Two new books on the news business are worth your attention.
Bias, by former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg, has been on the best-seller list. It’s an easy read and is highlighted by the anger and indignation of a reporter scorned.
The News About the News, by two Washington Post editors, is deeper, more sophisticated and less emotional.
Goldberg spends little space on political bias, saying most reporters are too competitive to let personal beliefs stand in the way of a good story. The bias he sees is social and cultural. The major media report on certain subjects from a liberal point of view, he writes, such as AIDs, homelessness, women’s issues, abortion, gun control and the death penalty.
Goldberg’s real enemies are the “powerful, arrogant, thin-skinned” celebrity journalists and media elite of New York City and Washington, D.C. And national TV reporters, as a group, are lazy, Goldberg writes.
“Anchormen in general don’t do well with criticism,” he writes. “They’re like royalty … after a while they behave more like kings than journalists.”
While Goldberg lambasts his former employer, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser are uncritical of their current employers, The Washington Post. But the issues they address are broader than Goldberg’s.
For instance, they contend that Wall Street’s pressures for higher profit margins for media companies are threatening the quality of journalism. Smaller staffs. Less news space. Less aggressive coverage. It’s much easier to write soft features and cover celebrities on a tight budget than spend months on investigations.
Downie and Kaiser see the Sept. 11 tragedy as a wake-up call, a chance to rescue journalism from “news as noise, news as wallpaper, news as spectacle.” They criticize the substitution of talk, opinion and argument for news.
They say it’s time to redraw the lines between news and entertainment, news and opinion, news and advertising.
“Independent, aggressive journalism strengthens American democracy, improves the lives of its citizens, checks the abuses of powerful people, supports the weakest members of society, connects us all to one another, educates and entertains us. News matters,” Downie and Kaiser wrote.
My comments: If only the major networks and national newspapers employed news ombudsmen and gave them time and space to share their concerns. The fact they don’t can only be described in Goldberg’s terms — as arrogance. Goldberg lost his popularity and eventually his job after criticizing CBS in a Wall Street Journal column. The Washington Post, by the way, is a positive exception, having employed ombudsmen for over 25 years.
News media companies are given special protections from government control in the Constitution. They also have Supreme Court protections in libel suits. In return, news companies have ethical responsibilities to perform public service. It takes money to hire good journalists and keep them.
Without responsible journalism, all you have left is a tabloid. Without news, all you have left is a shopper.
