American journalism is in trouble. Journalists know it, and so do their readers, viewers, and listeners. All over the country, people talk and worry about it. Yet the decline of a vital American institution continues apace, driven by historic and economic forces that sometimes seem, and perhaps are, too large and powerful to combat. Thanks to the computer revolution, the situation may not yet be hopeless, but the fact remains that journalism as it has been practiced for the better part of the 20th century in America-the period of its greatest accomplishments-is in peril.
The most dramatic evidence of the decline may be seen on the four main television broadcast networks-CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. Although there are qualitative differences among them, each has, after its fashion, sullied the legacy of broadcast news's most notable founding father, Edward R. Murrow, who believed the primary purpose of both radio and TV to be education, not entertainment. That Murrow's notion today seems almost laughably antique attests to the magnitude of the problem.
In the early 1960s, FCC Chairman Newton Minow described television as a "vast wasteland." In those days, however, broadcast news tended to be a small oasis in the wasteland. No longer. Network programs that once sought, however imperfectly, to provide the significant domestic and international developments of the day-sometimes accompanied by informed analysis and commentary-now increasingly imitate local newscasts where crime, hype, and inanity are staples. Documentaries and "news specials" have all but disappeared from the commercial networks, replaced by the dreary likes of Hard Copy and Prime Time Life. Many interview and issues programs have fallen under the malign, let's-see-who-can-shout-the-loudest-spell of the McLaughlin Group and Crossfire. And serious commentary utterly vanished several years ago with the retirement from NBC of John Chancellor. Probably as a result of all this, the "audience share" of the nightly newscasts has dropped off dramatically, and such quality programs as remain-Nightline, for instance, and (occasionally) ABC's World News Tonight-have about them the musty smell of the tomb.
Sadly and significantly, the decline of TV news has occurred at a time when what most Americans know about the world comes from the images they see on television. Yet the network news divisions have had their budgets cut, many of their foreign bureaus closed, their correspondents laid off, their libraries and archives trashed, their journalistic standards corrupted. If news on television was never as good as it should have been in the greatest democracy on earth, today's output is so meager and debased as to make what existed 20 or 30 years ago seem a monument to Edward R. Murrow.
There are many facets and reasons. Prominent among them are the corporate takeovers of the three original broadcast networks in the past 15 years or so-a classic string of smaller fish swallowed by ever larger ones. The new owners brought with them a stockholder-driven belief in the bottom line that exceeded even that of their hardly altruistic forerunners. The network news divisions, hitherto operated by the owners as a "public service" (if only to fend off further government regulation), were now required to become "profit centers."
Admittedly, by the 1970s the news divisions had grown terribly fat. Their staffs enjoyed lavish salaries and expense accounts, limousines and first-class air travel-plus, for the on-air people, the joys of celebrityhood. Cuts were not only inevitable in an increasingly competitive business environment but journalistically desirable. Nevertheless, maintaining a quality, worldwide news operation is an expensive, labor-intensive, and often unavoidably wasteful proposition, even after fat has been trimmed away. There must be huge investments in, among other things, technology; foreign and domestic bureaus; and a large staff of expert, creative, and energetic people who must have the luxury and time to wait for news to happen and sometimes to return from assignments empty-handed. In Murrow's day at CBS, the news division's profits, if any, were incidental. Today profits are king, the news divisions have been gutted (while anchors are paid multimillion-dollar salaries, like the entertainers they have become), and the concept of "public service" is, for all practical purposes, dead.
Deregulation of broadcasting also played a role. During the Reagan-Bush years, when "market economics" became a mantra, even some journalists insisted that it was "elitist" to believe people should be provided the news they need, in addition to the news they want. In this atmosphere, "public service" was all but abandoned as a government standard for license renewal. The argument went this way: If the broadcast networks and their affiliates abuse their audiences with too many commercials and too much tawdry entertainment and people don't like it, the marketplace will create new outlets. (Similar arguments have been used to support the reduction or elimination of federal funds for NPR and PBS.) Many government controls on the networks and their affiliates were thus weakened or lifted altogether, which led in turn to more commercials, more entertainment, more sex, more violence, more mindless sitcoms, more sports, more sensationalist "newsmagazines"-and less responsible and informed news coverage.
A similar, if not quite as dramatic, decline has occurred in print. Competition in city after city is a thing of the past, and corporate takeovers and mergers, such as the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Communications (and, more recently, Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting), are the rage. With most newspapers owned today by giant chains whose commitment to quality journalism is often shaky at best, and with the top editors of newsmagazines seriously wondering if there is even a place for them anymore on the crowded information superhighway, cutbacks, layoffs, bureau closings and pandering to turned-off readers have become commonplace. Even some of the remaining family-controlled newspapers have gone into decline. Although the New York Times remains the nation's (if not the world's) premier newspaper, others, notably the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, have lost some of their luster in recent years as MBAs and a new generation of market-oriented journalists-unashamed to call the fruits of the labor "product"-have taken over. As to the national newspapers, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, the former remains, despite improvements, a triumph of form over function, while the latter, despite the excellence of its reporting and newswriting, is essentially limited to the worlds of business and politics.
And what of the marketplace? Has it spawned the predicted corrective action? Not really, at least not yet. The economics of publishing makes starting a new daily newspaper in even medium-size cities prohibitively expensive. In television, there was hope that cable would step in as the broadcast networks cut back on news, but the results so far, though interesting, have been spotty. CNN, despite its brave experiments and its importance as a live witness to major national and international events and crises, has found it difficult to keep an audience tuned into non-crisis news broadcasts on an around-the-clock basis. As a result, although the network employs some fine journalists, it has felt obliged to offer more and more audience-friendly "soft" programming, including phone-in and live audience shows during the day and Larry King in the evening.
In other words, even at "all-news" CNN, the time devoted to real coverage of real events has declined in recent years, and the newer cable news outlets-e.g., CNBC and the fledgling MSNBC-are a long way from filling the gap. Indeed, nothing anywhere on cable even approaches the quality of what has been lost from the broadcast networks. (The creative, if limited, offerings on C-SPAN, informative and even enlightening as they may sometimes be, are not really journalism, and in any case seem better than they are because of the meager competition.)
Nor has the marketplace compensated in other areas. It might be argued that the best evidence of any network's dedication to news lies not in its 30-minute evening news broadcasts but in its dedication to in-depth documentaries. Yet the broadcast networks have almost given up on them altogether, while the documentaries on various cable channels tend to be scratchy reruns dealing with such relatively safe topics as World War II, the Russian revolution, the Great Depression and the like. More contemporary and controversial matters-the bloodletting in Bosnia and Rwanda, for instance, or abortion in America-are generally missing, except on PBS and public radio, and occasionally on CNN.
Taken together, these pieces form a very bleak picture, especially when measured against standards established over the last 60 years or so. Modern American journalism, born during the Civil War, began to mature in the 1920s, as the "yellow press" lost its attraction for a generation of Americans who had grown more sophisticated about themselves, their country, and its place in the world. The Depression and World War II gave young reporters and editors a chance to demonstrate how good journalism-including radio journalism, then brand-new-could be when practiced by talented, educated, and idealistic men and women who believed that democracy requires a well-informed citizenry and government a watchdog. The postwar period, from 1945 to 1975, was the "golden age," encompassing TV news's greatest achievements. It was also the period in which many American newspapers and magazines achieved world-class status. Yet two of American journalism's most important postwar achievements-the exposure of government duplicity in Vietnam and Watergate-turned out to mark the beginning of the decline.
Indeed, they may have helped cause the decline. The Vietnam-Watergate period turned a number of reporters, correspondents and editors into wealthy superstars and celebrities. Inspired by their example, a great many younger journalists left college over the past generation with an arrogant, chip-on-the-shoulder attitude unjustified by any actual accomplishments of their own. Soon, the search for "the next Watergate" became an obsession, and careerism and greed became commonplace, especially in the great "media centers" of Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Otherwise sobersided print reporters went on TV talk shows where their role was more to entertain than inform. And the public, seeing so much hubris and venality, and egged on by various right-wing demagogues, logically began to doubt that the Fourth Estate in general and TV journalists in particular were any more trustworthy than, say, the average actor or Member of Congress.
Some argue that journalism's post-World War II "golden age" was an historical anomaly unlikely to be repeated soon in the absence of a major crisis. Perhaps. But despite a saturated job market and the precipitous decline of journalists in the esteem of their countrymen, U.S. colleges and universities continue turning out large numbers of eager, talented, serious-minded graduates who regard journalism as a reasonable alternative to a lifetime in business, say, or the law or any number of other callings. Moreover, these recent graduates, having seen what went wrong and having grown up in a "post-modern" world of lowered expectations, do not appear to be as prone to arrogance and excessive ambition as their recent predecessors. Best of all, they possess a firm understanding of computers and the possibilities open to them in cyberspace.
The history of journalism has been marked by a series of major technological inventions, from movable type to space satellites, that increased the speed with which news travels, the distance it travels, and (theoretically, at least) the amount of information it conveys. As we have seen, however, technological advances do not necessarily bring qualitative improvements. It all depends on who controls the technology and for what purpose. Still, with the possible exception of television, each new invention has had a generally positive impact, at least in the beginning. And now, just when it seems that quality journalism might not survive in the post-modern world, comes what could turn out to be the most important technological advance of them all-the Internet.
Like a horizontal and vertical maze in a vast, intercontinental playground, the Internet piles computers on computers, links on links, relationships on relationships, possibilities on possibilities. It is a chaotic warehouse of information, entertainment and software. It offers newspapers, magazines, libraries, books, plays, movies, pornography, and just about anything else-good, bad, and indifferent-that can be expressed in words, pictures and sound. It has given crackpots the greatest soapbox in history, has provided shut-ins an expansive window on the world, and has ruined marriages because of the inordinate time spent on it by one spouse or the other (or both). Dissidents in China have used it as a worldwide, electronic freedom wall; mountain climbers on Everest have used it to describe their perils as they climbed; business executives, flying at the speed of sound, have made deals on it with the speed of light. Even in its infancy (or is it already in the pre-adolescent stage?), the Internet seems to rival all previous technological advances for social importance and impact.
It also brings new meaning to A.J. Liebling's maxim that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Now any person with a computer and a modem effectively does own a press, and thus may be writer and publisher all at once-and have a worldwide distribution system at his disposal to boot. He doesn't even have to submit his work to an editor! He may write whatever he pleases and put it out there, all unbidden and unhindered, for anyone in the world to read.
Democracy does have its costs, of course. There are problems in cyberspace: accuracy is often dubious, privacy can be invaded, copyright laws are routinely flouted, the amount of pornography available is almost beyond belief, and the number of psychopaths with computers-not to mention the number of people who can't spell-is alarming. But what is important here is that the Internet offers the potential of a brand-new outlet for a generation that sees it as an alternative to the traditional news media and understands how to use it for that purpose.
With something like this apparently in mind, the noted Washington journalist Michael Kinsley, former editor of the New Republic and former Crossfire pulpiteer, chucked everything some time ago and decamped for Bill Gates's clean, well-lit Microsoft cocoon in Seattle. There, Kinsley rather noisily set about creating Slate, a professional-quality, made-for-the-Internet magazine, or "webzine," as techies call them. There is considerable debate about whether Slate is a success. Some think Kinsley was too much wedded to print's (and the New Republic's) outdated conventions, yet others that he was too much dazzled by the Internet's electronic possibilities. James Wolcott, writing in the March 1997 issue of Vanity Fair found Slate "oddly cold and numbing." But Kinsley's success or failure isn't the point. The point is that he and many other talented people see the Internet as a means to an end, i.e., responsible journalism that deals with real issues and engages people easily and immediately, often in the Internet's uniquely "interactive" way.
The situation is reminiscent of the early days of radio when Murrow and the young correspondents he hired for CBS before World War II sought to adapt journalism to a new medium, and vice versa. Like those pioneers, Kinsley and his fellow Internet experimenters are feeling their way, trying to develop a new kind of journalism, even as the medium itself is metamorphosing with dazzling speed. The cumulative results so far, whatever one may think about Slate, are anything but impressive. Most "webzines" seem to deal primarily with pop music and culture and tend to be amateurish, self-indulgent and dull. Nor are the made-for-the-Internet offerings from various established newspapers and newsmagazines much of an improvement. Though slickly packaged, they give a thin, warmed-over impression.
Then, too, no one on the Internet seems yet to have found the right mix of text and pictures. The latter, along with movies and recordings, consume massive amounts of bytes and time, and make downloading a tedious and all-too-often exasperating experience. The day is not far distant when TV, computers and fiber optics will merge in such a way as to wipe out these technical problems (no doubt creating new problems in the process). And at that point, the question of whether the Internet will live up to its promise as a new medium for quality journalism will begin to be answered. For now, one may at least hope that it will.
When Murrow went to London in 1937 as CBS's "director of talks," he was told that the standard of radio excellence to which he would be held was the earlier broadcast of a nightingale singing in the Surrey Woods. Only a few months later, Murrow and his new colleague, William L. Shirer, put together the very first CBS World News Roundup and were on the air, live, with their descriptions of the Anschluss. The medium was not the message. It was merely the medium. The trick, now as then, is finding the right message for a given medium. Murrow found the message for radio as World War II loomed. It seems likely that the right message will eventually be found for the Internet. If so-who knows?-perhaps the competition will encourage a journalistic renaissance in old-fashioned television and print journalism as well.
The good news about the news today is that a great many journalists, in all media, are as concerned as everyone else about the state of their craft and are working hard to find ways to fix it. Whether they will be successful or not remains to be seen, but, even as journalistic standards were being eroded in recent years, a new medium was evolving that could help restore them-and just in time for the 21st century.
STANLEY
W. CLOUD ('91), former Time corresspondent, managing editor of The
Washington Star,, and executive editor of The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
and Time's Washington bureau chief between 1989 and 1994. He and his
wife, Lynn Olson, co-authored The Murrow Boys, published last year.
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