Get Ready for the Really Bad News

Earlier this week, a jury in Maine accused “Dateline NBC” of “negligence, misrepresentation and emotional distress” and ordered the No. 1-rated network to pay $525,000 in damages to a trucking company. Last week, CNN retracted a story alleging U.S. use of poison gas against American defectors during the Vietnam War; CEO Tom Johnson said the story contained “serious faults.” Last month, the Boston Globe fired one of its top columnists (interestingly, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year) for making up people, quotes and situations. In May, the New Republic apologized to its readers after discovering that one of its associate editors had manufactured stories out of whole cloth. Earlier this year, when the Monica Lewinsky story erupted on the national scene, journalists were accused of a string of sins, including the publishing and broadcasting of stories based on highly questionable sourcing, inadequate fact-checking, innuendoes, finger-in-the-wind guessing (where is that dress?).

And there were other examples of what editor Eugene Patterson, one of the senior statesmen of American journalism, called “rotting values”: the excessive, tasteless coverage of the O.J. Simpson trials, designer Gianni Versace’s murder, Marv Albert’s sex life and Princess Diana’s fatal car crash. Suddenly, journalists, who are supposed to comfort the powerless and discomfort the powerful, were seen strutting across the stage like Hollywood phonies playing the role of journalists in a much ballyhooed movie.

Are we witnessing a journalistic aberration, an odd coming together of embarrassing coincidences? Has American journalism mysteriously lost its compass--and along with it, its ethical and professional standards? Or are we experiencing the birth pangs of a new journalism?

An attempt at an explanation must start with the fact that journalism has been in the process of substantial change for at least 20 years. What we now see is only the tip of the iceberg. Much yet remains to be uncovered and understood.

First, we are the victims--or beneficiaries--of a vast technological revolution that has transformed the way we get and process information. In the late 1970s, most Americans (more than 80%) watched three evening newscasts; now they have the same three plus three cable news networks, 10 weekly news magazine programs, three cable business news networks, two sports news networks and three news Web sites furnished with video.

Just about every newspaper and magazine has its own Web site, often rushing to put its stories on the Internet before it has published them in the morning paper. The Internet, until recently a resource for the young and the curious, has now exploded in size and scope. In 1995, for example, only 4% of Americans used the Internet for news; now 20% use it for news. A very safe prognosis is that this new technology will spread with increasing speed and continue to transform the business.

Second, networks and many newspapers were owned and run by powerful families who wanted to make money but also wanted to perform a public service. Now news has become a big, big business. Newspapers have been purchased by chains; few remain in family hands. Profit margins run easily into double-digit terrain. Networks in the mid-1980s became so profitable that General Electric bought NBC, Loews bought CBS and CapCities bought ABC. By the mid-1990s, as one megacorporation after another rushed to expand its technological reach, extending profits into the stratosphere, network ownership changed hands again. Westinghouse bought CBS, Disney bought ABC, Time-Warner bought CNN, Fox was formed, conglomerates wired the world with satellites, faxes and cable TV.

How profitable is this new world? In 1996, only two short years ago, NBC produced three hours of television news a day. Now NBC, using its new subdivisions of CNBC, MSNBC and others, produces 27 hours of news a day. Each hour sets aside at least 12 minutes for commercial advertisements. NBC manufactures news in much the same way and with much the same motivation as GE manufactures light bulbs.

This new technological revolution and this new profit-centered, business-oriented news have transformed the ethics, values, standards and professionalism of journalism. In this radically changed atmosphere, everything is different.

* Competition, which was always a presence in the news business, has now become a brutal, relentless pressure, forcing normally careful reporters and producers to yield to temptations of wildness and recklessness, hastening to print and broadcast stories that are not fully researched, sourced or checked. They have even on occasion manufactured pure fiction and called it news.

* What used to be a once-a-day, twice-a-day or even three-times-a-day news cycle has now become a 24-hour-a-day news cycle with nonstop demands for “profitable news,” which is not the same thing as “news.” Accordingly, standards drop to the lowest acceptable level.

* TV anchors have become celebrities--some of them earning between $7 million to $10 million a year, even though the average wage for a newspaper reporter is still about $30,000 a year. Celebrities rarely like to rock the boat.

* CNN was inaugurating a new series when it broadcast its poison gas “exclusive.” The new series was designed to boost ratings, and the producers and anchors (as CNN’s Johnson described them, “my most experienced, my best”) were under excruciating pressure to attract viewers, to produce headlines, a buzz, to create news with an edge. They succeeded in every way except one: They produced a rushed product that failed as reliable news.

A question often asked is whether there is a way to reverse this rush to popularize the news, to convert each news program and newspaper into a profit center. An optimist would like to say yes, but a realist would have to say no. The incentives at the moment run toward steeper profits, not deeper, more meaningful news.