When facts trump attitude

In the days since a tidal wave of tragedy swept over South Asia, the performance of the America’s so-called mainstream media has administered a bracing rebuke to both ideological antagonists and corporate apparatchiks.

As the culture war has staggered from one bloodily inclusive engagement to another over the last two years, a cadre of dispirited academics and the handful of partisan commentators and diarists who infest cyberspace have managed to transform “mainstream media” from a description into an epithet.

A story on the New York Times in this week’s online edition of Business Week, for example, alleged that the paper’s “once-Olympian authority ... is being eroded not only by its own journalistic screw-ups ... but also by profound changes in communications technology and in the U.S. political climate. There are those who contend that the paper has been permanently diminished, along with the rest of what now is dismissively known in some circles as ‘MSM,’ mainstream media. ‘The Roman Empire that was mass media is breaking up, and we are entering an almost-feudal period where there will be many more centers of power and influence,’ says Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism school. ‘It’s a kind of disaggregation of the molecular structure of the media.’ ”

(Because there was no mainstream media to take an interest in their suffering, we’ll never know how many of those who lived out lives that were nasty, brutal and short in those early Middle Ages died yearning for restoration of the Pax Romana. But we digress.)

Meanwhile, the mainstream editors and news executives whose newspapers, magazines or broadcast divisions have become “properties” in some sprawling conglomerate’s portfolio must fight a constant internal battle to preserve their ability to gather and report the news in the face of remorseless demands for cost-cutting. Even the handful of major newspapers that have remained in the hands of family owners face constant pressure from Wall Street to boost their share price. Their mutual assailants are the icy-fingered corporate managers and financial analysts who believe that “increasing shareholder value” trumps not only every journalistic obligation to the public interest but also most of the Ten Commandments that don’t involve coveting -- which is an impulse they heartily approve.

When such management goes unchecked, the business entities called “communications companies” actually are little more than organized appetites.

Then along comes something like the South Asian tsunami, and the continuing indispensability of the mainstream media is vindicated, yet again. Only those news organizations that have made the short-term sacrifices required to maintain their ability to gather and report news have been able to respond as the situation demanded. Over the last week, they have fulfilled the most basic of journalistic obligations -- the duty of witness. They have placed the suffering and loss of millions before the conscience of the developed world, and the result has been a demonstration of human solidarity across regional, religious and cultural divides that seemed beyond reach just a month ago.

How much attention have this country’s leading mainstream newspapers given the tragedy’s aftermath?

Taking just front page stories as a measure, by Thursday, the New York Times had published 53 stories on the tsunami, the Los Angeles Times 38 and the Washington Post 31. All three papers had carried far more inside their main news sections and on pages devoted to science, health and features.

The story has dominated television similarly, and viewers have responded, despite the conventional wisdom that they no longer have a taste for foreign news. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s -- normally a trough for televised journalism -- the audience grew for the nightly newscasts on three free networks. Viewers of the CBS Evening News and ABC’s World News Tonight increased by 12% over their season average, while NBC’s Nightly News went up by 8%. On Wednesday of that week, ABC devoted a special edition of “Primetime Live” to the tsunami’s aftermath and attracted 10.3 million viewers, enough to push the magazine show’s ratings past those of “CSI: NY” and “Law & Order” for the first time.

In Britain, the battered BBC had audience increases of as much as 50% for some of its regular nightly news programming.

The experience of the three American cable news networks was particularly instructive. All of them drew more viewers, but the most dramatic increase went to CNN, the most traditional and -- shall we say, mainstream -- of the trio. In the week after the tragedy, CNN’s daily audience increased 38%, while its prime-time viewers grew by a striking 46%. Fox News, cable’s ratings leader, experienced more modest gains of 20% and 25%, respectively.

There’s a simple explanation for the disparity. While Fox is a series of chat shows linked by snippets of fragmentary information, much of it derived from other sources, CNN not only has maintained its domestic and international news-gathering capabilities, but -- in recent weeks -- also has renewed its managerial commitment to the primacy of hard news. Because it was able to draw on the resources of its own Bangkok, Indonesian, New Delhi and Hong Kong bureaus, as well as CNN International’s network of regular stringers, CNN had more than 80 journalists on the scene within days of the disaster. Fox News had 30. The BBC, whose audience grew at an even greater rate than CNN’s, had more than 100 people in the field.

Real news is covered in the same way that real wars are won: by putting enough boots on the ground.

And only the much-maligned mainstream media have the ability to put those boots where they belong. In the face of such evidence, it’s time to consider what an America -- or, for that matter, a world -- without mainstream media really would look like.

Do Americans really hunger for news media that provide more and more opinions based on fewer and fewer facts? Do they want media in which belief trumps knowledge? Do they really desire media suffused with attitude and bereft of understanding?

The experience of the last two weeks clearly suggests not.