The Los Angeles Times — April 4, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
How the Media Got That Way
The Creation of the Media:
Political Origins of American Communications
by Paul Starr
Basic Book
484 pp., $27.50
All the News That's Fit to Sell:
How the Market Transforms Information Into News
by James T. Hamilton
Princeton University Press
342 pp., $35.
by Ken Auletta
Neither
Comcast and Disney, nor Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and DirecTV,
nor AOL and Time Warner -- nor many of the recent media mergers
that have flattened the media landscape -- play featured roles
in Paul Starr's "The Creation of the Media" or James Hamilton's
"All the News That's Fit to Sell." Yet each book provides a context
to better understand the mania to merge. To proponents of these
unions, an unfettered free marketplace assures competition, just
as government regulations strangle progress. To opponents, these
companies are merely masking their true intent, which is to take
the risk out of capitalism by eliminating competition.
But these two books demonstrate
that U.S. media have had two powerful and largely silent partners,
first government and now advertisers. Starr, a Princeton sociologist
who won a Pulitzer Prize two decades ago for his history of the
medical profession ("The Social Transformation of American Medicine"),
goes back centuries to the origins of the media in America. In
the early days of the republic, media entrepreneurs were not independent
of postal subsidies or government printing contracts, which were
essential to shaping a free press. By investing in a more democratic
public education system, the United States produced the world's
most broadly educated, most affluent consumer market -- first
for newspapers, then for books, magazines, telegraph, telephone,
radio, film, television and the Internet. By rejecting Alexander
Graham Bell's monopoly patent claims and by insisting on a competitive
marketplace, U.S. courts and government regulators spurred investment
in what by the early 20th century became the world's foremost
telephone system. After the sinking of the Titanic, the federal
government regulated the airwaves to assure that wireless communications
were free of interference and to license the spectrum, which led
to the Radio Act of 1912 and the birth of a competitive radio
industry. And when a free radio marketplace became anarchic, the
Radio Act of 1927 affirmed public ownership of the airwaves and
enshrined the principle that in return for borrowing the public
airwaves, licensees had "public trust" obligations. This legislation
would, two decades later, serve to regulate broadcast television
when the federal government compelled NBC in 1941 to divest a
second network, giving rise to a third, ABC.
Hamilton, who teaches public policy
at Duke University, focuses on television's silent partner, advertisers,
and reveals with sometimes stupefying charts how the desperate
hunt for the female and younger viewers coveted by advertisers
has transformed, and cheapened, television news. The thesis of
his book is that softer news -- more entertainment, more personalities,
more sports, health news, music, graphics, human-interest stories
like Michael Jackson or Martha Stewart -- are what younger and
female viewers want. And since broadcast television has but one
source of income, advertising, and since advertisers crave younger
eyeballs and will pay more to reach them, news executives are
lashed to deliver improved demographic and thus sales numbers.
Despite an annoying tendency to
invoke in mantra-like fashion such phrases as "constitutive choices"
(meaning constitutional choices), Starr's volume is more clearly
written and more sweeping in its ambition. His thesis is that
U.S. media's "hybrid of capitalism and democracy" -- more libertarian
and entrepreneurial than government-supported telegraph, telephone
or television monopolies in Europe, yet ever willing to assert
a national interest -- was nurtured by our peculiar history. A
free press was vital in the fight for independence from England
and came to be seen as a bulwark against abusers of power, a protection
encoded in the 1st Amendment. Suspicion of concentrated power
provoked antitrust laws. A democratic aversion to Europe's tiered
class structure generated support for public education and colleges.
U.S. communication ventures were more innovative because government
policy encouraged competition. By contrast, state ownership of
the telegraph, telephone and much of broadcasting retarded their
development in England, and the Soviet government, fearful that
its citizens would talk to each other, invested not in new telephone
networks but in another new one-way technology: loudspeakers.
Like teenagers, we tend to think
no one has ever endured our experiences. No other era has ever
had such rapid technological change, we say. Imagine: The PC and
the fax did not exist before 1981, and only in the last decade
have the Internet and cellphones burst on the scene. Yet as Starr
casually notes, after its introduction in the early 1920s it took
radio only two decades to overtake newspapers as the primary source
of news for Americans, and by 1941 81% of U.S. homes had one.
And as much influence as the Internet has had, only dot-com true
believers would claim that it has jolted the way Americans live
more than the telephone or television did.
History, including media history,
does often repeat itself. Fox News, where partisan opinions often
bleed into news coverage, alarms many journalists (as does the
new Al Franken-supported "liberal" radio network that debuted
March 31) who fear we are moving toward a European press model
of media outlets identified with a party or ideology. Yet for
their first 100 years, U.S. newspapers were usually narrowly focused
mouthpieces for political parties. It wasn't until after the Civil
War, when people clustered in cities and advertising became a
second source of revenue for newspapers, that newspapers were
liberated to chase a mass audience. The New Journalism we think
of as a relatively modern invention by people who still practice
their craft -- Lillian Ross, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese
-- was actually a phrase coined in 1887 by Matthew Arnold, who
denounced its too-personal tone, its push for more narrative writing.
Starr's panoramic media history
abruptly ends in December 1941, which is a pity, since he does
not analyze the rise of network and cable and direct broadcast
satellite television, nor the PC and Internet and digital revolutions,
nor the convergence of technologies, all of which have triggered
a merger mania that has massed media power in fewer vertically
integrated media companies and has provoked cries for government
to intervene. While these media giants grow larger -- and this
is a media paradox of our age that cries for Starr's cool intelligence
-- they are menaced by technologies like the Internet that empower
citizens to escape the clutches of both media gatekeepers and
governments.
On the last page of his book, Starr
predicts that history will repeat itself, that the American media
will continue to seesaw between private ownership and government
regulation. In a sense, Hamilton's book picks up where Starr's
leaves off. His focus is on information and news, and he inspects
the underside of the media competition that Starr's abstract model
would see as a sign of robust health. Although there is more competition
in television news -- local news has expanded and often carries
stories before ABC, NBC and CBS networks do, and CNN has been
joined by Fox, MSNBC, CNBC and CSPAN 1, 2 and 3, among others
-- Hamilton proclaims "the death of hard news."
Hamilton shows that the old romantic
notion of news, captured so eloquently by former CBS News President
Richard Salant in a 1976 preface to the CBS News guidelines, is
by now a relic. Salant wrote: "To the extent that radio and television
are mass media of entertainment, it is entirely proper to give
most of the people what most of them want most of the time. But
we in broadcast journalism cannot, should not, and will not base
our judgments on what we think viewers and listeners are 'most
interested' in, or hinge our news judgment and our news treatment
on our guesses as to what news the people want to hear or see...."
We spend too much time debating
whether the media has a "liberal" or a "conservative" bias. Not
that these are not important questions. They are. But Hamilton
emphasizes a much more profound media bias, an economic bias coarsened
by media mergers that usually place in charge of these companies
managers who quantify news success by measures they can grasp
-- ratings, circulation, profit margins and stock price. As pressures
on news divisions to earn a profit intensified, and as the increasing
variety of news choices pushed executives to shout louder to attract
an audience, among the victims were news stories of an international,
governmental or cerebral bent. News executives became terrified
of boring their viewers, a reason sound bites got shorter.
"The market-driven nature of reporting,"
Hamilton writes, "leads to simple rules of thumb: Cover the horse
race in politics; focus on the human impact of government policies;
treat bad news more often than good news; and talk to your targeted
audience." The usual five Ws for reporters -- Who, What, When,
Where and Why -- were replaced, he says, by another five Ws from
news executives who double as marketing executives: "Who cares
about a particular piece of information? What are they willing
to pay to find it? Where can media outlets or advertisers reach
these people? When is it profitable to provide the information?
Why is this profitable?" When executives ask these questions,
news aims not to satisfy its "average" core 50-plus, mostly male
audience but to chase after what Hamilton calls "marginal" younger
and female viewers who don't regularly tune in. Using a variety
of surveys and statistical charts of who watches what and how
the news menu has been altered, Hamilton doesn't just assert the
change; he proves it. (Had he surveyed most news magazines and
newspapers, he could have made a comparable case.)
Hamilton does not demonize news/marketing
executives. He demonstrates that younger audiences prefer sports
to international news, health and lifestyle to government news,
more conflict and less exposition. The bottom line is that news
brims with conflict and the adversarial pose that substitutes
for hard information. One now hears the same complaint from the
Bush White House as from Nation magazine, that the media too often
play a game of "Gotcha!" rather than honestly searching for information,
and that this game is driven by a desperate hunt for ratings and
circulation, which are synonyms for profits. The Bush White House
would not call it a market-driven bias, for this might suggest
socialist tendencies, but the diagnosis of what ails news has,
at least in part, achieved a surprising consensus.
Of course, the consensus collapses
over what to do about this. When one combines the Starr and Hamilton
books, some partial answers do emerge. Pending before the federal
courts and the executive and legislative branches are momentous
questions regarding media ownership rules. How big should media
companies be allowed to get before they are seen as violating
the original Broadcast Act? It held that not only did broadcast
licensees have a responsibility to advance the public interest
but that government must strive to assure diversity of voices
and local ownership. Since government intervention has sometimes
been essential to assure competition and innovation, this suggests
that when the largest cable company (Comcast) bids to acquire
the second-largest media company (Disney), government has a legitimate
stake in ascertaining that a victorious Comcast would not have
too much market power, act as a gatekeeper and favor its own content
with better channel positions, deny a channel slot to competitors
or reduce both diversity and localism.
And since market-driven news dominates,
an argument can be advanced to increase public subsidies for such
news outlets as National Public Radio and PBS. This might assure
that "hard news" could be more widely disseminated. It might also
put peer pressure on journalists to reach higher. Perhaps some
journalists will have to figuratively throw their bodies on the
tracks to shame their bosses. Hamilton makes other suggestions
in his book, including increasing postal subsidies for newspapers
and magazines or decreasing the cost of news gathering by releasing
more government information and documents. The larger point, however,
is that an honest government referee is needed to clarify and
enforce the rules of the game.
Even with the referee, however,
journalists will have to learn to bridge the cultural divide between
us and the people who sign our checks. The pressure from the top
of these media giants is to push "synergy." Media moguls see "synergy"
when the company's local news or network morning or magazine shows
promote their entertainment division stars or shows. Journalists
see this as "shilling." It is in their nature for business executives
to extol elevated profit margins and stock prices, to promote
"teamwork" and build durable "brands." Journalists, on the other
hand, often think cost-cutting comes at the expense of news coverage,
that journalism is not about "teamwork" but independence, and
that a journalistic "brand" is not possible unless there is "credibility,"
which comes only from good, independent and often expensive journalism
to support more bureaus in more cities and more painstaking investigative
reporting.
This leaves journalists with a couple
of challenges. The first is to learn a common language so that
we might, gently, educate our naive bosses about journalism's
unavoidable inefficiencies -- waiting for sources to return calls,
making airport connections, finding second sources, arranging
interviews and digging through documents. The second is for journalists
who embrace the romantic notion that ours is a profession that
citizens in a democracy rely on, to act more professionally and
insist that journalism is not an instrument to sell advertising.
Ken Auletta writes about media
and communication for The New Yorker and is the author,
most recently, of "Backstory: Inside the Business of News."
