In Kovach and Rosenstiel's first woe-is-media tract, 1999's Warp Speed, fellow Concerned Journalist David Halberstam set the tone in the introduction: "The past year has been, I think, the worst year for American journalism since I entered the profession forty-four years ago." It's hard to distract men so despondent with news of such salutary post-1955 developments as female editors, 24-hour cable news, alternative weeklies, business journals, and fingertip access to 10,000 faraway newspapers. Still, Elements warns us, the situation decried in Warp Speed will seem like a golden age compared to the nightmare that is sure to follow if we don't pay the authors heed.
"Unless we can grasp and reclaim the theory of a free press," Kovach and Rosenstiel warn in the newer book, "journalists risk allowing their profession to disappear." It's a handy trick, to diagnose a terminal illness while claiming to corner the market on the cure.
Unsurprisingly, the authors take great pains to make sure we understand just how critical the patient is. The journalism profession "may face its greatest threat yet"; "conglomeration of the news business threatens the survival of the press as an independent institution"; "journalism independent of corporate self-interest will disappear" unless citizens "demand that their democratic interests be recognized not only by journalists but also by the corporate leadership"; "the revolution in technology and the economic organization it has spawned...are also threatening an independent watchdog press."
The humble 10 Elements of Journalism, we are told, "hold the only protection against the force that threatens to destroy journalism and thus weaken democratic society. This is the threat that the press will be subsumed inside the world of commercialized speech." And if we ignore the elements of journalism -- well, as Basil Fawlty once put it, that's exactly how Nazi Germany got started. "History has taught us by bloody experience," write Kovach and Rosenstiel, "what happens to a society in which the citizens act on the basis of self-interested information -- whether it is the propaganda of a despotic state or the edicts of a sybaritic leisure class substituting bread and circuses for sovereignty."
Although there is much sport to be had in watching well-fed boys not just cry wolf but scream "Hounds of hell!" at the top of their lungs, the journalism elite's self-critique does resonate on a number of points. Consolidation of media ownership is indeed troubling (notwithstanding AOL Time Warner's utter failure to colonize our mind-share). The exchange of knowledgeable international coverage for banal entertainment filler has not noticeably improved civic life. Local TV newscasts deserve their ritual shellacking for false banter, hand-waving on-the-scene nonsense from dull reporters, and the bottomless "new study proves it" well of medical stories. If you regard the United States as 280 million not-very-savvy people who receive their information primarily from the 11 p.m. Action News broadcast, Crossfire, or talk radio, then you might be depressed.
But the glass is not merely half empty. In 1980 there was essentially no desktop publishing. By 2000, a single newsletter-publishing company called Phillips Business Information was pulling down more than $100 million in annual revenue. In July 1992 the World Wide Web was in its demo stage. By July 2002, a single Web publishing company called Pyra Labs could report that new sites were being created using its "Blogger" technology at a rate of 1.5 per minute.
On the rare occasions such numbers are cited in journalism-in-crisis books, they are cast in a negative light. Toward the end of The News About the News, for example, we learn that "in 1988 there were 13,541 magazines published in the United States; by 2000 there were 17,815." A 30 percent jump in new magazine titles should be unabashed good news, right? Not when your larger complaint is the "fragmentation of the American public."
Some cautious optimists might suggest, gently, that the public is better served now that it need not get its news exclusively from Walter Cronkite and the locally dominant daily. Downie and Kaiser are more concerned by the way this audience choice has "intimidated owners and managers of news organizations" into trying to "outpander" one another by using "fashionable gimmicks" to "win the contest for higher circulation or higher ratings, and thus higher profits, with sleazier programs and publications." All of which, the authors contend, has contributed to a "pervasive sleaziness" that has made our era a regrettably "decadent time." Before you know it they're off about pierced noses and "misogynistic rap lyrics."
Much better to be a well-funded newspaper with a local monopoly, and to avoid the debased life of a competitive news organization chasing down audience fragments. Or, as Downie and Kaiser put it in The News About the News: "You have to wonder why more news-media owners and executives hadn't noticed the fact that the country's best news organizations are also enormously successful. America's very best newspapers all have made handsome profits, and have steadily broadened the scope and improved the quality of their news coverage."
That pretty much sums up the recommendations offered in The News About the News, an embarrassment of a book that, if labeled honestly, would have been called Why Aren't You As Good As We Are? Neither Downie nor Kaiser has ever worked in any newsroom other than The Washington Post's. Reading them talk about the disappointing "news values" of local TV stations and small-market dailies carries all the insight and charm of watching Richie Rich deliver a lecture about self-reliance to a roomful of crack orphans.
Most of the book is meaningful largely as a reminder of how poorly some well-regarded journalists can write (Kovach and Rosenstiel's crisp volume sings in comparison), and why sheltered people aren't always the best choice to write about the wider world. For example, Downie and Kaiser are so struck by their self-evident observation that the morning paper has more reporting than the TV news ("any single page in the newspaper contained about 40 percent more words than an entire half-hour newscast," etc.) that they repeat versions of this revelation 13 times. (I counted.)
Similarly, they repeatedly express displeasure that newscasts rely on video footage and graphics. They are outraged that TV stations in Los Angeles, a famously spread-out and traffic-clogged city, spend money on helicopters. They make clumsy errors, such as stating that the Gerald Loeb awards for business journalism are administered by the University of Southern California (it's UCLA), or that there were only "six American cities" with competing dailies by the 1980s. (They left out Philadelphia, Honolulu, and San Francisco, for starters.) Their optimistic hook -- that news organizations and their audience might have been jolted into a New Seriousness by the September 11 massacres -- has already fallen flat.
What's eerie is how Downie and Kaiser's beliefs, judgments, and even peer group mirror those of Kovach and Rosenstiel. There is a seeming consensus in Concerned Journalist circles on an impressively broad range of perfectly debatable editorial issues. Among the truisms, not even open for discussion: Crime coverage, especially on the local TV news, is invariably sensationalistic. Longer stories are better than shorter ones. The high-water marks for American journalism were the civil rights struggle, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate. (Vietnam is also remembered fondly as something they bravely opposed, but what's left out is how most every major media organization ridiculed the investigative journalists who contradicted four successive U.S. presidents by reporting that American prisoners of war had been left behind after 1973 -- a travesty described by Monika Jensen-Stevenson in the anthology Into the Buzzsaw.)
Other givens: Political conventions should be covered "gavel-to-gavel" by network television. Public tastes are dangerously base. The three most negative influences on the profession are "competition," "economic pressure," and "audience fragmentation." Three good measures of a news organization's seriousness are its number of bureaus, its journalism awards, and its staff budget. Journalism schools are crucial. News organizations can indicate their sobriety by hiring an "ombudsman," or "reader's representative."
The books tend to praise and damn the same reporters and editors, with Matt Drudge leading the villain list in both. The man behind The Drudge Report is described in Elements as a "lone hacker rummaging through the databases and chat rooms," while The News About the News calls him "an online chat room gadfly." The latter book further claims that "for every Drudge 'exclusive' that contained a germ of truth, another proved to be wildly wrong." Apparently, extremism in the service of trashing Drudge is no vice.
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