Our Media, Ourselves

Another perspective on why mainstream news reporting is so darn rotten

opinion by Doug Collins

The classic progressive criticism of the mainstream media stresses the problem of media ownership, the fact that major news media outlets--TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers--are owned by fewer and fewer large conglomerates which have commercial motives to squelch certain topics of reporting. This criticism basically reflects an anti-monopoly strategy, which aims to maintain or increase a diversity of ownership of the media, hopefully resulting in better news coverage.

It's true that conglomerate ownership can result in very obvious censorship, contrary to the public interest. The most memorable example was NBC's well-documented blackout of nuclear-mishap news, when NBC was owned by nuclear contractor General Electric.

But I'm not convinced that media conglomeration is really the main cause of progressives' unhappiness with American mainstream media. I think the main shaper of uncritical and insipid corporate news is only visible on a much deeper and more personal level.

To illustrate my point, first imagine that most major news outlets were owned by, say, two large corporations, instead of the five or six large corporations that we have now. Do you really think that mainstream news coverage would be substantially different? I doubt it, because the profit motives, the pressure to produce ratings, and the general structure of the corporations would remain the same. Similarly, if you divided the ownership of the current handful of major media players into a hundred smaller companies--as was the case a few decades ago--likewise my guess is that most viewers or readers would probably hardly notice the difference in actual news coverage. Let's face it, news as reported on commercial US networks and daily newspapers has been mostly rotten and vacuous for a long time, since long before the recent years of intense corporate consolidation.

Profit-driven and ratings-driven news reportage is always mostly rotten, no matter how big the company is that spews it out. It is a distorted mirror of society, selectively reflecting only portions of reality. Primarily, it gives precedence to murders and natural disasters ("if it bleeds it leads"), and to stories about the latest gadgets and services to buy. To add the requisite civic-mindedness, mainstream reporters attend press conferences of political or business leaders, and dutifully and predictably report what the powerful say, even in cases where official lies are blatant. In rare fits, when such media embark on meaningful reportage, the subjects of investigation are pretty much only those which are not distasteful to local Chamber of Commerce members. After all, it's business advertisement money that funds major media, and anyone who tells you that the funding source of a news outlet does not affect its news coverage is either lying or terribly naive.

The traditional means of maintaining some semblance of editorial ethics in mainstream news organizations has been "The Wall" between the advertisement and news-writing branches of the organization. The advertising department is expected never to try to exert influence on the journalists to cancel a negative report on a large advertiser, for example.

While this is preferable to outright control of news by the advertising department, the difference is minimal. Every seasoned news editor knows--if he's succeeded in keeping his job for more than a few months--that some news topics are simply more "sensitive" than others. If you publish a news item critical of corruption among the local elite, you will get flak, and you may end up losing your job. That's one reason why we see so many cute animal stories and so much trendy health advice in the news. It's innocuous.

Editors, after all, are just sergeants in the army of journalism, and they are careful not to let the GIs (the reporters) get out of hand. This army metaphor is quite accurate. In military fashion, editors typically assign stories to the reporters. Mainstream reporters generally don't have freedom to report on what they want, a fact that most news readers (or news viewers) are not aware of. Only after a reporter is fairly experienced, only after the editor knows the reporter is not going to do something "stupid", will the editor then let the reporter choose her own topics.

Unfortunately, those "stupid" topics are exactly what we need in our news. We need more reportage which comes from the heart and the genuine interest of the journalist. Instead, what we almost exclusively get is formula hackery. The hurricane footage you saw reported on last month's TV news could be rerun during the next big hurricane, and no one would notice.

Thus, the main problem in shoddiness of news coverage is not the control by a large corporate ownership, but the formulistic and top-down nature of the newsroom, the fear of losing your editing or writing job if you actually dare to confront the rich and powerful, or if you deviate from the formula. In a decent news organization, writers, hired for their integrity and ability, would have the freedom to report on whatever they wanted, and editors would simply edit rather than assign topics. Our world would be far better if this were true!

In a larger sense, the authoritarian stagnancy in the news room is only one instance of the same problem in almost all American work situations. Even the few Americans in union jobs, with (hopefully) some amount of job security, are still bound to their work duties, duties which generally are meted out in military fashion, with precious little room for choice or democratic change. Many unions are partly to blame for this, having concentrated their energies primarily on pay-related issues. Modern unions, like management, are generally keyed into an ethos of money, competition, control, and increasing production. But the fact is that there are far too many things already produced in this world. We Americans, as well as people in other developed countries, are up to our necks in products and information. Aside from food crops, we probably have enough products and information right now to last us for at least a decade!

The main problem with mainstream news is a deep and wide cultural problem, not something that anti-trust efforts will fix. It's easy to feel disenchanted with mainstream news because we observe it so often. It's easy to point our fingers at conglomerating media owners. It's far harder to take on what ultimately must be our responsibility too: culture change. It's time that we help slow the pace of production, of information, and of life by creating a new standard of increasing security, autonomy, and happiness in all workplaces, including the home. Every worker, manager, owner, unemployed person, union leader, house-spouse, journalist, editor, and news reader must at least consider this if there is to be positive change.

WWW Washington Free Press