Don't Quote Me

The Boston Phoenix
September 30 - October 6, 1999

[Don't Quote Me]

Thinking big

Two very different books share one vision: the renewal of civic life through a genuinely democratic media

by Dan Kennedy
Two generations ago, Henry Luce's Time and Harold Ross's New Yorker pioneered media criticism -- although they didn't call it by that rather forbidding term, since the aim was as much to entertain as it was to enlighten.
Back then, reporting on the press was a novelty. Today we live in an age awash in media criticism. Long a staple of the alternative press, media coverage is now one of the more glamorous beats at major daily newspapers. The Washington Post's most recognizable star, after Bob Woodward, is media reporter and TV talking head Howard Kurtz. Glossy magazines such as Vanity Fair and (yes) the New Yorker, as well as online publications such as Slate and Salon, are filled with media buzz. Organizations such as the right-wing Media Research Center and the left-wing Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting send out regular bulletins on the perceived transgressions of the supposedly objective press.
But though media criticism may have proliferated, the overwhelming majority of it is based on a rather small idea: that there's nothing wrong with today's journalism that higher ethics and greater diligence can't cure. At the center of this school of media criticism is Steven Brill's shambling wreck of a magazine, Brill's Content, which is as devoted to celebrating the media establishment as it is to tormenting some of its practitioners. In the most recent issue, to cite just one example, Brill weighs in with a turgid cover story in which he pressures news organizations to keep a respectful distance from family members, especially children, at celebrity funerals such as John Kennedy's. Would the world be a better place if Brill's strictures were adopted? Perhaps. But it would be better still if the media paid less attention to celebrity culture in the first place, a thought that seems not to have crossed the starstruck Brill's mind.
The real problem with the media is not that journalists don't know how to behave at funerals. It's that, 25 years into the post-
Watergate era, they lack clear vision of how to serve the public, which has grown increasingly disenchanted with politics, the press, and civic life. Worse, the independent and small-chain owners of the past have given way to enormous transnational conglomerates, which own movie and music studios, broadcast and cable networks, television and radio stations, newspapers, and magazines, and which incidentally -- very incidentally -- happen to cover the news.
Now come two members of the big-think school of media criticism with trenchant new books on what's wrong with the media and how to fix it. Jay Rosen, in What Are Journalists For? (Yale University Press), which will be published in November, makes the case for so-called public, or civic, journalism, an approach that he hopes will reconnect the media with the public and reconnect the public, in turn, with community life itself. Robert W. McChesney, in the just-published Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (University of Illinois Press), examines a much larger problem: the dangers posed when the means of communication, vital to democratic self-government, fall into the hands of unaccountable corporate interests.
Each book is flawed: in particular, Rosen fails to take fully into account the problems posed by corporate ownership, and McChesney fails to consider precisely what the decentralized, publicly controlled ownership that he advocates would offer in terms of content. (Indeed, McChesney denounces public journalism as "the sort of boringly 'balanced' and antiseptic newsfare that could put the entire nation into a deep slumber," thus defining it by its excesses.) In a sense, then, Rosen's and McChesney's critiques work best together, since the current low state of journalism will not be improved without attention to ownership and content.
Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, has been public journalism's most visible advocate for the better part of this decade. Though difficult to define (deliberately so, Rosen says, since the emphasis should be on experimentation), public journalism involves news organizations' stepping out of their "objective," above-it-all role to lead public discussion on community issues. Some examples: sponsoring meetings on specific topics and reporting on the results; eschewing horserace-style political coverage in favor of an issues-heavy approach; and stressing solution-oriented stories by looking at, say, how a neighborhood group fought crime.
These are sensible, worthy ideas, but there are a few problems, sometimes in the execution, sometimes in their very conception. Rosen himself points to the example of the television news director who put public journalism to a cynical use: staging televised feel-good public meetings during sweeps periods in areas known to be populated by Nielsen families, thus turning an idea for civic involvement into a cheap ratings ploy. Then, too, as critics such as New York Times editorial-page editor Howell Raines and Washington Post editor Len Downie have noted, news organizations run the risk of losing their credibility by abandoning their traditional observer status. Rosen counters, convincingly, that in a successful public-journalism project the news organization takes the lead in promoting discussion of a particular issue, but
not in pushing any one course of action -- whether the discussion concerns plans for a new football stadium or the future of affirmative action.
There's a problem, too, when public journalists set out not just to help shape public debate, but to monopolize it. Rosen does not mention perhaps the highest-profile failure of public journalism to date: the mindlessly unbending resolution of the Charlotte Observer, along with a consortium of five other newspapers, seven TV stations, and three radio stations, to define the 1996 North Carolina Senate race between incumbent Jesse Helms and challenger Harvey Gantt by a specific set of poll-tested issues: crime and drugs, taxes and spending, health care, and education. The result, critics charged, was that the normal give-and-take of the campaign was ignored, including serious allegations that a Helms-controlled foundation had taken large sums of foreign money. In the end, Helms was re-elected, possibly with the unintentional help of the media. The lesson here ought to be that public journalism should supplement, not replace, more-traditional forms of campaign coverage; and that in an era when independent media outlets are dwindling, the last thing news organizations should do is band together and act as one. Attempting to shape the conversation is one thing, but the Observer and its media partners seemed to forget that elected officials and candidates are ultimately responsible to the voters, not to journalists.
Rosen's strength is in describing solutions; McChesney's is in laying out the full extent of the media's trespasses against us. McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois and an expert on the history of broadcasting law, offers a critique of the media that actually goes well beyond mere journalism. As he sees it, corporate media are a crucial cog in promoting something he calls "neoliberal democracy," in which "there is formal electoral democracy, but . . . the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision making." (This is a very different use of the term "neoliberal" from its origins in the late 1970s and '80s, when it was generally used to describe a then-new breed of Democrats who were liberal on social issues but moderate to conservative on economics, such as Paul Tsongas and Gary Hart.) The media's role in this, McChesney argues, is not just in propagating unimaginative, status quo journalism, but in producing lowest-common-denominator popular culture and in encouraging a cult of "hypercommercialism" so pervasive that advertising stickers are placed on the very food that we eat. The underlying message: we are a society of consumers, not citizens.
McChesney authoritatively demonstrates that it didn't have to be this way -- that public control of the airwaves was lost in the smoke-filled rooms of Capitol Hill during the late 1920s and early '30s, and that the current wave of media mergers was fueled by the lobbyist-driven and campaign-donation-fueled Telecommunications Act of 1996. His proposed solutions are worthwhile, if unlikely to become reality: mandatory public access on commercial broadcast stations; a generously funded, politically independent public television and radio system; free time for political candidates coupled with tough campaign-finance reform (McChesney is withering in his criticism of the American Civil Liberties Union for adopting the viewpoint that unfettered spending is protected speech); and the use of anti-trust law to break up vertically integrated media monopolies.
But McChesney undermines himself with his willfully dismissive view of the Internet, which could counteract many of the evils he convincingly describes. McChesney argues that, to date, the Internet has followed the same path as the early days of radio, with nonprofit and amateur projects slowly giving way to the forces of commercialism. But in radio, the public was shut out by a deliberate act of government, in league with the fledgling broadcast industry. That's simply not going to happen with the Internet, because the guise under which nonprofit radio was killed -- a limited broadcast spectrum that required government regulation -- simply doesn't exist on the Net. Thus, a theoretically infinite number of nonprofit projects can exist simultaneously with the forces of commercialism. McChesney acknowledges all this, yet dismisses its importance, questioning the impact of, say, an obscure leftist Web site amid a sea of entertainment and shopping sites. But of course webmasters can band together in all kinds of creative ways to increase their visibility. A portal of progressive Web projects under the banner of the Nation, for example, could have a considerable impact. McChesney's discussion of the Net seems churlish, as if he's afraid that technology will undermine his call for an anti-corporate jihad.
Both What Are Journalists For? and Rich Media, Poor Democracy suffer for having followed similar books by better-known writers. In Rosen's case, the precursor was James Fallows's Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (1996), a good part of which is actually based on Rosen's public-journalism ideas. McChesney's book pales by comparison with Ben Bagdikian's classic The Media Monopoly, first published in 1983 and updated repeatedly over the years. Neither Rosen nor McChesney is as graceful a writer as Fallows or Bagdikian. Nevertheless, they've written important books, both of them useful antidotes to the ethics policing that makes up most media criticism. Yes, Stephen Glass and Patricia Smith had to go, and one can only gape in astonishment at Mike Barnicle's continued good fortune. But McChesney and Rosen remind us that the media's troubles run far deeper than this trio's type of misdeeds.
As if to underscore their similarity of purpose, both Rosen and McChesney pay tribute to one of the century's notable thinkers: the philosopher John Dewey, who believed that the public, properly informed and engaged, was fully capable of self-government. Rosen and McChesney contend that the media for much of this century have instead followed the path laid out by Dewey's opposite, the journalist-author Walter Lippmann, who believed in government by experts, an exalted position for the elites, and a limited place for what he believed were the hopelessly uninformed masses.
In embracing Dewey's optimism rather than Lippmann's realism, Rosen and McChesney call for a genuinely democratic, open, civic-minded role for the media -- a role, sadly, that bears little resemblance to the one they play today.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here