COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : The Bottom Line on TV News’ Celebrity Stories

Re Garrett Glaser’s Counterpunch, “Defending Jackson, Oprah Coverage” (Dec. 20): On the one hand, he says it is a “commitment to honestly examine . . . media that drives these stories, and, on the other, it is a deterioration, which occurred when the FCC permitted widespread ownership changes” that is responsible for content.

C’mon, Garrett, can’t have it both ways. Either the media focus on celebrities and rumors about celebrities is quality or it isn’t. Either it is objective reporting about the serious issues in our community or it is merely an attempt to garner as large an audience as possible.

Glaser says it “does no good to air a daily newscast of great intellectual achievement,” apparently believing that the public will not watch such a newscast. At the same time, Glaser seems to blame the lack of such content on the FCC because of its “abdication of regulatory responsibility.”

As a member of Los Angeles’ broadcast news community during the final phase of deregulation in the late ‘70s, I believe that although the FCC’s actions had an impact on quality, they had virtually no impact on content. Content has long been driven by economics.

The major reason that print media may be able to afford to present stories that have primarily social value is because one or two stories are virtually incapable of determining their profit. However, when the entire bottom line is controlled by the 10 to 20 stories in a newscast, the only ones that stand even a remote chance of being aired are the ones that will most likely produce the greatest revenue in terms of audience. Profit is the bottom line.

The media seems to pretend that its goal is to present an objective report about our world, instead of the “shorter, more visual stories” that management feels produce the most revenue. The disappearance of the “longstanding buffers between news departments and the ‘bottom line’ ” has to do with the fact that for a long time management had no expectations of profit from news.

AL KONOW, Los Angeles