Sadly, media executives continue down this wretched path despite voluminous evidence that it’s not working. Over the past several decades, newspaper circulation and network-newscast viewership have gone way down, and the audience for local TV news is disintegrating. Yet the best news organizations, Downie and Kaiser note, are growing, solidly profitable enterprises, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In nearly every city, the highest-quality TV newscast (such as it may be) is also the one with the largest audience. Cost-cutting and dumbing down the product, as it turns out, is a formula for short-term success and long-term failure. But media executives operate in an environment in which the short-term is everything. In a particularly chilling passage, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings tell the authors that, just 20 years ago, their bosses looked at the ratings perhaps every week. Now they study them every day — and they even examine them minute-by-minute to determine which stories pushed younger viewers, say, or women over 50, to change the channel.
This is all unarguably true, but I do have some quibbles. Downie and Kaiser mostly miss some encouraging developments from the past decade. First, though they are right that the Internet has not led to a flowering of first-rate independent media, it has at least fostered a few excellent sites such as Slate and Salon, and some important small-scale projects that help keep the mainstream honest, such as Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews.org, Al Giordano’s NarcoNews.com, and Ira Stoll’s SmarterTimes.com. The financially stressed Salon is sucking wind these days, but on occasion it is still, as it was in the late ’90s, a vital source of original, idiosyncratic reporting on politics, media, and culture. Slate is like a much faster New Republic — and, after all, we live in a much faster society now. Sites such as Giordano’s and Stoll’s give smart, informed, and, frankly, obsessed observers the opportunity to rant constructively about the sins of the media. And Romenesko’s daily digest gives them a way of getting their views out to media junkies across the country.
Second, Downie and Kaiser correctly note that the best news organizations, such as the Times, the Journal, and their own employer, the Post, are as good as they’ve ever been, and are available on the Web for free or, in the Journal’s case, for a small subscription fee. This is a revolutionary development, but the authors toss it off almost in passing. Though it is surely lamentable that the Podunk Argus-Advertiser runs only a half-page of foreign news from the AP every day, it’s become less important now that anyone with a computer and a modem can read the Times without paying a nickel. (There are plenty of people with such access, too. According to Mediamark Research, more than 42 percent of the adult population are "regular" Internet users, with nearly 84 million adults having Net access either at home or at work.) And, yes, NYTimes.com and washingtonpost.com are among the most popular content sites, suggesting that people really do want quality, and know where to find it.
Finally, Americans spend an ungodly amount of time in their cars listening to the radio, and here the news about the news is positive. Tens of millions of us get most of our broadcast news from public radio, and especially from National Public Radio’s drive-time programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The authors do genuflect in NPR’s direction a couple of times toward the end of the book, but they miss its true significance: public radio today is so good that we are actually in the midst of a new golden age of broadcasting.
There are even bright signs in the otherwise blighted world of commercial radio. It’s true that corporate pressures have transformed most of commercial radio into lowest-common-denominator stupidity. Yet nationally syndicated programs such as Imus in the Morning and Rush Limbaugh’s talk show, despite obvious flaws such as crassness (Imus) and conservative bias (Limbaugh), offer sustained, reasonably intelligent commentary on politics and public affairs.
Downie and Kaiser’s dead-on critique of the traditional news outlets would ring just a bit truer if they were more savvy about — and less dismissive of — new media and radio.
IF THE STOCK-market pressures laid out in the Knight Ridder anecdote are Downie and Kaiser’s major theme, their secondary — and related — theme is the state of the news business since September 11. For a brief period, they note, the media cast profit considerations aside and did the right thing, devoting time, space, and resources to covering the terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
Following a decade in which the media’s principal obsessions were sex, celebrity, and gossip, Downie and Kaiser argue, September 11 offers the media an opportunity to renew themselves, to rededicate themselves to the special task of informing a self-governing people envisioned in the First Amendment. "Americans have been jolted into international action, forced to abandon their comfortable perch above the global fray," they write. "Whatever else is coming, we can confidently predict that it will be a compelling story, and a great time for good journalism. But will it also be a great time for the news business?"
Not likely. Sure, it will be a great time for the New York Times, NPR, Nightline, 60 Minutes, Frontline, and the handful of other news organizations committed to excellence. But the business of the media isn’t news, it’s business.
Yes, in the long run they’re only killing themselves. But as John Maynard Keynes once observed, in the long run we’ll all be dead.
Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser will speak at noon on Tuesday, February 26, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, in the Kalb Seminar Room, Taubman 275. Their talk will be part of the "brown-bag lunch" series of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. For more information, call (617) 496-2582.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net
