Distrustful Public Views Media as ‘Them’--Not ‘Us’ : Journalism: Credibility has declined. Elitism and blurring of line between substance and fluff are factors.
By almost any reasonable measure, the mainstream news media in this country are more responsible and more ethical today than at any time in their history.
Gone--for the most part--are the days when editors and reporters accepted extravagant gifts and free meals from news sources, when reporters routinely masqueraded as police officers, doctors and others in pursuit of a story, when stories were featured or killed almost daily to accommodate the financial, political or social interests of the publisher--or his wife.
And yet public confidence in the news media is in steady decline. In a Times poll conducted last month, only 17% said the media, overall, are doing a “very good” job--down from 30% in 1985. Almost 70% agreed with the statement: “The news media give more coverage to stories that support their own point of view than to those that don’t.” Forty percent said they have less confidence in the news media today than they did when they first began paying attention to news and current events.
Why?
One explanation may be that many members of the public feel a growing disenfranchisement from the news media, as they do from the government. Increasingly, they think, the people who report, edit and broadcast the news are elitist--well-paid, well-educated sophisticates who are more interested in (and have more in common with) the movers and shakers they cover than in the everyday concerns of the average reader and viewer.
Many in the responsible, mainstream news media--especially the print media--say there’s another problem: They’re paying, they say, for the sins of their less responsible, sensation-minded brethren, many of them in television.
Fact-based docudramas, tabloid TV shows such as “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition” and “A Current Affair,” and local TV news shows that emphasize murder and mayhem--flash, crash and trash--have blurred the lines between substance and fluff, between journalism and hype, between news and entertainment.
Sob stories and sensational headlines were long a staple of many American newspapers, even well into the 20th Century, but in those days newspapers were people’s only source of news; today, with so many widely different sources, some readers and viewers are inclined to “lump them all together . . . as the media “ and to deem them equally unworthy of their respect, says Van Gordon Sauter, president of Fox News and former president of CBS News.
In the recent Times poll, respondents did seem to distinguish among the different kinds of news and talk programs.
Sort of.
Although 91% said the major network news shows are “a good way” to obtain information about what is going on in the world today, and 81% made the same judgment about local daily newspapers, the percentages were much lower for the various tabloid TV shows, radio and TV talk shows, and supermarket tabloid newspapers. Only 24% said Rush Limbaugh’s radio and TV talk shows are “a good way” to learn what’s going on in the world, for example, and only 6% gave that rating to weekly tabloid papers such as the National Enquirer and the Star.
Still, more than 40% said TV talk shows such as those hosted by Larry King, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael are “a good way” to learn what’s going on in the world--and for most of these shows, the percentages were more than 50% among blacks, women, high school dropouts, people aged 18 to 29 and people with less than $20,000 annual income. (King also fared well with blacks and with people 18 to 29, but, unlike the other hosts, he also drew high ratings from men, people earning more than $40,000 a year and college graduates.)
Sauter may be right, then, when he says most people may realize that these various formats are different, but for many people the programs “all have fundamentally the same perceived value.”
As David Paletz, a professor at Duke University who writes about media and politics, puts it: “All the stuff on TV which is not news but is in some way close to news amplifies the diversity of what can be considered news, and people . . . ultimately equate them with regular news.”
The result, Paletz says, is a kind of “news miasma.”
But readers and viewers are not the only victims of this miasma. Reporters, editors and television news directors also seem at times to give news organizations with widely varying standards “fundamentally the same perceived value.”
Jose Rios, news director at KTTV Channel 11, a Fox station, says the success of the tabloid TV programs has influenced the way traditional television newsrooms operate. “You look at what’s on the air on some stations, just in terms of production, it would have been absolutely verboten five years ago,” he says.
Mainstream newspapers have been similarly influenced by both tabloid television and the tabloid newspapers sold in supermarkets.
Reporters had long heard rumors about Bill Clinton’s alleged extramarital activities, for example, but it wasn’t until the Star, a supermarket tabloid, published Gennifer Flowers’ account of their alleged affair that the story suddenly became front-page, top-of-the-network news almost everywhere.
Another supermarket tabloid, the Globe, was the first U.S. publication to name the Florida woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her two years ago. (Smith was acquitted.) Despite policies against using the names of rape victims, NBC used the tabloid’s story to justify its own broadcast of the woman’s name--and the New York Times decided that if NBC News could do so, the Times should too.
Although newspaper editors tend to blame the excesses of television for the news media’s generally declining reputation, Maxwell King, executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, notes that many newspapers are also doing “silly things--even, I think, some panicky things, to try to gain readership.”
Since the public tends to lump much of the news media together, it may not matter much which medium or which news organization is the silliest or most irresponsible. As Dan Rather says, “I don’t think it helps anybody in journalism to point fingers and make accusations along the lines of, ‘Your end of the boat is sinking.’ There’s no such thing as ‘Your end of the boat is sinking.’ If the boat is sinking, then we’re all sinking--the boat in this case being our reputation, our credibility with the public.”
Media credibility is not all that’s sinking in contemporary society, though. Public opinion polls reveal a growing disenchantment with all social institutions. The number of people saying they have a “great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in Congress, organized religion, the Supreme Court, public schools, big business and organized labor have all declined in those polls over the last 20 or 25 years.
The rise of Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential campaign provided ample evidence of widespread unhappiness with traditional institutions; the enthusiastic reception that Perot and President Bush received when they attacked the media--and the success that Perot and Clinton had in bypassing the traditional media in favor of talk shows and other direct appeals to the electorate--provide equally compelling evidence of many peoples’ unhappiness with the media in particular.
“The gnawing contrast between what life should be, according to (the commercial) blandishments we see, and what it is increasingly . . . has contributed to a pervasive hostility between the races, between men and women, between people and their institutions, including the media,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Michael Fancher, executive editor of the Seattle Times, also senses that “people in general are more skeptical and hostile,” and he attributes that shift to “very deep-seated questions about where we’re going as a nation, as a society.”
Hostility toward the news media is “just one manifestation of an overall anxiety . . . a lack of confidence about the future,” Fancher says.
In the case of the news media, the hostility may be especially virulent because the role and visibility of the media have probably changed more in recent years than have the role and visibility of any other major social institution.
Historically, most of the news that people read and saw was prepackaged; reporters asked questions and wrote stories and when newspaper and magazine editors and television news directors deemed them ready for the public, they were published and broadcast. The journalistic process itself was invisible--concealed.
Now CNN, C-SPAN and the major networks bring live news--press conferences, troop landings, presidential debates--into the nation’s living rooms as they’re happening; viewers often get to see reporters asking rude, stupid, arrogant, insensitive questions, whether shouted at President Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden or directed at military leaders in press briefings during the Persian Gulf War.
The actual process of journalism, like that of making sausage, is not very attractive. Many people wouldn’t eat sausage if they had to watch it being made; it shouldn’t be surprising that they often feel like throwing up when they watch reporters at work.
“The quality of the questions often borders on the idiotic, and the demeanor is insulting,” says John Balzar, Northwest bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.
Not only have the media become visible and ubiquitous but--perhaps most important--they have become substantially more powerful. Mergers and monopolies have given individual news organizations more power, and the decline of political parties and several other institutions have given the news media overall more power.
Americans have traditionally been skeptical of powerful individuals and institutions, and as the media have become more powerful--in effect, replacing the political parties as kingmakers (and kingbreakers) on the campaign trail, for example--growing public hostility was probably inevitable. The media, collectively, have simply become a bigger and more inviting target.
Along with increased power, however, has come a growing elitism in the media and a concomitant sense in the public that the media no longer represent the average person.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author and statesman, wrote in the late 1830s that American journalists, while “not great writers,” nonetheless were the only American writers he would acknowledge because, “generally in a very humble position, with a scanty education . . . they speak the language of their country.”
Most journalists remained--until relatively recently--”of the people, not above the people” and as a result, they were generally portrayed in popular culture as good men with “good values; they represented the common American,” in the words of Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Real-life journalists were typically underpaid, unsophisticated, chain-smoking, hard-drinking “blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth types . . . (who) stood up for the little guy” and they were depicted accordingly on the silver screen, says Glenn Garelik, a longtime magazine journalist who teaches courses in “the media and society in the 1990s” at Georgetown University.
Reporters figured prominently and sympathetically--as working-class heroes, as cynical tough guys with hearts of gold, as bumbling everymen, rough-around-the edges regular Joes--in a whole range of movies, from the 1930s (“The Front Page,” “His Girl Friday”) into the 1970s (“All the President’s Men”). Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night” and Humphrey Bogart in “Deadline, U.S.A.” were the prototypes of the early breed.
No more.
Over the past dozen years, in movies such as “Absence of Malice,” “Die Hard,” “Bob Roberts” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities”--and in such television series as “Hearts Afire” and “Love & War”--journalists have been variously depicted as superficial, callous, exploitative and possessed of overweening ambition and “values that much of their audience find inimical,” as Garelik wrote in the New York Times early this year.
Back when reporters were “paid $9 a week and had just a high school education . . . (they) knew the streets . . . they could go where the rats could go,” Garelik said in an interview.
Now, to many, the media are the rats.
“It’s unbelievable the extent to which the journalist is now portrayed in popular culture as the omnivorous careerist, the person who preys on the common American, either under the myth that he’s helping his news organization maximize . . . profits or else he’s out to win a prize . . . and the public be damned,” Clark says.
The news media are shown in popular culture as an insular monolith, “an aristocratic fortress whose highborn members are not simply aloof; they eat the common people for dinner,” Garelik said.
It could be argued, of course, that this pop culture depiction of the journalist doesn’t mirror reality so much as it creates (or at least influences) reality--that people think ill of journalists because they’re responding to recent movie and television portrayals that have made journalists look bad.
Which came first--the image or the reality? Do the two reinforce each other? Or do the images created by movies and television have such resonance with the public largely because they confirm what the public already thinks?
To be sure, today’s better-educated, more sophisticated journalists bring a quality and range of knowledge and expertise to the job that makes today’s newspapers, on balance, better and more comprehensive than they were 30 years ago, says Shelby Coffey, editor of the Los Angeles Times. But those improvements have come at a price--a growing gap between the news media and the people for whom they write and broadcast.
There’s “a sense that we’re elite,” says Fancher of the Seattle Times. “We come off as thinking we’re a whole helluva lot smarter than the people we (write) . . . for, and they don’t like that.”
Sauter, the Fox News president, worries that many in the media have become so “arrogant . . . so damned stuffy and self-important and self-righteous and, in effect, sort of removed from the daily concerns of people that it was easy for people to go to other sources (of news) that just seem a bit more real.”
Too many traditional journalists these days, Sauter says, “think that they somehow have been anointed by some higher power to bring ‘The Truth’ to the peasantry--and the peasantry is saying, ‘Up yours.’ ”
It’s no wonder that during several controversies in recent years--the congressional pay raise in 1988, the House banking scandal in 1991-92, the nomination of Zoe Baird as U.S. attorney general this year--it was radio and TV talk shows, not the mainstream news media, that first connected with the anger and resentment many Americans felt.
The news media are “just not making the connections to the audience” that they once did, says Maxwell McCombs, a professor of communications at the University of Texas. “People simply aren’t interested in what we have to say. . . . What’s in newspapers, what’s on television, just doesn’t have much relevance to their daily lives.”
Newspaper editors have been talking more in recent years about the need for “diversity” in the newsroom, in part to make their publications more relevant to many readers in our increasingly multicultural society. That’s obviously an urgent need; for all the talk newspaper newsrooms remain 90% white--and 66% male. One reason there is growing public disenchantment with the news media is that there are growing numbers of ethnic minorities in our society--and growing numbers of very vocal critics among minorities and women--who do not see the reality of their daily lives reflected in news coverage.
But newsroom diversity must also include white ethnics and others from middle-class, non-Ivy League homes, people who drive Fords, not BMWs, people who--like their predecessors--can relate to the people they write for.
More than 80% of all U.S. journalists hold bachelor’s degrees, compared with 21% in the general population. The median salary for a journalist is $31,000--compared with an average per capita income in this country of $19,000--and many top journalists in big cities make six-figure salaries; some of the most influential, especially in television, make more than $1 million a year.
Increasingly, these journalists-cum-entrepreneurs frequent fancy French restaurants, write books and go on lucrative lecture tours. Like the politicians, entertainers, athletes, Wall Street lawyers and titans of industry they write about, they’ve become celebrities in their own right.
A Los Angeles Times story listing celebrities who attended President Clinton’s inaugural ball listed “media celebrities” Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Peter Jennings before mentioning either the “Hollywood celebrities”-- Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Sigourney Weaver and Shirley MacLaine--or the “political celebrities”--George Stephanopoulos, the White House press secretary; Gov. Ann Richards of Texas, and Ron Brown, then Commerce secretary-designate.
Media celebrities routinely party and vacation with top government officials and other famous people; they also grace the covers of national magazines and appear regularly on the Sunday morning television talk shows, where they chat up--on a first-name basis--the very politicians the public has become disillusioned with.
In the recent Times poll, 65% of the people agreed with the statement, “The press looks out mainly for powerful people;” 60% said people who work in the news media have little in common with people like them; 50% said they only “infrequently” see things that are relevant to their own lives reported in the news media.
“The top journalists move in packs with the affluent and powerful in Washington,” says Hodding Carter, the columnist and television commentator. “They swarm with them in the summer to every agreeable spot on the Eastern Seaboard. When any three or four of them sit down together on a television talk show, it is not difficult to remember that the least well paid of these pontificators make at least six times more each year than the average American family.”
Many journalists, it seems, have lost not only their traditional connection to the common man but their sense of being outsiders, their perspective, even, at times, their independence. They may still talk about the underdog, but their friends are often the “overdogs”; many journalist now have more in common, socially and financially, with the ruling class than the underclass. In a time of unprecedented public skepticism toward those in government, the most prestigious news media have virtually become part of government--the Fourth Estate in word and deed.
“The power structure has co-opted us, and . . . our egos were such that we allowed it to happen,” says Dennis Britton, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.
When Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to enroll their daughter, Chelsea, in the private Sidwell Friends school in Washington, a New York Times story on the school was headlined “Sidwell Is Often Chosen by Capital’s Elite;” the first “elite” parents named in the story were Donald E. Graham, publisher of the Washington Post; Judy Woodruff, the PBS reporter, and Albert R. Hunt, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. After these Washington elite came three U.S. senators. Then: David Brinkley of ABC News and Leslie Stahl of CBS News.
As Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly, said in his March column, “This helps explain the lack of criticism from the Washington press about the Clintons’ decision to send Chelsea to a private school.”
Peters says these shared attitudes also help explain why the news media were “so slow to see the problem” presented by “another common practice among the elite”--hiring an illegal immigrant housekeeper and not paying Social Security taxes.
When it was disclosed that Baird, President Clinton’s first choice for attorney general, had done just that, the Washington Post headlined a story, “Baird’s Hiring Not Seen as a Major Block.”
But the public was outraged, and a week later, the nomination was withdrawn.
It’s not surprising that many in the public see the news media as part of “them” in the increasing “us” vs. “them” polarization of American society.
“I think we are elitist in that the people who are in my (newsroom) . . . and in . . . your newsroom aren’t representative of the broader society that they cover,” says William Woo, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “I think we are out of touch in terms of associations.
“How many members of the Los Angeles Times and the Post-Dispatch belong to the American Legion, belong to Kiwanis, go to prayer breakfasts? I can tell you that a helluva lot of people that we like to sell the paper to go to those things. . . . I think we are disconnected,” he says.
With that disconnect comes, inevitably, a certain insensitivity, even callousness. As a result, many members of the public say, the news media too often intrude into the private lives and private moments of non-public figures, people very much like themselves.
“They stick a microphone in front of accident victim and say, ‘Hi, I’m from the news. How do you feel now that you’re dying?”’ Marian Dolan, 56, of Folkston, Ga., told a Times reporter in a follow-up interview to the Times poll.
“How do they think someone feels? Don’t they know? Don’t they care?”
Reporters and editors have discussed this problem--and this practice--among themselves, and, indeed, as Woo notes, one reason people may seem more critical of the news media today is that the media have shown a greater tendency toward self-examination and “a much greater willingness . . . to accept and provide public exposure” to their critics than in previous generations.
Some newspapers have ombudsmen, reporters who respond to readers’ complaints and sometimes write about them for their papers. Others cover the media as a regular news beat. Most papers have expanded columns of letters to the editor and expanded and more prominently and frequently published corrections of mistakes.
“We’re not making more mistakes, just owning up to more,” says Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal.
Critical media coverage of many institutions in the 1960s and 1970s created higher standards and higher expectations for all institutions, including the media, Steiger says. “When we don’t measure up, the public doesn’t like it.”
This public disenchantment has given rise to a whole range of media critics as well as to several media watchdog groups: Accuracy in Media. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. The Media Research Center. The Center for Media and Public Affairs.
The very existence--and virulence--of their criticism has helped contribute to the perception that the media are more flawed than ever.
In an attempt to analyze this perception--and the underlying realities--news media executives in their annual meetings routinely feature speeches and panel discussions on what the press is doing wrong and how performance can be improved. Newspapers, magazines and, less often, television also carry occasional stories that examine media misconduct. Media companies like Times Mirror--and its subsidiary the Los Angeles Times--conduct polls on public attitudes toward the media.
People in the media are “more concerned about what our customers think,” says N. Christian Anderson, associate publisher of the Orange County Register. “The perception is people don’t like us as much; maybe it was that way all along and we just didn’t listen to them or . . . pay attention to them.”
Even now, however, most of the media’s self-scrutiny is internal. Yes, the media publish and broadcast stories examining their coverage of big stories like the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and Flowers’ accusations against Clinton. But these remain the exceptions. There is little systematic examination in the media of how the media do their job, what their decision-making processes are, what their traditions, limitations, objectives and profit margins are.
“We pride ourselves on doing superficial looks at whether we wrote a story for the right reasons or not,” says Geneva Overholser, editor of the Des Moines Register. “But we don’t let it all hang out about whether the corporatization of American journalism is terrible for American democracy.”
David Paletz, a Duke University professor who writes about media and politics, attributes this, in part, to “a kind of macho ethos that (says): ‘We’re out there and we’re gonna gather the news. We have our specialized ways. Don’t bother to ask us how we do it.’ ”
“To some extent, the press is protective and defensive of itself,” he says.
Indeed, many news media executives are still hostile to criticism, from within and without, and most still seem to regard the internal workings of their organizations as either an arcane trade secret that the public wouldn’t understand or as a sensitive state secret that’s none of the public’s damned business.
Only about 30 of the nation’s more than 1,500 daily newspapers have ombudsmen; perhaps half a dozen have reporters who write full time about their own profession. Television gives the news media even less coverage.
If the news media want to reverse their decline in public esteem, “We better start explaining ourselves more,” Rather says. “I do not except myself from the criticism that we haven’t done a very good job of it.”
Peter Johnson in The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this story.
The Movies and the Media
The movies once portrayed reporters sympathetically, from the cynical tough guy with a heart of gold in such screwball comedies as “It Happened One Night” (1934) to hard-working heroes in “All the President’s Men” (1976). But the reporter in the 1990 film “The Bonfire of the Vanities”--reflecting the harsh new image of the journalist in pop culture today--is a lout who callously exploits a hit-and-run accident in an effort to advance his career.
THE TIMES POLL / Viewpoints
Many people see those in the news media as elitist--insensitive to and aloof from the everyday concerns of average Americans.
The following questions were asked in a Los Angeles Times poll conducted last month. Q. Which of these statements comes closer to how you personally feel: “Most news reporters are just concerned about getting a good story, and they don’t worry very much about hurting people,” or “Most news reporters balance their desire to get a good story with concern about hurting people.”
Just concerned about getting a story: 58%
Balance story with concern about feelings: 37%
Don’t know: 5% Q. Please choose the statement that comes closer to how you personally feel: “The press looks out for ordinary people,” or “The press looks out mainly for powerful people.”
Press looks out for ordinary people: 26%
Press looks out mainly for powerful people: 65%
Don’t know: 9% Q. Do you think the people who work in the news media have a great deal in common with people like you, or a good amount, or only some, or do the people who work in the news media have hardly anything in common with people like you?
Good amount (Total): 36%
Great deal: 9%
Good amount: 27%
Some (Total): 60%
Only some: 37%
Hardly anything in common: 23%
Don’t know: 4% Q. Do you think the news media are working to protect the interests of people like you or not?
Yes: 50%
No: 40%
Don’t know: 10% Q. Do you think the news media should be working to protect the interests of people like you or not?
Yes: 87%
No: 11%
Don’t know: 2%
How the Poll Was Conducted
The Times Poll interviewed 1,703 adults nationwide by telephone from March 6 to 9. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the country. Random-digit dialing techniques were used to ensure that both listed and unlisted numbers could be contacted. Results were weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education and household size. The margin of sampling error for the total sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For certain subgroups the error margin is somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by other factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.