COMMENTARY : Too Much Dessert? : When the media started giving viewers only what they wanted--a diet of sugary celebrity froth--the game changed. But TV has an obligation to serve spinach too.

At “Frontline,” we know we are blessed by some advantages that many of our colleagues in commercial television do not have--most important, that our survival does not depend on high ratings. Because we are not part of that increasingly desperate chase for viewers, we can comfortably afford to ask ourselves every day, “What is really important? What needs telling? What do our viewers need to know?”

Michael Sullivan is the senior producer of PBS’ “Frontline.” This is an excerpt of his speech accepting the program’s recent award at the USC School of Journalism Alumni Assn.’s 35th annual Distinguished Achievement in Journalism Awards.

Our answers to those questions are not always right. They are hard questions, after all. But we are not imprisoned by the question that seems to dominate so much television journalism today and, I fear, more newspapers too. The dominant question today of American journalism has become not “What do they need to know?” but “What do they want to know?”

I have come to believe that the erosion of public confidence in journalism can be traced to the day that question changed.

For me it happened in the early 1980s, when I was working for a fine commercial station in the Midwest. The way I remember it is that one day the newsroom spent its energies looking out at our city and the world, trying to figure what was happening and what was going to happen next, using our best, if highly flawed, judgment to tell the audience what we thought they needed to know. And then the next day, I found myself sitting in the dark, staring through a one-way mirror, watching a focus group of viewers, and someone was asking them, “Well, what do you really want to know?”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but everything had changed. This very fine and noble institution that I worked for began a long slide down, from being a revered institution in its community to becoming just another television station, barely distinguishable from all the rest in its town or in any other town.

In that moment, when the question changed, we changed from being leaders to followers. We were lost. And nothing has been the same since.

If you doubt how far we’ve slipped, you need look no further than the O.J. Simpson spectacle. Never has there been a wider gap between the importance of a story to the lives of people and the amount of coverage that story received. It represented the total victory of the new question--give them what they want to know.

And almost all of us were there. Even “Frontline,” in its privileged and protected place, was swept up in the story for a time: For a month, at least, the big discussion up and down the corridors was, “What can we do about this amazing story?” We were astonished by the public reaction to it. It seemed like a national nervous breakdown.

So we went searching for its meaning. We talked to many of the country’s social critics and some very interesting writers, looking for something fresh and big to say about it all. Ultimately we came up blank. Perhaps the most accurate answer we found was the simplest: The country was gaga for O.J. simply because he was the most famous person ever to be indicted for murder. Others had become famous after they were indicted, but nobody as famous as O.J. had ever been charged with murder.

“Oh,” we said. That’s a sentence, not a documentary, and so we simply didn’t do anything about it.

Unlike most of our colleagues, we had that luxury, only because we could still ask the old question. We were still asking, “How important is it? Do we have anything to add? What do they really need to know?” The question you ask makes all the difference.

I do think it’s time to stop fooling ourselves that journalists are held in such low regard by our fellow citizens simply because we are the messengers of bad news. It’s clearly more than that, for we are not just unpopular--the public doesn’t respect us anymore, either. We know how they feel about politicians; we report on it all the time. The bald truth is they feel just about the same about journalists.

We all know the pressures that have diminished our reputation--the intense competition, the downward drag of the tabloids, the merger mania among the media moguls. But part of the story is our own behavior, our own moments of callousness, the brutality of the way we pounce in packs, devouring the story of the moment and the people in it, the breeziness with which we deliver our opinions, our lack of humility presenting “the truth.”

I would not pretend to know the way out of this quagmire--how to redefine our role or simply find it again, how to fend off the pressures that make us worse than we could be.

But in my own recent musings, I have begun to find some glimmer of instruction, even inspiration, in the most compelling political story of the year--the public surge for Colin Powell.

As retired Gen. Powell said, his rise says a lot more about the country than it says about him. I think he had it right.

Everyone has his take on the meaning of the Powell boomlet, but at its heart I think it is pretty simple: A good portion of our republic is yearning for a solid, healthy center to our public life, a civil politics that rejects the rigid ideologies of the left and right. They want a way to rebuild all the bridges between us that we bombed in our rush over the last 30 years toward unfettered personal freedom and unfettered capitalism. What they want is to feel once again is that we’re all in this together.

Powell, of course, is not going to be there to mold those yearnings in the political arena, but I suspect that journalists can help fill part of that need, for members of the public are telling us profoundly and directly what they need.

Powell has repeated his prescription for what to do about all this many times:

“We have to start thinking of America as a family. We have to stop screeching at each other, stop hurting each other, and instead start caring for, sacrificing for and sharing with each other. We have to stop constantly criticizing, which is the way of the malcontent. We cannot move forward if cynics and critics swoop down and pick apart anything that goes wrong, to a point where we lose sight of what is right, decent and uniquely good about America.”

In this mythical family, we journalists have given ourselves the role of the bold, unrelenting truth teller, the critic, the scold--a necessary one in any family.

But it’s how we play that role that counts. And it seems to me that most often today, we play the part as if we didn’t belong to this family at all. We just stand out in the street, with our flak jacket made of cool objectivity, and lob our verbal grenades through the dining room window.

If any fundamental change may be called for, it is that we start acting as if we belonged to this family after all, that we tell the hard truths, but the hard truths that really matter, and we tell them again and again, calmly, patiently and doggedly.

But we need to think hard about the lesser truths: the spats, the peccadilloes, the gossip that only seem to hurt everybody--the people in the stories and the fabric of our collective life. And sometimes, we just have to say: “No, not in my newspaper, not on my broadcast.”

It is an act of great discipline, of course, not to publish what others do, and ultimately it will take an act of cultural collusion on our part to bring that kind of discipline to bear, to civilize the whole journalistic enterprise.

But imagine for a moment what our political campaigns might be like if we made different choices about what to emphasize in the torrent of words that spew forth from the candidates. What if we began to emphasize their bigger, more substantive thought, and pay less attention to their mean-spirited barbs toward each other? What if we covered what matters most to our readers and viewers, which is not the sporting contest? We’re in love with the sport of it. Members of the public have made it clear that they have other things on their mind.

But these would be hard things to change. We are intensely competitive and don’t have the institutions with the clout to alter our collective behavior. But it may be time to build some.

And that is the other part of Powell’s story that I find full of instruction and hope: the story, much bigger than he, about how the U.S. Army resurrected itself from the ashes of Vietnam, rebuilt itself, changed its relationship with its political masters, gained control of its work and redeemed itself with the American people.

That change began in 1971 with a study by the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., a survey of 450 lieutenant colonels, nearly all of whom had served in Vietnam.

The report blasted the Army for not facing its failures, indicting senior leadership for rampant careerism, old-boy assignments, inflated awards, fictitious body counts--the whole facade of illusion and delusion.

The report said:

“There is the widespread feeling that the Army has generated an environment that rewards relatively insignificant short-term indicators of success and disregards or discourages the growth of long-term qualities of moral strength.”

Do you hear some resonance with our situation? I do.

But the Army’s report did not scapegoat anyone outside the Army.

“There is no direct evidence that external fiscal, political, sociological or managerial influences are the primary causative factors of the less than optimum climate. Neither does the public reaction to the Vietnam War, the rapid expansion of the Army, nor the current anti-military syndrome stand out as a significant reason for deviations from the level of professional behavior the Army acknowledges as its attainable ideal.”

And that’s the way the Army started its recovery. It fixed first what was in its control: its own culture, its own standards, and then it went after the politicians and convinced them to change the way America’s wars were run--that the politicians’ job was to say “go” and “stop,” and it was the military’s to decide how to do its job.

And if you examine the Gulf War closely, as we have been doing for a series to be broadcast on “Frontline,” you discover how total the Army’s recovery was--how it regained the respect of the public.

I don’t want to overstretch the comparison, but I think the problems of our own behavior and that of our colleagues may not be so different from the disarray in the Army in 1971, and that the Army’s problems with political masters parallels ours with our corporate masters.

I would not suggest that we have the same tools at our disposal that the Army had to enforce such change, but first the Army dramatically defined the problem and found the will to start. It is a lesson we should take to heart.

*

“The Gulf War” airs in two-hour installments on “Frontline” on Tuesday and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.