First came the Alar scare: Read all about it, everywhere--Apples Cause Cancer.

Then came President Bush’s arms reductions proposals at the NATO summit: “A triumph,” reporters and commentators alike concluded--with CBS News, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, among others, using that very word.

Finally, Tian An Men Square: More than a million Chinese demonstrated against their government, and the American media assured their readers and viewers that China would never be the same--that the democratic genie was permanently out of the totalitarian bottle.

All these media judgments may ultimately prove correct. But differing interpretations could also have been made in each case:

--Many respected scientists and public health officials say the study that triggered the Alar scare was seriously flawed and grossly misleading.

--Political analyst William Schneider says the President’s NATO trip was not a political or foreign policy triumph, merely a “public relations triumph . . . and the press fell for it.”

--Columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in Time even before the Beijing government’s brutal crackdown, dismissed the “genie out of the bottle” analysis as “rank sentimentalism . . . a fallacy so large it is embarrassing just to hear it.”

‘Pack Journalism’

But these divergent views were rare exceptions to the conventional wisdom. Increasingly, it seems, a media consensus forms on major events quicker than you can say “pack journalism.” Critics say such consensus journalism is both more prevalent and more perilous than ever before.

Why? Why do the media sometimes arrive at an instantaneous consensus on issues, events and individuals that would seem open to widely varying, even conflicting interpretations? How does this “conventional wisdom” develop?

Many of the more than 60 journalists and public opinion specialists The Times interviewed recently about the phenomenon attributed its growth to the tendency of reporters to talk to the same sources all the time. Others pointed to a “herd mentality” in the media--”the nation’s herd of independent minds,” in Krauthammer’s phrase. Still others cited conditions ranging from geographic myopia and ideological bias to manipulation by government officials, laziness, homogeneity, timidity and insecurity in the press corps and the absence of such volatile, fundamentally divisive issues as Vietnam, Watergate or the civil rights movement.

But most of those interviewed said the growing trend toward consensus journalism derived largely from the pervasiveness and impact of television, with its demands for speed, brevity and conformity.

These demands affect print reporters as well as television reporters; knowing that television will almost inevitably be first, newspaper and magazine journalists often try to provide the analysis that television may lack the air time to do. But in trying to rush this analysis into print to compete with the ever-increasing speed of television, many reporters and columnists reflexively reach for the simplest, safest, most obvious explanations.

Journalists required to write daily stories on developing events “don’t think deeply enough and . . . don’t take enough time . . ; there’s too much instant consensus . . . “ says R. W. Apple, deputy Washington bureau chief for the New York Times.

The longstanding imperatives of daily journalism--the crush of events and the rush to meet deadlines--have been exacerbated in recent years by computers, satellites and the other miracles of modern communications technology. The media can communicate faster, so the media does communicate faster--if not necessarily with greater perspicacity or originality.

Technology has also made it possible for reporters to check their work against the competition in a way never before possible. A reporter sitting in his office or in a hotel room can watch Cable News Network and, simultaneously, call up on his computer screen several wire service reports of an event, even as he sits writing his own version. The tendency to conformity can be all but irresistible.

Technology notwithstanding, “reporters are only human,” and many journalists invoked this phrase to explain why they are often so quick to form a consensus--whether by discussing an issue or event with each other or by independently arriving at the same judgments.

When a story like the Alar apple scare or the China protests develops, journalists get caught up in the emotion of the story, much as their viewers and readers do. The dispassionate judgment they generally demand of themselves may give way to sheer enthusiasm (China) or fear (Alar).

“Alar was a classic case of a feeding frenzy that got swiftly out of control because it quite literally addressed itself to mom and apple pie--or if not the pie, at least the apple,” says Tom Brokaw, anchor of “NBC Nightly News.”

In China, the U.S. media thought the troops wouldn’t attack the protesters, and even when they did, the media remained convinced that China had been forever changed by the protests, that freedom--not repression and executions--would follow.

Major upheavals have hit China at the end of each of the last four decades, though, and the current Chinese leaders--like their predecessors, terrified of anarchy in so vast a population--have remained authoritarian, determinedly faithful to their violent revolutionary roots.

So why did the massacre and repression surprise so many journalists?

“We all, to one degree or another, got sucked in by the prospect that these were the 1980s version . . . the Oriental version of the Concord Bridge,” Brokaw says. “I think that we were unsophisticated. . . . I suppose what I fault us all on in China is that we took a really typical Western attitude toward it and failed to see it for its Chinese aspects, both culturally and politically.”

Reporters on the scene in Beijing were “part of a euphoric environment,” says Henry Muller, managing editor of Time magazine. “They were witnesses to something absolutely amazing” that coincided with what reporters from democracies would like to see happen. “They became so engrossed in what was going on that they lost their ability to be as purely analytical of the events as they should have been.”

Daniel Schorr, senior news analyst for National Public Radio, says he, too, was “swept away” by what happened in Tian An Men Square, and he subsequently told his listeners that he shouldn’t have called the events in China “irreversible” and would immediately “expunge the word ‘irreversible’ from my commentator’s vocabulary.”

Does frequent media consensus--whether on China, Alar or anything else--prove that the American media is a mindless monolith?

No.

On any given day, newspaper front pages and editorial pages reflect strikingly different views of what is and what should be important. Indeed, The New Republic regularly publishes headlines that present diametrically opposed views of the same story on the same day--as in this one, from July 26, dubbed “Yes, No, Maybe” by the magazine: Los Angeles Times: “Senate Backs Funding of Stealth Bomber, 98-1;” New York Times: “Senate Deals Bush Defeat in Killing Funds for Stealth;” Washington Post: “Senate Gives Conditional Go-Ahead on B-2 Bomber.”

But the media do reach consensus with surprising frequency. Newsweek even has a weekly feature, Conventional Wisdom Watch, which wryly tracks the ebb and flow of conventional wisdom on a wide range of issues, both large and small.

Of course, conventional wisdom is sometimes correct as well as conventional--”a firm grasp of the obvious,” in the words of Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief for the New York Times. Or, as Jeff Greenfield, media and political analyst for ABC News, puts it:

“Sometimes people says it’s raining because it’s raining.”

Nor is conventional wisdom an altogether new phenomenon. Chroniclers and interpreters of the day’s events have been echoing each other at least since Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all wrote the Gospel according to Jesus Christ. Still, critics worry that as conventional wisdom becomes more prevalent, it becomes both more conventional and less wise. When all think alike, none really think; society ultimately suffers.

Reporters, especially younger reporters, have traditionally regarded themselves as unconventional individualists, as iconoclasts and risk-takers. But few really are, especially now. There are far fewer enfants terribles than enfants timids in the contemporary press corps.

Journalists today are better educated than their predecessors, and the environment they work in has become more serious, more formal--both more corporate and more conformist. Journalism is now a Profession, with codes of ethics, pension plans and newsrooms that look more like insurance offices than the cluttered city rooms of generations past, filled with ink-stained wretches sitting at whiskey-stained desks. Individually and institutionally, those in the press are now more inclined toward responsibility than sensationalism, and with responsibility often come respectability and caution.

Some might dismiss these observations as mere nostalgia for a romanticized past that didn’t really exist, but as syndicated columnist Robert Novak says, today’s journalists--especially Washington journalists--are “by and large pretty well-paid, respectable, family men . . . fairly conventional people.

“There seems to be . . . less individuality today than there was 25, 30 years ago,” Novak says. “They tend to create a more conventional reportage because they’re much less characters than they used to be . . . much less apt to go off the deep end on an interesting or an outrageous position.”

Dan Rather, anchor for the CBS Evening News, says a “general lack of intestinal fortitude in taking on the conventional wisdom” is more prevalent now “than at any time in the last 20 years.

“Bold, aggressive reporting has gone a tad out of fashion, and that makes it easier for conventional wisdom,” he says. “It’s hard to get in trouble if you ride along with conventional wisdom. . . . Even if you’re wrong, your editor will probably shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Well, you know, what the hell, everybody else was wrong on that story.’ ”

Reporters working abroad, whether based there or traveling with American officials, seem particularly prone to consensus journalism.

Norman Pearlstine, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, says he can recall when he was based in the Far East for his paper, watching a veteran reporter who wrote (and still writes) “front-page stories for a very major American newspaper,” rummaging through waste baskets at the foreign correspondents’ club in Tokyo, “fishing out other people’s first drafts . . . looking for the lead to his story.”

When high government officials travel to foreign countries--to the NATO summit in Brussels or to capitals in Eastern Europe, as President Bush did earlier this year--the press goes along largely as a captive audience, captive to one another and captive to their government chaperones.

“You can go on (a presidential) . . . trip without ever having a conversation with anybody other than another journalist,” Novak says.

Not surprisingly, reporters who talk almost exclusively to each other often produce similar stories. And if one is tempted to offer a different view?

“Suppose I wrote that the Bush NATO summit trip was a failure,” says Jack Nelson, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. “The editor would say, ‘Hey, wait just a minute. . . . AP says it’s boffo. UPI says the same thing. The network anchors seem to all agree that it was a success.’ Suppose I wanted to go against the grain. . . . I didn’t happen to go against the grain on that, but I would imagine that I would meet with some resistance.” If a veteran, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter such as Nelson feels this way, imagine the constraints an inexperienced reporter would feel.

Henry Muller of Time concedes that editors “make it very hard for American reporters” to break free of the consensus.

“Any reporter who is reporting a story substantially differently from his colleagues is sure to get a lot of calls from the home office asking why,” Muller says. “He’s sure likely to get a lot of skepticism from his home office and maybe even some guidance to file stories that come closer to the mainstream view.”

In earlier generations, reporters in the field didn’t have to worry nearly as much about what other reporters were writing because their editors would probably see only one other version of the story before deadline--the Associated Press dispatch. Now, with 24-hour-a-day Cable News Network (CNN), the increasing influence of the traditional networks, the growth of supplemental news services and the widespread availability of the national editions of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, editors can check their own reporters’ work against many reliable sources.

Perhaps this helps explain why the proliferation of news media, which--in theory, at least--should yield a more varied news report, has produced instead a greater consensus: uniformity, not diversity.

Rather offers an even more compelling explanation. Reporters, he says--himself included--consult the same sources, a “shockingly small . . . circle of experts (who) . . . get called upon time after time after time.”

Why don’t journalists seek different sources? Some do. Sometimes. But it’s easier to keep calling the same sources; a source who is both accessible and quotable is a journalistic treasure--all the more so on television, where the most popular sources are those who learn to speak in perfect, eight-second sound bites. Besides, reporters often call a source because they want a quotation to illustrate a particular point, and they are sure to get exactly what they want if they call a source whose attitudes they already know.

Albert R. Hunt, Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, says he grew so annoyed at seeing the same experts quoted in his paper all the time that he banned the use of several of them for a couple of months last year.

“The ban ended when I did a column and had to quote a couple of them,” he says, sheepishly.

John Buckley, communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, is a favorite source of political reporters--bright, articulate, friendly, quick with a deft jab or pithy remark--and he laughs at reporters’ over-reliance on him.

In the “truncated Rolodex of the press corps . . . on many subjects, I’m part of the Stations of the Cross,” he says.

Why do journalists quote “experts” so often? In part because most journalists are generalists. Despite recent improvements in education and the development of a cadre of journalistic specialists, most still lack the special training often required to intelligently evaluate intricate disarmament proposals, economic issues and political upheavals at home and abroad.

Equally important, unlike the press in many other countries, where journalists are openly partisan and feel free to blend reportage and commentary, the press in the United States has long prided itself on being nonpartisan and non-ideological, clearly separating fact (the front page) from opinion (the editorial pages). So, in an effort to provide some perspective and insight, to tell readers and viewers what a new development really means, without blatantly injecting their own opinions, American reporters turn to experts.

“We depend too much on experts in this country,” says Michael Kinsley, who recently spent six months in England as an editor for The Economist magazine. “The fiction that someone who’s engaged in studying and thinking about public policy issues all day can do that without developing an opinion about it doesn’t exist in other countries.”

Reporters in, say, England and France, are expected to be “fair and accurate and balanced,” Kinsley notes, “but they’re not afraid to express their own views so you don’t have to go quote Norman J. Ornstein to say what you really think.”

Thus, in those countries, seven different journalists might put seven different spins on a given story; in this country, four of them might put Ornstein’s spin on the story--and the other three would probably use Ornstein’s colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, William Schneider (or vice versa).

Not everyone agrees that the American press is non-ideological. Some critics argue that the press is ideological and that journalistic consensus emerges precisely because of that lock-step ideology.

Critics on the left say the entire Cold War orientation of the press, the tendency to see everything in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations, with the Soviets as the implacable villains, has put a definite spin on coverage of foreign and domestic issues alike for more than 40 years.

Critics on the right say that since studies show that most journalists are politically and culturally liberal, the conventional media wisdom on such issues as civil rights, Vietnam, abortion and the environment has long reflected that spin.

Patrick Buchanan, former press aide to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan and now a syndicated columnist, says that when he worked in the Nixon White House, he was often able to predict “every single question . . . and the spin on the questions” that Nixon would face in his next press conference.

Many journalists dismiss Buchanan’s analysis because of his own conservative ideology and Republican partisanship. But they concede his description of “a conformity of mind-set among American journalists which is unbelievable.”

There are now more minority and women reporters than ever before, but most reporters--and most editors and other top-level decision-makers--are still white males with a great deal in common.

“There’s an awful lot of similarity” in their education, background, economic status and views about the system, says Norman Pearlstine of the Wall Street Journal.

One view shared by many in the press corps is a sense of their own importance. Several reporters interviewed for this story conceded that President Bush received glowing reviews for his NATO proposals, for example, in part because he did, in essence, what the press had been telling him to do.

“Beginning in early May, a rolling barrage of stories, columns, essays, cartoons and commentaries was unleashed at the White House by newspapers, magazines and television personalities,” Richard Harwood wrote in the Washington Post. “There was a central theme: Mr. Bush, by failing to respond positively to the initiatives of Soviet President (Mikhail S. ) Gorbachev, was bungling a historic opportunity to end for all time the ‘Cold War’.”

So when Bush went to Brussels and made what CBS termed a “bold, fresh initiative,” there was a new conventional wisdom: “The President returned in triumph after a virtuoso performance. . ,” as the Los Angeles Times put it.

“Politicians rarely lose in the press when they take the advice of the press,” says E. J. Dionne, chief national political correspondent for the New York Times.

Bush’s NATO trip was also perceived as a triumph because he did “better than expected”--a sure-fire way to turn one conventional wisdom (disaster) into another (triumph), as scores of canny politicians have learned on the campaign trail.

Bush has been a fascinating case study in the half-life of conventional wisdom since long before NATO.

“George the Wimp fades into George the Ripper fades into George the Compromiser. . . , “ as Maureen Dowd put it in the New York Times last month.

Why has the journalistic consensus on Bush shifted so often that he almost seems to be reinventing himself every few months? Columnist William Safire of the New York Times says Bush is “not as complex as Nixon . . . not as simplex as Reagan and . . . most of us haven’t figured out the way to approach him.”

But one reason conventional wisdom changes is that events and people change. Besides, journalism, like nature, abhors a vacuum; newspapers are published every day, and television is broadcast every day, so reporters must have something new to say every day. If they all say the same thing today and they all say a different same thing tomorrow, if they adopt and abandon and re-adopt conventional wisdom so quickly that “everything sounds like Donald Duck,” in the words of Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, well, maybe that’s why journalism is called “the first rough draft of history.”

How rough is that first draft? Well, when President Reagan nominated Dr. C. Everett Koop as U.S. surgeon general, the journalistic consensus was that Congress should not confirm Koop, that he was--in the words of New York Times editorials--”the wrong man for the job . . . an affront both to the public health profession and the public.”

When Koop left office almost eight years later, the conventional wisdom was that he had provided--in the words of a New York Times editorial--”medical integrity . . . honesty . . . responsible discussion . . . a distinguished example of leadership.”

Tom Lutgen of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.