Denied a part in the public drama, people "became either consumers or escapists
from politics," Columbia's James Carey wrote, observing how citizens responded
to this kind of news. "It was a journalism of fact without regard to
understanding, through which the public was immobilized, demobilized and was
merely a ratifier of judgments derived on high. It was, above all, a journalism
that justified itself in the public's name, but in which the public played no
role, except as an audience."
"Whereas the game was once viewed as the means, it is now the end, while policy
problems, issues and the like are mere tokens in the struggle for the
presidency," says Syracuse University Professor Thomas Patterson, who analyzes
the impact of press frameworks on politics in his book, Out of
Order.37
Even when journalists cite public opinion polls, they often use them to grade
politicians instead of framing questions about the public's opinions or
interests. Policy battles often are described as having only two sides, led by
opposing politicians locked in personal combat.
That story still was not told, although Williams gave us a glimpse of the stack
of white paper. Sitting at home, the citizen received no information about
Gingrich's goals or the content of the White House's 37 pages. This narrow,
superficial, pseudo-insider coverage told citizens nothing about their
government's actual activities; it seemed to be aimed instead at an audience of
insiders who cared only about keeping score.
Although it is especially common on network television, this kind of coverage
hardly is confined to the national news. Local journalists, taking cues from
their more prominent colleagues, are likely to ask a political candidate,
"You're behind in the polls. How can you win?" instead of, "Why are you running
for this office?"
The Negativity Bias
The press is the living jury of the nation," said 1830s newspaper editor James
Gordon Bennett.
Increasingly, it seems to be a hanging jury.
Much has been said in journalism reviews about how negative the news is and how
this drives audiences away. Many journalists, from the muckrakers of the last
century to the investigative reporters of today, have proved that some bad news
is good for us. We need to know the truth about our problems in order to face
them effectively.40
However, the critics also have a point, which is gaining new significance in
the changing media environment. While the strategy framework omits much of the
real news that citizens need to know, other journalistic habits actively poison
the atmosphere. Many journalists are biased, not so much by "liberal" or
"commercial" viewpoints but by negative assumptions about all institutions.
Local news, particularly on television, thrives on violent accidents and
criminal events that rarely are presented in a meaningful context. Instead of
learning what might be done about these tragedies, we become instead a passive
audience, watching what one critic calls the pornography of violence. News
about crime and violence is cheap and easy to cover; news about ways people
might attack such common problems is even more important--and very hard to
find.
Our national self-image is as skewed as our local picture. Most political
analysts would agree that politicians are no more venal or corrupt now than
they ever were.San Antonio Express-News.
"We're contrarians. That's why we got into this business."48
"You really look like a fool if you take the issues seriously," New York
Newsday columnist Gail Collins confessed to Paul Starobin of the
Columbia Journalism Review. Coverage of government has to be especially
tough, she said. "Anytime you write something really, really positive about a
politician--unless he's dead--everyone in the community of journalism says,
`God, did you see how they're sucking up to that person?'"50
"The reporter used to gain status by dining with his subjects; now he gains
status by dining on them," writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker,
decrying the "casual cruelty of so much of the media." Instead of highlighting
problems in a way that rewards the politicians who try to address them, Gopnik
continues, reporters "now relish aggression while still being prevented, by
their own self-enforced codes, from letting that aggression have any relation
to serious political argument, let alone to grown-up ideas about conduct and
morality."
Instead of proving that journalists are unbiased guardians of the public trust,
this perpetual negativity has backfired. The apparently endless flow of
scandals and feeding frenzies has damaged, rather than enhanced, journalism's
credibility. The watchdog that barks at everything loses its bite.
"Journalists are now creating the coverage that is going to lead to their own
destruction," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dean of the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
"If you cover the world
cynically and assume that everybody is Machiavellian and motivated by their own
self-interest, you invite your readers and viewers to reject journalism as a
mode of communication because it must be cynical too."53 also is profoundly
negative. But Limbaugh articulates the anger and frustration that many people
are experiencing after decades of negative information. And, significantly, he
connects people to politics. He welcomes them in instead of shutting them
out.
According to a new study by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, talk radio listeners
think they know more than other people but actually answer less
accurately on public affairs questions. Jamieson's research tracked how
citizens learned about the health care reform debate over a nine-month period
in 1994. "At the end of that period, we took the people who said they relied on
talk radio and...asked them how well informed they felt. We had been watching
their level of information across the process. Of all the people we watched,
they said they were the best informed. And of all the people we watched, they
were the least informed. And they were also the most cynical about
governance."
Understandably, the public doesn't have a clear sense of why Rush Limbaugh
isn't considered a journalist if Sam Donaldson is. As Carl Bernstein once
remarked, journalism is "the only institution that remains closed while
insisting that all others be open." Ordinary citizens who seek entrance to the
"journalism temple" to learn how it works often are rebuffed.
Acting on their understanding of what makes a good story, they nevertheless can
have an inordinate impact on policy, unless political officials respond
adequately to the issues that appear, sometimes randomly, in the news. The
press does not necessarily set the political agenda, but it can create obstacle
courses for officials and citizens who might prefer to take things up at a
different pace or frame them in a different way.58 whether he still planned to allow gays to
serve in the military, Clinton said he intended to keep his promise but would
"consult with a lot of people" over an indefinite period "about what our
options are" for lifting the ban.
Reading the pool report back in his hotel room, Friedman realized that lifting
the ban on homosexuals in the military was the hottest topic Clinton had
addressed that day. He dismissed the fact that Clinton had made exactly the
same promise several times during his presidential campaign. Friedman, in fact,
had been a foreign correspondent during the campaign; he was just starting on
the White House beat. He persuaded his editors in New York that Clinton's
repetition of his pledge was real news because he was now president-elect, not
just a candidate making a campaign promise.
This incident is not unique. As the news media's influence has grown in recent
years, so has the public's dissatisfaction with the way it is handled. Most
journalists still believe they are operating in the public interest and should
be valued for helping ordinary people understand their world. But increasingly,
people see journalists as a special interest group, like any other, which
manipulates them in order to throw its weight around or make a buck.
As Margaret Gordon, Dean of the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the
University of Washington, told the
Freedom Forum Foundation Center during the
1992 presidential campaign:
As Americans we seem to be amusing ourselves to death, to use Neil Postman's
phrase, instead of facing our common challenges as a nation. Consumers, as
citizens, need bread as well as circuses. The health of our democracy depends
on it.
As they conscientiously attempt to offer intelligent and relevant information,
even the most experienced journalists often lose track of what news should be
about. For example, in January 1995, ABC, CBS, and NBC--which attract about 31
million viewer households a night68
Nothing illustrates this misguided coverage more graphically than Connie
Chung's much-touted interview with Speaker Newt Gingrich's mother, during which
Mrs. Gingrich described First Lady Hillary Clinton as a "bitch." The scandal
wasn't that Connie Chung appeared to violate an off-the-record agreement--it
was that she considered this news. This was tabloid at its purest: celebrity
combat. The real news of the day, shrunk down to make room for the Chung cat
fight, was about the plans Mrs. Gingrich's newly empowered son was developing
for changing the government.70
As former NBC President Lawrence Grossman points out, American journalists have
become the exact definition of the ancient Greek chorus: "old citizens full of
their proverbial wisdom and hopeless-ness."42
Limbaugh and other radio talk show hosts fill a vacuum that could be served
instead by a better journalism and a more receptive political culture.
Unfortunately, they are filling it with material that often is inaccurate. 
Today's news is created, packaged, and delivered by a priesthood of
journalists, trained by editors who hired them because they had the right
"instincts," that is, they had the same set of cultural expectations and values
as the editors themselves. The news is delivered, take it or leave it, to a
passive audience. The public has little ability to add anything to the news
agenda or to correct errors of interpretation or omission. Theoretically, both
the news production process and the product are protected from outside
influence in order to preserve journalists' ability to tell the truth, without
fear or favor. Traditional news organizations seldom offer information about
their reporters' qualifications, how they choose what becomes news, or what
citizens can do to affect the news agenda. In fact, inquiries into the
political affiliations of journalists are viewed as inappropriate, and many
reporters do not disclose even their outside income from interest group
speeches.56 As a result,
journalists at the major networks and newspapers influence politics in ways
that the founding fathers and early newspaper editors never could have
imagined. Their influence often is unwitting; in fact, many reputable
journalists routinely turn a blind eye to their role, believing that excessive
preoccupation with their influence will bias their work. 
Neither Clinton nor the gay-rights lobbyists had meant to make opening the
military to gays his first policy move; the Friedman headline and story made it
so. And the story touched off a firestorm that Clinton, with slight experience
in handling the national press, could not contain. Friedman's page-one,
lead-story treatment in the most influential newspaper in the country set off a
second round of coverage in the other media, which had not highlighted his
comments on lifting the ban in their stories that day because he had told them
the same thing before. Analysts have since decried this Clinton "decision" to
begin his presidency by lifting the ban as an important strategic mistake. In
fact, it was The New York Times that pushed it to the top of Clinton's
political agenda.
Recently my colleagues and I organized two focus groups in the Seattle area on
the media's coverage of the campaign. What we found is that people are
incredibly angry at the media. They think that all the media moguls and
journalists have access to massive amounts of information that the public
doesn't ever see.... People no longer believe that journalists are operating in
the public interest or for the public good. Many of the people we spoke with
believe that journalists' decisions are business-motivated ones.Newton Minow says, "to aim at
the bottom line is to aim too low."
Local television news broadcasts provide ample evidence that local news also
doesn't deliver what it promises. Paul Klite, Director of the Rocky Mountain
Media Watch, a citizens' watchdog group, analyzed 50 local television news
shows that ran in 19 cities across America on January 11, 1995. According to
Klite, the newscasts were on average 30 percent commercials; 30 percent sports,
weather, and chatter; and 30 percent other news. In the 12- to 15-minute window
of "real" news, 28 percent was crime; 25 percent was disasters; and 31 percent
was fluff, for example, "bears eat Popsicles, girl reunited with dog, how to
tango," and celebrity stories, Klite found. "That leaves less than five minutes
in the newscasts to talk about education and the environment, the economy and
arts and science, homelessness and poverty, overpopulation, government, health,
and all the other important issues of our time," says Klite, adding that this
was a "consistent pattern across the country."
Politicians certainly have contributed to this process. Issues that might be
considered public or "common to us all," have been discredited by the current
wave of political correctness, which prefers private and individual
initiatives. Efforts for a common good, like the right-to-life, abortion
rights, environmental, and consumer movements, are denigrated as "special
interests" that are indistinguishable from private profiteers.
Coverage of the O.J. Simpson, William Kennedy Smith, Menendez brothers,
John Bobbitt, Tonya Harding, Susan Smith, Heidi Fleiss, Joey Buttafuco, and
Jeffrey Dahmer cases is of popular interest and, in some cases, has led to
valuable public discussions of such substantive issues as spousal and child
abuse, racial discrimination, and the criminal justice system. Ordinarily,
however, common threads are not offered; if these situations involve us, we
rarely understand how.
"Active citizenship must be based on an understanding of how democracy works,"
asserts Washington Post columnist David Broder, the dean of American
political journalists.66
