Critics of Media Cynicism Point a Finger at Television

Thirty-five years ago, the White House Correspondents Assn. refused to allow television reporters to join the organization. Television was then in its infancy as a news medium, and in the judgment of the newspaper, wire service and magazine reporters of the day, TV reporters weren’t real journalists.

Many print reporters still look down their ink-stained noses at broadcast journalists. But television is now, indisputably, the primary source of news for most Americans. It may also be the primary source of the cynicism that increasingly pervades the news media and society at large.

Even some television journalists worry about their medium’s contribution to the cynicism, negativism and mistrust that now threaten the political process in this country.

Widespread public mistrust of elected politicians is the “inevitable result of television,” says Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News and now general manager of KVIE, the public television station in Sacramento. The “smug, cynical attitude” of many television reporters today has made political officials seem so flawed, Sauter says, that “their ability to lead and to have moral suasion” have been seriously undermined.”

The print media have also played a significant role in the rising tide of cynicism, with their post-Vietnam, post-Watergate determination to see scandals and scoundrels wherever they look and with such derisive, dismissive features as Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom Watch” and the New Republic’s “Clinton Suck-Up Watch.” But it is not mere happenstance that this rise has mirrored the rise of television as the nation’s dominant source of both news and leisure-time entertainment.

Writing in the winter issue of the American Prospect, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, devoted a dozen pages to examining the possible causes of what he calls “the decline of our civic life.” He concludes: “Television is the culprit.”

Putnam argues that “each hour spent viewing television is associated with less social trust . . . while each hour reading a newspaper is associated with more.”

Although Putnam’s widely discussed research focused on the disengagement of increasing numbers of Americans from various civic and social activities and organizations, he also examined the impact of television viewing on peoples’ feelings about one another and about their civic institutions. “An impressive body of literature suggests that heavy watchers of TV are unusually skeptical about the benevolence of other people.”

There are several reasons for this. The most obvious is that the time spent gazing at television’s often artificial, distorted picture of the world displaces time that could be spent in a wide range of social, political, intellectual and recreational activities that would provide a truer, more complete view of life in contemporary America.

But many who work in and study the media--and those who are covered by the media--say the content of television news programs and political talk shows is primarily responsible for the epidemic of cynicism. Just as studies have shown that viewers who see crime-dominated local TV news shows are likely to think that crime is much more prevalent than it really is, so viewers who watch national news shows, magazine shows and the weekend political talk shows are likely to think that the world in general, and politicians in particular, are much worse than they really are.

The evening network news shows are the same 22 minutes they have been for more than 30 years--a mere “headline” service, as Walter Cronkite, the longtime “CBS Evening News” anchor used to say--and that “small news hole often pushes positive news out in favor of negative news,” says Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.).

Television is unmatched in its immediacy, intimacy and drama, but it is generally unable to convey complexity, shadings and nuance. In the words of Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), television requires “images as opposed to thought . . . the starker, the bolder, the more sensational . . . the more negative [the image or] . . . the charge, the more likely somebody is going to remember it.”

Bradley says television also requires “instant reaction when reflection would be a better course.” But politicians are reluctant to take the time for reflection when someone sticks a microphone in their face, which means they may eventually have to recast, or recant, their words--a clear path to diminished credibility.

Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, says the sheer volume of media information available, especially on television, is largely responsible for what he calls a “new harshness” in America. In earlier generations, Cuomo says, “kids were chased from the room” when parents spoke about a local murder or scandal; with television, no one leaves the room, Cuomo says, and everyone grows up having heard everything.

“There’s just so much you can handle, even as adults,” he says.

An information explosion has left the airwaves filled with journalistic fallout. Where once there were just the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs, there are now also CNN, C-SPAN, network magazine shows, syndicated tabloid TV shows and so many political talk shows that reporters seem to have run out of politicians to interview and spend a great deal of time interviewing each other.

Individually and collectively, all these shows have an enormous amount of air time to fill--in an era of intense competition for an increasingly fragmented audience and amid growing concerns among conglomerate owners about the bottom line. The print media--which are also faced with an increased profit squeeze while fighting to hold a dwindling audience--have not been immune to these trends.

Result: A personalization, tabloidization and sensationalization of the news that often strives to make political coverage as sexy as Hollywood gossip (who’s sleeping with whom?) and as narrowly defined as sports reporting (who’s ahead?).

“You come out of a [legislative] conference and there’s 10 reporters standing around with their ears twitching,” says Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.). “They don’t want to know whether anything was resolved for the betterment of the United States. They want to know who got hammered, who tricked whom. . . . They’re not interested in clarity. They’re interested in confusion and controversy and conflict.”

Many journalists echo this criticism.

“The coverage of Washington seems to me to be about attack-counterattack, not about complexity of process,” laments author David Halberstam.

Financial constraints make it more difficult to do complex issue stories these days. Virtually every major news organization, print and broadcast, has reduced staff in recent years, and the TV networks in particular have greatly reduced their foreign bureaus. Many newspapers, faced with rising newsprint costs, have also reduced their news hole--the amount of space they devote to news, editorials and everything but advertising (which has also declined at many papers). In many news organizations, editors and news directors are now reluctant to give reporters the time and space it takes to do thorough investigative or analytical stories.

“We haven’t got a single [Los Angeles] TV station with a bureau in Sacramento,” says Michael Jackson, the KABC radio talk show host. “The cynicism there, at the local news level, is their disdain for us and their conviction that we don’t care about matters that affect our lives.”

Personalities and Politics

Increasingly, the media focus on the easy stories--personalities and political scandals--thus blurring the lines between the “serious” media and the tabloids.

“The competition in newspapers is no longer tiered,” Bradley says. “It used to be that the National Enquirer had its niche, the New York Times its niche. . . . There wasn’t a whole lot of crossover.” Now newspapers “find it difficult to resist the titillation” that drives the tabloid news media, in print and on the air.

This “crossover” probably began with the Gary Hart/Donna Rice story in 1987, accelerated with the first Menendez brothers murder trial, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers, Heidi Fleiss, Lorena and John Bobbitt and Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding and reached its crescendo during the O.J. Simpson case, when mainstream and tabloid news organizations often battled for the same stories.

Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, used to enjoy saying that neither the National Enquirer nor People magazine invented personality journalism--”the Bible did”--and he was certainly right that people have always been interested in stories about other people.

But driven largely by television, the news media have turned increasingly in recent years to personality journalism, to the cult of celebrity, whether real celebrity (Michael Jackson and Bill Clinton) or artificial, overnight celebrity (Heidi Fleiss and the Bobbitts).

The rise of television has closely paralleled the decline of the major political parties in the United States, and the effect has been both synergistic and trivializing. Bradley says that as political parties have lost their clout, the focus of campaign coverage has almost inevitably shifted from the party and its platform to the individual candidate and his personality.

Although it was a mainstream newspaper (the Miami Herald) that broke the story about Hart and Rice--and a supermarket tabloid (the Star) that first printed Flowers’ claim to a 12-year affair with Clinton--television prepared the way for, and helped to spread, both stories.

In today’s media climate, once a story is on television, even the most responsible newspaper editors too often succumb to what Peter Jennings, the anchor for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” calls the “it’s out there” syndrome: Readers have probably seen the story, editors reason, so “we can’t ignore it. Maybe we can even put it in perspective.”

Of course, this is sometimes simply a rationalization for publishing a story that will attract readers but would not have been deemed “proper” had not television “forced” the editors to run it. So television--at times, tabloid television--becomes more of an agenda-setter than the respected daily newspapers.

Moreover, just by putting political leaders on the small screen and routinely bringing their faces and voices into the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom and--in some homes--the bathroom, television has humanized them and deprived them of the larger-than-life stature they once enjoyed.

That can be healthy, of course. Citizens should judge their leaders as humans, not as gods--and citizens are less likely to be disillusioned when their leaders make mistakes if they do not have unrealistically high expectations of them.

But in the process of humanizing our leaders, TV has also homogenized them.

“Television is a medium that encourages a certain sense of appealing sterility,” says Albert Hunt, executive Washington editor of the Wall Street Journal.

That’s because television--as Marshall McLuhan wrote--is a “cool medium.” “Hot” candidates--bold, aggressive, risk-taking candidates--don’t wear well with television viewers, especially in the course of our longer and more heavily covered political campaigns. We now see so much of these candidates that they become like members of our extended families, and familiarity can often breed contempt--especially if the candidates seem neither distinctive nor admirable to begin with.

What the late cultural critic Christopher Lasch said of televised political debates--”The format requires all the candidates to look the same”--could be said of television’s demands on all political leaders and would-be leaders. But while forcing candidates to appear the same--equally nonthreatening--it also forces them to answer what Lasch called a “highly rhetorical,” Catch-22 question: “What makes you so special” that we should vote for you?

The inevitable answer, Lasch said, is “Nothing.”

Candidates are made to appear unworthy of our votes not only because they are bland and uninspiring but because they are flawed.

But what flaws are the media exposing these days? To show that Lyndon Johnson lied about the progress of the Vietnam War or that Richard Nixon tried to use the power of the federal government to cover up the Watergate break-in is journalism of the highest order, showing a clear connection between a leader’s character flaws and his public policies.

Much of the more recent focus on the shortcomings of political candidates has had less to do with policy, however, than with prurience. Thomas Patterson, a political science professor at Syracuse University, says such stories often reveal more about the cynicism of the reporters than about the character of the candidates.

Most journalists say they are just providing information that the public wants and should have. But 65% of the public polled last year said the media pay too much attention to the sex lives of presidential candidates, according to the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press (now the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press).

The media’s fascination with campaign controversies, as opposed to matters of policy, is very much at odds with the voters’ concerns--and it’s increasing, Patterson says. In the 1960 presidential campaign, references in Time and Newsweek to “policy problems” (which Patterson defines as “enduring issues about how government should act”) outnumbered by more than 2 to 1 stories about “campaign controversies” (which Patterson defines as “short-term concerns about how candidates should act”). Those numbers began to shift in 1976, and by 1988--the year of Gary Hart and Donna Rice--Patterson says references to campaign controversies outnumbered references to policy problems by about 25%.

Are we, as a society, better off because we know that Clinton may have cheated on his wife with Flowers? Would we have been better off if we had known that Presidents John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had affairs?

Although some critics say editors and news directors should rely on their own taste and judgment and withhold certain stories, Jeff Greenfield, media and political analyst for ABC News, says that competitive pressures now make that virtually impossible.

If the same pressures had existed in early generations and the press had written about presidents’ extramarital affairs, “Would it have been a public service?” Greenfield asks.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA, thinks it would have been. “I don’t like to live in a naive world,” he says.

Neither do most other people--especially journalists. In most matters--particularly those involving public officials--they would rather know than not know. But in practical terms, neither Kennedy nor Roosevelt could be elected under today’s journalistic standards. Would the country be better off if they hadn’t been? Or as Greenfield puts it, if we had known during World War II that Winston Churchill “drank like a fish . . . would we have entrusted him with saving Europe?”

At the same time that the personalization of political coverage has diminished the politicians, it has exalted the reporters, and that has also made coverage seem more cynical.

The average “sound bite”--the time that television devotes to a candidate’s statement--has declined dramatically, from 42 seconds in 1968 to nine seconds in 1988 to seven seconds in the first three months of the 1996 presidential campaign. But while the nine Republican candidates received a combined total of just 2 hours, 9 minutes of air time on the three major network evening news shows through the California primary, the reporters who covered them were on the air for a combined 13 hours, 7 minutes--more than six times as long--according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.

Where reporters once provided a brief introduction to, or summary comment on, a politician’s remarks, they now use only a brief snippet of the politician’s remarks to illustrate their own points--which are more often than not critical.

Newspapers and magazines often fall prey to similar practices.

“I want to do some preaching to our folks that one of our big responsibilities . . . is to let the candidates come through in their own terms,” Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the New York Times, said early in this campaign year. Thus, during the heat of the primary season, the New York Times often published a feature called “In Their Own Words”--brief excerpts from various candidates’ speeches the previous day.

On television, political junkies can get even more than brief excerpts. They can look at C-SPAN and get a politician’s entire speech. Because of this--and because of coverage in the best daily newspapers--Thomas Mann, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., describes the current media climate as “the best of times and the worst of times. For the interested consumer of political news, there is a bountiful harvest to reap,” he says. “But most Americans . . . are preoccupied just trying to keep their lives and families together.”

They have neither the time nor the inclination to watch C-SPAN or to locate and read lengthy analyses of the issues in the few newspapers and magazines that publish them. For these “inadvertent consumers, it’s the worst of times,” Patterson says. All they see is “the hype and melodrama and contrived conflict . . . the cynicism about everyone’s motives . . . the emphasis on corruption.”

Besides, even with two channels operating 24 hours a day, C-SPAN reaches only a fraction of the total viewing audience. What people increasingly find elsewhere on television is “attitude”--a cynical attitude.

In earlier generations, reporters shared their mocking, sarcastic remarks only with their colleagues and friends in the newsroom and the barroom. Now, with more latitude for interpretation and the aforementioned reversal in the balance between quotes from politicians and comments by reporters, Lelyveld says, it’s “easier, perhaps, for young reporters to work fairly flip and shallow judgments into their stories than it was” when he was a young reporter.

Many critics cite stories on the 1992 presidential campaign by one of Lelyveld’s own reporters, Maureen Dowd, as a classic example of cynical commentary in the guise of straight news reporting. But others say that Dowd, now a columnist for the paper, wrote so well and so incisively that her excesses were pardonable. The bigger problem, these critics say, is those who have tried to emulate Dowd but lack her deft touch.

Journalism With an ‘Attitude’

But it is television that is largely responsible for the tectonic shift toward “attitude journalism.” Because people can often see events for themselves on television--and because reporters today are generally better educated than their predecessors--many journalists, in all media, feel that they are both required and qualified to provide interpretation, context and analysis. Unfortunately, this often translates as cynical rather than analytical.

On the network news shows, the most frequent offender is the closing “stand-up”--the tagline a reporter often closes his story with, “a casually skeptical, almost automatically undermining last line . . . a note of slightly world-weary doubt that anything in this world can be accomplished,” as Lelyveld puts it. Such cynically dismissive comments “can be a solvent that dissolves trust.”

Jennings of ABC says this “potentially dangerous reportorial device . . . is seen as obligating the reporter to say something pithy, mean, cynical, enlightened, sophisticated, intelligent, wise in the last 15 or 20 seconds that he or she spends on camera.” As a result, “I see more ‘attitude’ on TV now than in the past.”

To some critics, “attitude” simply means “editorializing”--a reporter giving his opinion rather than limiting himself to the facts.

“I’m often struck . . . by how much freedom journalists have today to . . . make judgments and to do things that I was taught in . . . journalism school just were not permitted in straight reporting,” says David Weaver, a professor of journalism at Indiana University.

Too many stories on television begin with reporters saying “I think. . . ,” says Marvin Kalb, longtime NBC diplomatic correspondent and now director of the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. “I don’t want to know what you think; please tell me what you know and tell me how you know [it].”

There is, however, a difference between analysis and opinion--and an even greater difference between both of them and the “attitude” that’s also known as “edge” or “being a smartass.” “Edge” is increasingly evident, not only in the network news stand-ups, in the questions that some reporters ask at press conferences and in some print stories but--most prevalently, most perniciously--in the weekend chat-and-shout shows from Washington.

On these shows, reporters and columnists talk to each other--and, on some shows, to political newsmakers--about the events of the week. The shows range from sober, unobjectionable “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation” to “Washington Week in Review” and “This Week With David Brinkley” to such journalistic food fights as “The McLaughlin Group” and “Capital Gang.”

Journalists who appear on these latter shows are encouraged to give one-word answers to complex questions, to rate various people and likely developments on scales of 1 to 10 and to make outrageous statements and oversimplified judgments.

Andrew Sullivan, editor of the New Republic--one of the major print practitioners of “attitude”--says this is just part of “a broader shift in the general culture that isn’t propelled by the press. Everything is more more smartass in the culture. Television comedy is much more sassy than it was in the past. Even situation comedies have to have an edge. . . . Irony seemed to emerge as a definite cultural trait sometime in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

But many journalists say the denizens of the political talk shows go far beyond irony.

“I hate those shows,” says Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post. “I refuse to watch shows where people shout at each other and make glib predictions and pretend to know things they don’t know. . . . That could contribute to people thinking that everybody in the media is like that and . . . they all want to be celebrities and make a lot of money and they’re all smartasses.”

Appearing regularly on these shows can be lucrative--and they can lead to even more lucrative speaking engagements and book contracts, as well as to peer praise, a measure of celebrityhood and a greater visibility that may make their regular jobs easier.

“Nearly every Washington correspondent competes to be on [the talk shows],” says Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. “There is . . . no question that for a newspaper correspondent to appear on national television is of enormous help to doing newspaper reporting. My phone calls get returned faster because White House aides have seen me on television. It’s sad but true.”

Most newspaper editors are eager for their star reporters to appear on television because it confers status and visibility on the newspaper as well as the reporter. That increases the pressure on journalists to make the most of these appearances, ideally by making a provocative comment that will be remembered--and repeated elsewhere.

Indeed, that often seems the primary objective of the participants in the chat-and-shout shows. The reporters are set up as “experts on everything, a fundamentally fraudulent idea,” McManus says. But “you can be glib and have the edge and the attitude and the sizzle easier if you don’t know the complexities of the issue.”

In fact, Margaret Carlson of Time magazine has said, “The less you know about something, the better off you are” on these shows.

Otherwise responsible journalists say things on the political talk shows that they wouldn’t dream of writing in their newspapers or magazines. Many critics see this as another form of the laziness that has led to both the trivialization of the news and an overemphasis on political strategy stories rather than coverage of substantive issues. It is also another “strategy for cost reduction,” says Jay Rosen, journalism professor and director of the Project on Public Life and the Press at New York University. “It allows commentators to have views without doing much reporting.”

The demand for “attitude” and “edge” on television is so pervasive that producers who call prospective guests try immediately to find out if the guest will take a hard, black-and-white stand on whatever issue is going to be discussed. If the guest during that preliminary screening call says something like, “Well, it’s not that simple” or “Gee, it’s a little more complicated than that,’ producers tend to lose interest and hang up faster than you can say “Cretin!”

Larry King, a talk show host who specifically calls himself an “infotainer,” not a journalist, has been pilloried for not having enough “edge,” for not asking tough enough questions. Howard Rosenberg, the Los Angeles Times television critic, has called King a “patsy,” someone who “couldn’t find his way to the jugular even with a compass, track dogs and body map.”

But as the Washington Post pointed out last month, because King has “no interest in showing us how smart he is,” he asks “disarmingly simple questions” that can “produce just as many, and often more, enlightening revelations about newsmakers” than the more hard-nosed political talk shows.

The movers, shakers and opinion-makers in Washington and, to a lesser extent, in New York watch the political talk shows, and even though the shows have a relatively small audience overall, they have a substantial echo effect. What’s said on them often finds its way into cocktail party conversations, newspaper and magazine stories and columns and the general political atmosphere--the basis for the conventional wisdom.

Moreover, many newspaper and magazine editors--in an effort to compete with television, especially for the younger, hipper audience--increasingly want “attitude” and “edge” and “bite” in their own coverage.

McManus of the Los Angeles Times says he has received just such requests from his editors, and he understands why.

“Newspapers are losing readers and they’re particularly losing younger readers,” he says. “That’s not only a commercial consideration, it’s also a civic problem. If we believe that what we do informs citizens better than any other media, then reaching a large audience is important to fulfilling what we see as our civic mission. There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking for stories that are sharp and arresting and, yes, have an edge. I think an intelligently edited and reported newspaper can . . . be skeptical without being cynical.”

McManus says it is difficult to strike this balance in television, but even in newspapers, he concedes that by asking for more edge, editors “create a pressure that is most easily satisfied by a dash of flip cynicism . . . what I call ‘cheap edge.’ ”

That is exactly what most media critics increasingly complain about, in broadcast and print journalism alike.

“Most reporters are troubled by this [trend],” says Kenneth Walsh, Washington bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report and the author of a new book, “Feeding the Beast: The White House Versus the Press.”

“But many reporters feel powerless to do anything about it because in their own organizations, they know that the way to get on the front page or lead the [TV] news is to have this edge and attitude.”

So they keep doing it.

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times’ editorial library assisted with the research on this series.

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Letting the Candidates Speak

The media have been giving less time to comments by political candidates and more time to their own reporters’ observations. A few news organizations are trying to counter this. The New York Times has tried to “let the candidates come through in their own terms,” as Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld puts it.

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Air Time

Reporters on the evening network news shows had more than six times as much air time as the candidates they were covering during the first three months of this year’s Republican primary season.

Journalists (13 hrs. 7 mins.): 74%

Others (2 hrs. 32 mins.): 14%

Candidates (2 hrs. 9 mins.): 12%

Source: Center for Media and Public Affairs, Washington, D.C.