An Insider’s Edition of News Standards

It’s one thing for a lowly newspaper guy (blush) to relentlessly attack television news. Everyone knows his malignant views are distorted by envy and ignorance.

Yet what are we to make of this indictment of today’s newscasting from a highly respected former key insider?

“The standards are so badly eroded. I fear they will never be recaptured. It’s a very bleak outlook. Nothing will turn it around.”

That came Monday from Av Westin, former executive producer of ABC’s signature evening newscast and the man who guided the emergence of “20/20” as a formidable newsmagazine in prime time before leaving the network in 1987.

Westin, an architect of modern network news. Westin, the onetime CBS newsman Ted Koppel called a “legend” and Dan Rather anointed “one of the super pros.” Westin, who wrote in his 1982 book about network news that viewers are “presented every night with a picture of global events displayed so graphically and with such increasing clarity that they find themselves relating to the world, to the nation, their city or town, and to their fellow Americans as never before.”

What a difference less than two decades makes.

“I knew what the reality of TV news was; I was part of it,” Westin said from New York. “But I didn’t know how bad it had gotten.”

Westin said he learned how bad from scores of network and local newscasters while researching a handbook, “Best Practices for Television Journalists,” he has written for the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation centered in Arlington, Va.

Given a general malaise regarding “best practices,” one envisions handbook copies being used in frenetic TV newsrooms as coasters under coffee cups. Although his task appears as hopeless as trying to teach Quasimodo good posture, though, Westin can’t be blamed for trying.

Some of his handbook covers such ethical niceties as correcting mistakes, something your basic self-promoting newscast--you have to draw the line somewhere--just doesn’t do. “It’s not in the ethos,” said Westin. “There’s always an excuse: ‘The person who watched us yesterday may not be watching us today, so why bother?’ ”

Much more devastating, Westin said he was stunned by what he heard from reporters, producers and managers that related to “closet racism, pandering for ratings and management compromises.”

One example of shocking race bias recalled anonymously in the handbook: “My bosses have essentially made it clear. We do not feature black people.”

Another example: “If I gave my boss a choice between a black female doctor at NYU [a teaching hospital in New York City] and a white male doctor at Lenox Hill [an upscale private hospital on the affluent East Side], she’s going to pick the white male doctor at Lenox Hill, even if what they say is identical. Period.”

That mentality--along with over-coverage of crime stories showing handcuffed African Americans or Latinos being shoved into squad cars--sustains newscasting’s big lie about such minorities not contributing positively to society.

Although the numerous “sound bites” Westin includes are unattributed, listed at the back are 134 persons who “contributed” to the handbook. They range from the obscure to “Dateline NBC” co-anchor Stone Phillips and Rick Kaplan, the controversial former ABC News executive who just recently resigned under fire as president of CNN’s U.S. operations.

Westin, no relation to ABC News president David Westin, is a consultant these days while winding down a fellowship with the Freedom Forum, a group that fears, with cause, that as media credibility dives, so will public support for press freedoms under the 1st Amendment.

Americans tend to mutter about media as much as they do about weather. It gets ugly, with many not appreciating that the price of a free press is one that’s messy and dysfunctional from time to time, in contrast to the orderly but timid media that go pliantly about their business in authoritarian lands.

Westin himself is not entirely pure here, having followed his tenure at ABC News with a high-ranking stint at King World, whose tabloid series, “Inside Edition,” was known then for doing occasional admirable journalism that was undermined by its frequent trashiness.

“The name of the game for ‘Inside Edition’ and others was flatly ratings,” Westin said, “whereas the network news programs still purport to be news programs but aren’t any longer. The two curves have crossed.”

So his goal, Westin said, was to issue a status report on TV journalism and examine ways to increase sensitivity among newscasters to being “fair, accurate and balanced.” Talk about long odds.

Is one problem that the TV news biz is nearly all biz?

“There’s no question that 99% of [TV news] decisions have within them a component of the business side,” Westin said. “One of the things that really dismayed me was the degree that top management folds to business pressure.” The examples he was given “relate to how affiliates [local stations] threaten to preempt [negative network] stories about the used-car business and dealers. When I ran ‘20/20,’ we did those kinds of stories, and we never had that kind of pressure.”

Of course, the concept of media having a high fiscal profile is not limited to TV. If this newspaper and others didn’t tend to business matters, they wouldn’t be in business. It’s proportion and integrity that become critical for Americans in an age of troubling media mergers that place control of mass communications in fewer and fewer hands.

Despite a human tendency to recall the past as pristine, there’s been no golden age of TV news, even with the high quality of some of its earlier journalists. As for “pandering for ratings,” though, compare today’s TV news values with the loftier ones espoused in the old CBS News Standards and Practices “blue book” that used to be a standard for the industry. Created by late CBS News President Dick Salant, much of it amounts to common sense, a 1976 section quoted in Westin’s handbook, for example, calling for something as fundamental as severing entertainment values from news.

“This may make us a little less interesting to some,” it stated, “but that is the price we pay for dealing with facts and truth, which may often be duller and with more loose ends than fiction and drama.”

That is quaint, almost other-worldly compared with today’s constant vamping for the camera and use of celebrity minutiae to glamorize (while dumbing down) newscast after newscast. “What Salant said we shouldn’t do,” Westin observes, “is now the standard rule.” One of the problems noted in Westin’s handbook is that, unlike most of their predecessors, the captains of today’s network and local newsrooms are Howdy Doodies who were reared on television. So it’s become the narrow prism through which they perceive and define the world they deliver to the public. “Their thought processes and attention spans have been shaped not by ideas themselves,” Westin points out, “but by the way those ideas were presented on television.”

How will they be presented in coming years? As do others, Westin foresees the future of video news in niche programming, from the Internet to existing shows, such as BBC newscasts from the United Kingdom, available on cable.

The question is how large--or small--those niches will be. And whether much of the public will even care.

*

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.