For journalists, lessons in conduct and survival

I don’t usually look to Karl Rove or Rupert Murdoch for insightful analyses of current media issues.

Both men are unquestionably intelligent. But Rove, longtime chief political strategist for President Bush, is a paid partisan, and given his influence, it’s difficult to believe he hasn’t had something to do with the administration’s persistent hostility toward the news media.

Murdoch is the chairman of News Corp., which publishes the gossipy, sensationalist tabloid New York Post (of “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline fame). His corporation also owns Fox News, which has been very successful but which is not a model of journalistic probity, its “fair and balanced” slogan notwithstanding.

Both Rove and Murdoch gave speeches last month, though, that offered insightful, provocative examinations of major problems the media face today.

Rove, speaking at Washington College in Chestertown, Md., did not spend his time bashing the “liberal media,” as so many of his Republican colleagues have done. Instead, while acknowledging that the media are “generally liberal,” he said, “I think it is less liberal than oppositional,” and he went on to criticize journalists for their knee-jerk opposition to every administration, regardless of its political affiliation.

“Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat,” Rove said.

I don’t entirely agree with that formulation. Most reporters still do see themselves as fair-minded finders and recorders of facts. But ever since Vietnam and Watergate revealed administrations run by both major parties to be misleading the American people, many journalists -- especially those based in Washington -- have developed an automatically antagonistic, adversarial position to virtually every administration, virtually every political figure, whether national, state or local.

Despite the constant conservative bleating about the “liberal press,” for example, just look at how the media jumped all over President Clinton in the earliest days of his first term, long before anyone had heard of Monica Lewinsky. “The President’s honeymoon was over before it began,” the Center for Media and Public Affairs concluded after studying network television coverage of the first 10 weeks of the Clinton presidency.

Cynicism is the default position in the news media these days. Every politician is suspect. Reporters have become predators. “Gotcha” journalism is the order of the day.

There are good reasons for that, of course. Politicians often do lie and cover up and advance programs for their personal gain rather than the public good. And the journalist’s age-old mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable is as valid today as it was a century ago, when Finley Peter Dunne first put those words in the mouth of his tavern owner-cum-philosopher Mr. Dooley.

But some people do go into politics to perform a public service. And even those who are primarily motivated by a lust for power, wealth and/or ego gratification aren’t necessarily thus motivated in everything they do.

One often gets that impression from reading and watching the news, though, and that mind-set has helped to poison the political process in many ways, as Rove (and others) have pointed out.

Voters often decide not to go to the polls if they think they’ll only be choosing between two corrupt, conniving candidates. And some good men and women who might run for office decide it’s not worth it if their integrity is going to be questioned and their finances and private lives are going to be probed daily.

Rove said a number of things in his Washington College speech that I don’t agree with, but neither the White House nor the college has released a transcript of the speech, so I don’t want to criticize him based solely on press and online accounts of what he said.

There are transcripts available, though, of the speech that Murdoch gave at the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. In it, he warned editors that the traditional media are making a big mistake if they look on the Internet only as a competitor -- as the digital-age equivalent of radio and television.

The Internet as a provider of news is “a revolution,” he said, and newspapers in particular have been “slow to react” to that “fast-developing reality.”

Newspaper editors should look on the Internet as a potential partner and should grasp it as “a huge opportunity to improve our journalism and expand our reach,” Murdoch said.

Most newspapers have websites, but “how many of us can honestly say that we are taking maximum advantage of those websites to serve our readers, strengthen our businesses or meet head-on what readers increasingly say is important to them in receiving their news?” Murdoch asked.

Newspapers, he said, are “uniquely positioned to deliver that news. We have the experience, the brands, the resources and the know-how to get it done.” The challenge for newspapers, Murdoch said, is to figure out how to deliver the news in ways that today’s young consumers want it.

Murdoch cited a new report by the Carnegie Corp. on the changing news consumption habits of the nation’s young people and what this means for the future of the news industry.

The Carnegie report also spoke of a “revolution” in the news business and said that 44% of 18- to 34-year-olds go to the Internet at least once a day to get news updates. Only 19% said newspapers are their primary source of current information.

Newspaper circulation has been declining for more than 30 years, and the Internet has accelerated that decline, especially among the young. The Internet provides new and more varied ways to get the news, and that’s why it appeals to the young, Murdoch said.

The young “want the option to go out and get more information,” he said -- hence the popularity of links on the Web. “They want to be able to use the information in a larger community -- to talk about, to debate, to question” -- hence the popularity of chat rooms, bulletin boards, instant messaging, blogs and a host of other Internet features.

The new generation of news-seekers also wants its news “on demand,” Murdoch said. Newspapers can provide that by frequently updating their websites. But the implementation -- and the implications -- of some of Murdoch’s other observations worry me. He says young news-seekers want “a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened.”

If that “point of view” is evenhanded analysis, we all benefit. If it’s opinion masquerading as news, as one sometimes sees on Fox News, it helps no one.

Murdoch also says the young “want news that speaks to them personally, that affects their lives.”

True -- and not just the young. But local TV stations have tried this “news you can use” approach for years, and it has largely trivialized or replaced real news in many cities.

Not all news can (or should) be personally, instantly useful to everyone. There is some information that every citizen should be familiar with, its immediate nonutility notwithstanding.

We might all have better understood what led to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, for example, if most news organizations -- the television networks in particular -- hadn’t cut back so much for so long on their international coverage and had spent more time examining the Arab world and less on Michael Jackson and Princess Di.

Murdoch didn’t pretend in his speech to be “an expert with all the answers” to the problems posed by the paradigmatic shift in the nation’s news-consuming habits. Instead, he said, he is “searching for answers to an emerging medium that is not my native language.”

Newspaper editors would be well advised to join him in that quest, just as journalists everywhere would be well advised to consider Rove’s comments about their knee-jerk adversarial opposition to those in power.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous Media Matters columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.