The Boston Phoenix
April 6 - 13, 2000

[Features]

Media

Antitrust coverage, then and now

by Dan Kennedy

It was another sorry day in the sorry history of the New England Patriots. NO DEAL -- COACH, WIFE SPURN PATS, screamed the front page of the Boston Herald American of January 9, 1982, hyping a story that USC coach John Robinson had declined an offer to lead the hapless losers.

And, oh yeah, there was this: the US Justice Department had just agreed to settle its eight-year-old antitrust case against AT&T by forcing it to cut loose its 22 local units (the so-called Baby Bells), and had dropped a 13-year-old antitrust case against computer giant IBM. The Herald dispatched those momentous developments with a couple of AP stories on page three, along with a staff-produced sidebar predicting that, in New England, long-distance rates would drop and local rates would rise.

Which just goes to show how much news priorities have changed over the past 18 years. As Tuesday's wall-to-wall coverage of the Microsoft decision demonstrates, we are now a culture obsessed with business news, especially when it pertains to the stock market. According to trade-industry statistics, just 19 percent of households invested in the stock market in 1983; by 1999, that figure had risen to 48 percent, an all-time high.

The change is best reflected in the way the populist Herald, the middlebrow Boston Globe, and the elite New York Times covered the AT&T/IBM story of 1982 and the Microsoft story of 2000. Then, there was a huge gulf. Over the years, though, the gap separating the three papers has narrowed considerably.

The Times, then as now a paper for the investor class, covered the 1982 story with the gravity it uses for wars and revolutions: a six-column, two-line headline on page one, four stories on the front, and another 12 inside spread out over four pages. This past Tuesday's treatment of the Microsoft story was actually somewhat more restrained, though no less comprehensive.

By contrast, the Globe's priorities have changed a lot since 1982. Eighteen years ago its lead story was on the national unemployment rate's rise to 8.9 percent, a seven-year high. The AT&T/IBM story -- a pick-up from the Los Angeles Times -- was the off-lead, accompanied by a front-page analysis by staffers Curtis Wilkie and Tom Oliphant and a couple of quickie sidebars inside. On Tuesday the Microsoft decision led the Globe, with a story and an analysis -- both staff-produced -- beneath the six-column headline THE GAVEL FALLS HARD ON MICROSOFT, and four full pages inside.

Nowhere, though, is the change between 1982 and 2000 more pronounced than in the Herald. In contrast to its indifference in '82, on Tuesday the paper splashed the Microsoft story with the headline MICRO-BURST, and gave it more than two pages inside. Of course, the Herald is not the same paper it was in '82. Then it was a sensationalistic Hearst publication in its death throes, and it would be bought within a year by Rupert Murdoch. Today it's locally owned, and publisher Pat Purcell puts out a considerably more restrained product.

Still, the audience has changed more than the Herald has. The fact that readers of a city tabloid are presumed to care about business news just as much as subscribers to the august Times says much about the democratization of the stock market.