How Low We Go to Hit the Bottom Line : Media: The boomers’ mothers must have been delinquent. How else to explain today’s trash?

Time magazine’s June 7 cover, “The Incredible Shrinking President,” is the state of the art for American journalism. Missing are the bullet, the blood and the pornographic embrace, and an honest admission from the editors that the messenger is not above killing the message.

Once upon a time, publishing gods were of church and state. Now, numbers are God. For almost 40 years, newspapers and magazines and television news have been ruled by spreadsheet printouts, though all three are creative as well as business pursuits. But the theology of the lowest common denominator, the pagan worship of demographic and sales totals, is yesterday. Ask the readers who have canceled their subscriptions to Time. Ask the advertisers who have taken Time off their schedules. Successful American enterprise is all about worthy product. All about the long haul.

Socked into a tiny space in a corner of the media are publications and films and television programs that are welded to an ancient morality that will, no doubt, come back one day; but for now, the hot ticket to the reader or viewer is casual killing and off-the-wall sex. That stuff sells, network, film and publishing heads say, oddly, since newspaper and magazine circulation is falling, book sales are slumping and television market shares are shrinking.

The fall of the ‘80s Empire has not yet bottomed out. There are still nasty white-collar crimes to uncover, new sick sexual couplings to exhibit on talk shows, new movies with sexism-as-rightness to film. Ponderous cleavage and shock-value headlines will continue to line the newsstand racks. Metallic-cover books promising sex or mean-spirited gossip will fill shelves. Nothing will change for a while.

I believe that this state of the press, and much of the nation, is due to me and my friends. When American women took to the streets to fight for equal rights, or stayed in their kitchens and dreamed of another life, they forgot to instill in their children the values their mothers had given them. The women in this country, the feminists, changed the world in the 1970s, and we short-changed our own kids. Too caught up in the business of equal opportunity, we allowed our children no hardship. Times were good, so they lived without want. The tube took over their education. They got soft, and grew up without the American spine, which is shaped by struggle and sacrifice and the search for something better.

The generation of baby boomers that has been making the headlines--writing and acting them out--does not, really, know what it means to be an American. An old cliche, that, but it’s time to say it once more, now, to the men and women who mistake money for substance, scrimped-on products for good business practice. There was an American tradition in industry that included pride in the work, a built-in responsibility to the consumer, a commitment to the welfare of a larger community than one’s own business. Those tenets and more are absent from most of America’s media companies, and, perhaps, absent from the hearts and spirit of the generation that I and my contemporaries bore.

The press has gone mad with its power. Having once toppled a president, it is yellow enough, and hungry enough, for circulation and ratings to try to do it again. The great American mind-set of fairness seemed larger than any computerized sum--and it was--but management’s addiction to numbers has distorted our reason. The old-fashioned dedication to keeping high the level of thought in the nation has lost its way.

Lest I appear to think myself better than my colleagues, I rush to tell that the line dividing LEAR’S church and state, editorial and business, is fuzzy at best, but our crimes are small. We do not play the numbers game well.

Competitive sport in our substandard system of reward is not for many of my generation, but we made this world and we must live in it. We play by outdated rules, keep our roots in our parents’ America and watch the numbers game go to zero.