Read All About It

CBS News and the Philadelphia Inquirer were once among the crown jewels of American journalism. Through the early years of television and well into the 1980s, CBS even styled itself the Tiffany of American network news organizations: the home of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, the broadcast gold standard for serious national and international news, with bureaus across the globe, manned by the best correspondents in the business. The Inquirer, from 1975 to 1990, won 17 Pulitzer Prizes for labor-intensive stories on such important local and national issues as police brutality, massive deficiencies in the IRS processing of tax returns, a secret Pentagon budget and corruptions and incompetence in the Philadelphia court system.

But as Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post, and Robert G. Kaiser, a longtime Post reporter and editor, note in their unsettling new book, “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril,” although it is extraordinarily difficult to build a great news organization, it is “tragically easy to disassemble” one.

“Bad things can happen to good newsrooms,” Downie and Kaiser say, and over the last decade or so, an industrywide push for ever-increasing profit margins has made many bad things happen at CBS, at the Inquirer and at other newspapers and television stations large and small.

Rather and Wallace are hanging on at CBS, but Cronkite retired 20 years ago, at 65, and most of the best correspondents have either followed him or gone to other networks or other endeavors; most of the bureaus have been shut, and CBS is now “the least ambitious of the three networks,” Downie and Kaiser say.

At the Inquirer, top editors and reporters have quit in alarming numbers, frustrated and enraged by repeated cutbacks in staff and news space dictated by the profit demands and budget-cutting of its parent company, Knight Ridder.

“Most American corporations would be thrilled with a 10 percent profit margin,” Downie and Kaiser write, “but most newspaper proprietors consider a 15 to 20 percent profit from their monopoly businesses a minimal sign of good health.” Many insist on 25% to 30% or more.

Those margins can be difficult to achieve without damaging the news-gathering effort, even in good economic times. In bad times, when advertising revenue plummets--as it did in the early 1990s and as it has done even more precipitously during the last 16 months or so--it is virtually impossible to have both high profit margins and high journalistic quality. But having repeatedly promised Wall Street bigger and bigger profit margins, the media moguls say they must fulfill those promises or risk losing the big institutional investors whose defections can send stock prices into a nose dive.

In a shortsighted effort to avoid that, most newspapers “have shrunk their reporting staffs, along with the space they devote to news, to increase their owners’ profits,” Downie and Kaiser say. “Most owners and publishers have forced their editors to focus more on the bottom line than on good journalism. Papers have tried to attract readers and advertisers with light features and stories that please advertisers ... and by de-emphasizing serious reporting on business, government, the country and the world.”

The expectations and recommendations of Wall Street stock analysts have become more important to today’s press barons than debates in Congress and famine or genocide abroad, so in an attempt to retain or regain an increasingly fragmented audience, they’ve presided over the tabloidization and celebrification of their news organizations. It’s all O.J. or all Princess Di or all Monica Lewinsky or all Gary Condit all the time.

Downie and Kaiser make clear that they are exempting the Post--as well as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal--from their scathing indictment of contemporary journalism. At those three papers, they say, the news staffs have “never been more talented, and their journalism ... never been more ambitious.”

Downie and Kaiser also praise the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News, and they cite significant recent improvements in the Portland Oregonian, Raleigh News & Observer and New Orleans Times-Picayune.

“America’s very best newspapers,” they say, “all have made handsome profits, and have steadily broadened the scope and improved the quality of their news coverage.” So why, they ask, haven’t more owners of news organizations noticed this and acted accordingly? Instead of dumbing down their content in an effort to regain readers, why haven’t they made their newspapers better--more comprehensive, more authoritative, more concerned with the important issues of the day, at home and abroad? Why is it that “none of the fashionable experiments of the eighties and nineties to try to win new readers for papers included increasing the emphasis on foreign or national news”? Downie and Kaiser ask. Why haven’t the leaders of today’s media conglomerates realized that high-quality journalism can lead to--rather than undermine--significant profits?

Why indeed.

Unfortunately, Downie and Kaiser don’t directly answer those questions. Nor do they address another equally interesting set of questions. Consider these facts: The audience for the three evening network news programs in this country plummeted 40% from 1981 to 2001, even as network executives increasingly supplanted serious news with audience-friendly technological gimmickry and superficial news-you-can-use formats. But “[a]ll over Europe,” they write, “big audiences tune into prime-time newscasts, many of them much more serious and richer in content than any American television news broadcast.”

Ninety pages later, Downie and Kaiser drop a similar--and similarly intriguing--factoid: Surveys, they say, show a “steadily declining number of Americans who said they ‘enjoy keeping up with the news.’ ... Comparative surveys showed that Americans were, on average, much less knowledgeable about current affairs than the Germans, French or British, for example.”

Again, the obvious question: Why? Is it something intrinsic to their (and our) culture(s)? But American journalists are fond of saying that we have the best, fairest and freest news organizations in the world, and our news organizations certainly do have the most freedom from overt government censorship; our 20th century tradition of objectivity rather than blatant partisanship has certainly led to a more evenhanded approach to the news than that practiced in many other countries.

But what have we done with our freedom and our fairness? Is it possible that news organizations in Germany, Britain and France--to use Downie and Kaiser’s examples--have helped create and nurture an appetite for serious news while most of the oh-so-free-and-fair news organizations in this country have been--to use one of the authors’ favorite words--”pandering” to the basest instincts and lowest common denominator in their audience, thus depressing a lively interest in substantive news by emphasizing celebrities, scandal and sensationalism in a headlong rush for short-term profits?

Downie and Kaiser don’t examine this issue or its implications. But they have written a valuable and alarming book nonetheless. They give specific example after specific example of newspapers’ sacrificing quality for profitability. They go inside WRC-TV in Washington to illustrate the pressures and tensions inherent in local TV news (singling out Los Angeles as “America’s capital of tabloid TV” along the way). And they report the discouraging--and discouraged--observations of anchors Rather at CBS, Peter Jennings at ABC and Tom Brokaw at NBC, which ultimately paint a bleaker picture of the evolution-cum-decline of network news than do the authors’ own words.

Assignments at CBS, Rather says, used to be made “strictly and entirely on the basis of, ‘Do we think this is important enough and/or interesting enough to cover?’ Nobody said, ‘Well, it costs too much and we can’t afford that.’” But profits, which were mentioned “once a year” when he took over the anchor chair in 1981, are now talked about “at least every day and most days more than once,” and those discussions inevitably lead to ignoring certain stories that should be covered.

“The News About the News” is not unrelievedly depressing. The authors do point out that news organizations across the country have provided superb and conscientious coverage of the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath and that newspaper sales and network news audiences have grown substantially as a result. Moreover, they say, anxiety about the Internet’s replacing newspapers is likely to prove as unfounded as were earlier fears about television’s replacing newspapers.

Television has replaced newspapers as the source of news for most people, but in the process, television has made the better newspapers even better. It’s forced them to work harder, to give readers not just the news but the how and the why of the news, to provide the depth and context and perspective that television cannot--or will not--provide.

So far, many newspapers--and many television stations--have reacted differently to the Internet. They’ve tried to compete with the Internet on its terms, racing into print or on the air with unconfirmed reports that often prove inaccurate.

Will that change as the Internet continues to evolve and as traditional news organization learn to adapt to its challenge? Will the newfound gravitas that emerged in the aftermath of Sept. 11 continue even as the images of that horrible day begin to fade from memory?

It’s too early to answer either of those questions definitively. But Downie and Kaiser are certainly right when they speak of the “obvious and palpable” benefits to our society of a return to more serious news coverage and more rigorous news values. “The United States will be a better place,” they say, “if its citizens can get from the news what they need to know to govern themselves effectively and improve their lives.”