“If there is ever to be an amelioration of the condition of mankind,” John Adams once wrote, “philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult, dangerous and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind cannot now be governed without it, nor at present with it,” (qtd. in Bates).
To present day, themes hindering the public’s ability to be informed continue to rise. Since the birth of the Penny Press, newspapers have been in the business of reporting news that will sell advertisements. Today, dial testing is used to gauge the level of interest in each story.
“Fierce economic competition has put pressures of institutional life and death on the economic performances of corporate managers,” said Bill Kovach adding, “many of whom are remote from and essentially unfamiliar with the historic role of the press in American life.”
Such as Roger Ailes, the president of FOX News Channel. After admitting FOX News excessively covers scandals, Ailes gave a justification saying, “This is a tough business and if you don’t get the ratings then you go off the air.”
Ailes is not the only person with power in the news industry to come from a journalistically unrelated field. Shortly after the Tribune Company Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Zell (whose background was in investing) took control over The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and WGN America, the company tipped into bankruptcy. In a 2008 ABC report on the Chicago Tribune’s file for bankruptcy, Zell blamed the bad economy for the state of the Tribune claiming it was the “perfect storm.”
However, a report by The Pew Center for the People and the Press explained that news has become omnipresent in the digital era. After finding 92 percent of the study’s respondents get their news from more than one platform, the report read, “The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. ”
Frustration over journalistic quality has a history that dates before the digital era (Bates; Blevins; Reel; Halberstam; and Ward). According to Fred Blevins, by 1960, social responsibility had already become an artifact of cultural history. In 1997, when Blevins presented his paper The Hutchins Commission Turns 50: Recurring Themes in Today’s Public and Civic Journalism, Blevins probed at the Hutchins Commissioners and proponents of public journalism paralleling standpoints.
Under the democratic assumption that citizens will make proper decisions when they are properly informed, these positions express agreement over the public’s right to share the press’ role to inform the public. Despite a shared envision of the media as “adult education tools for democracy,” their stances have sparked an ongoing debate over who may be trusted to regulate the media’s messages.
“The default seems always to fall on social responsibility, the middle ground that demands self-control in the spirit of compromise,” Blevins claimed. Calling the “middlebrow attempts” to democratize American media a failure, Blevins contested that had they been successful, we would have seen an electorate capable of making rational decisions in their civic duties, and responsibilities grow from an amorous and consumptive behavior towards proscribed newspapers, books and ideas.
An informed public requires the press to ask the president challenging questions and to be analytical with what is said at a press conference, Douglass Cater said in 1959. Emanated from publicity’s influence over his power to levy taxes and pass laws, Cater warned of the president’s inclination to not be completely up-front and honest when speaking at press conferences.
When done tactfully, a reporter’s question and persistence can be very influential, such as in 1957 when President Eisenhower repudiated a reporter’s inquiry about a major section of the legislation. According to Cater, section three of the bill did not become a law (29-30).
However, Cater revealed that Eisenhower was not always met with such a rigorous challenge. In reference to an Eisenhower conference, James Reston wrote, “What everyone does not know is just how far this habit of casual or inaccurate official talk, inflated by the modern techniques of public relations, propaganda, and mass communications, has added to the political confusion and cynicism of our time.” (qtd. in Cater 43).
Eisenhower strategically spoke of his political stances and intentions in broad terms while running for and in office. In what became tactics for future candidates such as President Obama, who ran off of the “Change” platform, Eisenhower kept his message short and sweet claiming “you can’t sell 37 things.” His campaign, which marked the birth of political TV ads, sang to tunes such as, “You like Ike, I like Ike, everybody likes Ike for president. Bring out the banners, beat the drums, we’ll take Ike to Washington.”
Stimulated to increase circulation with the birth of the Penny Press, a documentary by the History Channel examined how the paper’s new model, the average person was suddenly able to acquire a newspaper.
Shortly after, the press began to pump up William Henry Harrison’s American image portraying him as a man in the wilderness and fighting opposition, even though it was far from the truth. “William Henry Harrison, with the log-cabin and hard cider slogans, generated not only a modus Vivendi of conducting politics but essential themes of value for today’s media.” (Ward 133).
According to the History Chanel, Harrison’s campaign marked the beginning of the immense media event used by the press for its great photos and story.
Juxtaposing Nixon and Clinton’s scandals to one another reveals how the press can be instrumentally used and manipulated by the president. It reveals how the press oftentimes will use the president for their own economic gain.
Although both scandals grabbed country’s attention (one more quickly than the other), each story’s resonance played out very differently.
Upon Nixon’s death, the media focused on his achievements and his post-Watergate redemption. During the Watergate scandal as a way to help him appear innocent, Nixon blamed the press.
Post-Watergate, against great odds, Nixon pulled off what David Halberstam claimed to be his most successful campaign by using young TV reporters who were less likely to ask hardball questions and who had a weaker—if any–remembrance of Watergate. Halberstam wrote, “The coverage seemed to be not merely scripted but indeed edited by Nixon himself” (36).
Clinton’s scandal provided a copious supply of entertainment for Late Night comedy, and when the Star Report revealed the sexual relations between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the report’s popularity alone made the news on CNBC.
The public’s fascination with the Clinton-Lewinsky saga was like a soap opera addiction, David Weaver said, an Indiana University journalism professor (qtd. in Ricchiardi 32). In a story that, according to ABC News, was first officially reported by a blog, news organizations jumped on every possible juicy detail, dropping their three-source rule down to two.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press revealed that the public thinks members of the news media rushed to judgment about the president’s veracity in the case. Ten days after the story broke, 75 percent said they believed journalists had given the story “too much attention.”
However, according to the Pew poll, there was a high level of interest in the story. In comparison to Washington scandals where only 17 percent pay close attention, a full 34 percent said they were watching the Lewinsky scandal very closely (33). “In the Clinton-Lewinsky case, people might be expressing a loathing of what they view as media overkill in a rush to uncover more prurient information,” said Evertt Ladd, head of the Roper Center for Public Opinion and Research at the University of Connecticut. He added, “They also might be separating Clinton the man from Clinton the president” (33).
But the story’s salience was able to provide substantial revenue for the media industry. However, high TV ratings, website hits, and street sales are only measures of curiosity—not indications of respect for journalists, said Weaver who rhetorically asked whether the media’s agenda is to serve as entertainers or informers.
In the age of yellow journalism, sex, crime, and sports became recognized to be what sells newspapers (Reel). When Walter Winchell’s sex column, which frequently did not check sources, led him to be the highest paid reporter at the time, established journalists became horrified–but readers were hooked (A&E).
Some journalists however, used the media’s sensationalism ethically to their advantage. One of the first female reporters, Nellie Bly, went undercover to reveal what it was really like in a madhouse. Her reports, full of personal experience that elicited credibility, had a style that attracted readers of the time.
“I think I experienced some of the sensations of a drowning person as they dragged me, gasping, shivering and quaking, from the tub. For once I did look insane,” she wrote (Bly 309). Without the use of modern-day dial testing, Bly became the time’s highest paid celebrity journalist. Yet her career did not begin with economic motivation—but rather it started when she wrote a letter to the editor about her anger over an opinion piece that criticized women who wanted to work outside the home. Her journalism career began while fighting for a cause.
Nellie’s popularity was economically successful, uncovered important issues, and came packaged with an editor, Joseph Pulitizer, who said that “accuracy, accuracy, accuracy” was his number one priority.
Today, however, we are in a new era. The number of Internet users who read blogs—one-third—is equal to the amount of bloggers who consider what they do to be a form of journalism (Pew Center for the People and the Press). Although blogging has in the past enabled some to be successful muckrakers, when comparing their work to journalistic standards, the Pew Center for the People and the Press found that only a third of bloggers frequently spend extra time trying to verify facts.
From there, the numbers dropped—15 percent of bloggers often quote other people or media directly, and only 12 percent usually get permission to post copyrighted material.
In an atmosphere where the boundaries between advertising and editorial are erased, Kovach said, “It is more difficult for journalists to distinguish themselves or what they do—and the value of what they do—from all the other voices pumping through the system.”
Today, in a time when 65 percent of Americans get their news online, the Pew Center for the People and the Press reports that forms of advertising are capable of growing to levels sufficient enough in finance journalism online are further in doubt.
Since 2000, the newspaper industry has lost $1.6 billion (roughly 30 percent) in annual reporting and editing capacity. Although more people are obtaining their news from the Internet, 79 percent of online news consumers say they rarely, if ever, have clicked on an online advertisement. The only old media sector with growing audience numbers is cable, a place where the lion’s share of resources are spent on opinionated hosts.” (Pew Center for the People and the Press).
Since the rise in TV and the Internet, Celebrity reporters have continued to be used as wallpaper to bring in viewers. After what was called the “story of the year”, Connie Chung was put on a plane with Tanya Harding and then famously asked her, “how’s the chicken?”
Above a cutline that read, “Ground Zero” at the sight of the Oklahoma Bombings, Chung began her report by saying, “Good Evening. Dan is off tonight.”
Two-thirds of the respondents in a Pew Center for People and the Press report agreed with the statement, “major news organizations do a good job covering all of the important news stories and subjects that matter to me.” In contrast, 72 percent backed the statement, that “most news sources today are biased in their coverage.” In respect to this dichotomy, the report explained that this could be because Liberals and Democrats are more likely to say the big news organizations do a good job on subjects that matter to them, while conservatives and Republicans say the coverage is biased.
Brian Anderson has hailed the Internet’s influence over the news industry claiming that its different niches have enabled right-wingers to fill the market void, who, as Anderson claims, have been shut out by the media’s left-wing orthodoxy. Matt Welch (qtd. in Anderson) said he was pushed into blogging in direct response to when he read “five days’ worth of outrageous bullshit in the media from people like Noam Chomsky and Robert Jensen.” Although very little blogs make money, bloggers like Welch can circulate their ideas on the Internet at a very low cost. However, while they may be inexpensive to run, the Pew Center for the People and the Press claimed that because only 14 percent of new media sites produce mostly original content, they too are being drastically affected by the cutbacks in old media.
While the marketplace of ideas continues to grow, the Hutchins Commission’s epigram by John Adams, whose words expressed difficulty in the regulation of the press and the problematic dangers of a divided readership between views, remains relevant today. While the news industry’s wealth continues to raise concern amongst those in the field—along with many members of the public—some remain hopeful and others are pessimistic. As audiences fragment and companies diversify the responsibility of journalists is questioned, “Many journalists feel a sense of lost purpose,” Kovach said, “There is even doubt about the meaning of news, evident when serious journalistic organizations drift toward opinion, infotainment and sensation.” Bates believes journalists today have a different sort of influence. Just as they did in the 1940s, journalists are trying to make a difference with their reporting as backstage activists, professional experts, and democratic realists. He added, “The men of the Hutchins Commission would be pleased.”
Anderson, Brian C. “We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore.” City Journal. (2003).
Bates, Stephens. Realigning Journalism with Democracy: The Hutchins Commission, Its Times, and Ours (Washington, D.C.: The Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies of Northwestern University, 1995).
Bly, Nellie. “Ten Days in the Madhouse.” 1887. Masterpieces of Reporting. Ed. Wm. David Sloan and Cheryl S. Wray. Northport, AL: Vision, 1997. 305-19. Print.
Blevins, Fred. “The Hutchins Commission Turns 50: Recurring Themes in Today’s Public and Civic Journalism.” the third annual conference on Intellectual Freedom. April 1997. Reading.
Halberstam, David. “Richard Nixon’s Last Campaign.” Columbia Journalism Review 33.2 (1994): 35-39.Communication & Mass Media Complete.
Kovach, Bill. “The Roots of Our Responsibility.” Nieman Reports 53.4 (1999/2000): 4-5.
The Pew Center for the People and the Press. Pew Internet and American Life Project. http://www.pewinternet.org/reports.asp.
Reel, Guy. “This Wicked World: Masculinities and the Portrayals of Sex, Crime, and Sports in the National Police Gazette ,1879–1906.” American Journalism 22.1 (2005): 61-94. Communication & Mass Media Complete.
Ricchiardi, S. (1998). Double vision. American Journalism Review, 20(3), 30. Retrieved from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.
Ward, Hiley H. “The Media and Political Values.” The Significance of the Media in American History. Ed. David D. Startt and Wm. David Sloan. Northport, AL: Vision Press.
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