Jennie Buckner, former vice president for news with Knight-Ridder and editor of "The Charlotte Observer" newspaper from 1993-2004, served as Davidson College’s 2005-2006 James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy during the spring semester. She recently delivered the college’s annual Batten Lecture, which is reprinted here. Readers interested in participating in a discussion of matters raised in the talk are invited to visithttp://pressingmatters.davidson.edu, a blog established by Buckner's students.
 Thank all of you for coming tonight. I feel so honored to have been the Batten Professor these past five months. Many of the best lessons I ever learned, about journalism and about life, came from James Knox Batten. He was a talented journalist and an exceptional leader who lived his values, and I was lucky enough to have him as a mentor and friend. So teaching here at the college Jim loved, walking the paths he once walked, has been more meaningful than I can say. To the members of the Batten family and the Knight Foundation, thank you for supporting this visiting professorship. To the faculty and administrators, I appreciate how you have welcomed me into this wonderful community. To the students here, I owe you big-time, for you have made our classes interesting, lively and full of discovery.
There’s an old definition of journalism I have always liked a lot. Journalism, it says, is the oxygen of democracy. What a great metaphor! It speaks directly to the meaning and purpose I found in my 35 years of newspaper work. I loved how newspapers, for just a couple of quarters, could empower people, giving them all kinds of information to make smart choices. I loved how newspapers, through just a story, could introduce folks to someone they never otherwise would have met, and could get them to care about that person’s life. I loved how newspapers, with just one feisty editorial, could shake things up and start people talking until, before they knew it, they were ready to do something. I loved how journalism sometimes could be oxygen: breathing life into a community, giving breath to its civic soul.
But recently, as I have looked at the news from my new perch, I have seen more clearly something I do not love. It is the thick, ugly layer of pollution hanging over our media landscape. It is the pollution of infotainment and tabloid news. It is ever-more-shallow news. It is shrill opinion, masquerading as news, and error-prone instant news. It is hyping-every-tiny-twist-of-the-news news. It is comedy about the news coming to actually be the news, for some people.
Yes, there is still high-quality journalism available for those who seek it -- and thank goodness for that! But just as no one can avoid the unhealthy affects of air pollution, so no one can avoid the noxious fumes of today’s news pollution. Make no mistake, lousy journalism is hurting us. It is reducing our collective intelligence and turning us into a understand-less, care-less people who don’t even see the value in showing up to vote.
The decline of civic life was one of Jim Batten’s concerns. He would remind his editors that the quality of our journalism and the quality of our democracy are knit tightly together. He warned us that if one started to unravel, so would the other. Today, all around us, we see signs of the Great Unraveling. Interest in news, and especially news about public affairs, has been dropping for years – especially among young people. So has voting and participation in public life. Now both are approaching crisis levels. Consider:
 Only 47 percent of people aged 18 to 24 cast ballots in the last presidential election. But at least that number was better than the 2000 election, when only 36 percent of young people showed up at the polls. Just half the people polled in a 2005 National Youth Survey agreed that voting is important. When the Carnegie Corporation asked young people why more of them did not vote or get involved civically, the chief reason was that they did not have enough information about candidates or the issues.
Our democracy has started to wheeze. In a speech last year, former vice president Al Gore told the story of how he flipped on the television to learn more about a major news story. Instead of the big international event, the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years.
Now this was not just a hiccup of editorial judgment; it was not a momentary breakdown of good sense. It was emblematic, Gore said, of how something has gone “basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions.”
Gore continued: “Clearly the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to ‘glue eyeballs to the screen’ in order to build ratings and sell advertising.”
We all know what he’s talking about, don’t we? Most evenings, local TV news is all crime all the time, with the weather, a few fires and the requisite oddball feature thrown in. If you want to see just how odd the oddball is getting – and you missed the hiccupping man –, you can go to a blog created by some of my students, at pressingmatters.davidson.edu. On this blog, amid their fine media criticism, you will find a television clip that also speaks to the dumbing down of news. The story is about leprechaun sightings in Alabama. You heard me right. Leprechauns… In Alabama.
Now, I have no problem with the occasional “bright,” as newspaper people call such features. I have put many brights into the paper myself. Editors like them because they can bring a little levity to an otherwise serious report. The problem is, there is less and less substance these days.
Some TV producers, with cynical eyes trained on polls which show declining interest in public affairs, are simply shrugging and saying: Let them watch leprechauns. This condescending calculation, that viewers are too stupid to want anything serious, means people get less and less reporting on important issues, which, in turn, leads to less and less interest in public affairs, which of course leads to even more-dumbed-down news, spinning in an accelerating downward spiral.
 Many people tell me they have given up on television news, that they no longer watch it at all. I understand the reaction. But simply turning off the tube is not the answer. Just giving up means giving in -- to something destructive. The majority of people still do get their news from television, and when television doesn’t inform them, they are unable to act effectively as citizens. They deserve, we deserve, some of that good-old-fashioned-oxygen-of-democracy journalism.
The good news in this story is a growing reform-the-media movement has begun asking for just that. It is making waves and making change. Tonight we join an important national conversation on how citizens can help save journalism – and in the process help save democracy. Davidson is just the place for that conversation, for students, professors and educational leaders could have a special role to play.
First, we must better understand the forces that are causing serious cracks in journalism’s foundations. They include 1. Increasing business pressures, which are harming news-gathering capacity and quality in many places; 2. Weakening journalistic values, which are being replaced by entertainment values, and 3. Decreasing interest in news, which has reached alarmingly low levels in young people.
These are powerful forces, no doubt about it. But we can do something about all of them. It all starts with raising our expectations -- and then raising Cain. And we need to start now. Retired television journalist Bill Moyers reminds us why: “It’s not simply the cause of journalism that’s at stake today, but the cause of American liberty itself. As Tom Paine put it ‘The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.’”
This is a cause of great worth. Let’s make it our cause. We can tackle news pollution the same way people decided to take on air and water pollution, creating the environmental movement. I would remind the students here tonight that young people helped lead that movement, and it is being kept alive by young people today. You can help lead this charge.
 First, let’s talk about the business pressures. The headlines were grim in 2005 – and I’m just talking about stories on the media. A recent State of the News Media report recites a litany of newsroom cutbacks, all of which were aimed at appeasing Wall Street analysts and investors. But the biggest shareholders of my old company, Knight Ridder, were not appeased, despite some big whacks at budgets. Knight Ridder’s profit margins had slipped and so had the stock price. In November, the three largest investors forced the country’s second largest newspaper company to put itself up for sale.
I was stunned. Although the profit margins had fallen below some of its peers, Knight Ridder was still making lots of money. The company had tried to do what Wall Street wanted, while struggling to fulfill its public service responsibilities. Indeed, it had become one of the most cost-conscious newspaper companies in recent years. But the major investors wanted the stock to move up and the management to move out. When the sale to the McClatchy Company is finalized in a month or two, Knight Ridder will be no more. What were the lessons here?
Dan Neuharth, in an article for USA Today, said the lesson for other CEOs of public newspaper companies should be: “Don’t compromise journalistic standards to please Wall Street.”
“Newspaper leaders,” he wrote, “must hold strong journalistic sensibilities when facing shareholder pressure to maximize profits.”
The nation’s 13 major publicly traded newspaper companies publish half of the papers we read every day. Business pressures are especially intense on these papers – and on their websites, which increasingly are important sources of news. Depending on how well strong journalistic traditions migrate online, Neuharth says, “we’ll either be beneficiaries or losers.”
I should note that some of these corporations still produce high-quality news. But the point is, the system makes it increasingly hard for them to do so. Wall Street keeps pushing – and so we must provide some push-back to help counter their unrelenting pressure. All of us who value good journalism must let media leaders know that newspapers and TV news divisions cannot be turned into cash cows, milked for Wall Street. You do not need an MBA to know that milking strategies weaken, and eventually kill, businesses. Milking – getting high margins through heavy cost controls -- is not wise stewardship of these vital community institutions.
When you notice signs of poor stewardship, when you see important topics going under covered, complain. Ask your neighbors to complain. Write to the editor or TV news director and tell them you want a vigorous press and responsible journalism. When you see great journalism, let them know you recognize it – and want more of it. Copy the corporate owners. Remind them they are stewards – or should be -- of something that matters in your town.
Think of the probing, important journalism done in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. We deserve more of that kind of work more often, in every city. It shouldn’t take an act of God to get it.
One of the media reform movement’s big concerns is the increasing consolidation of media. In 1983, 50 corporations owned a majority of the news companies. By 1992, fewer than two dozen of them controlled 90 percent of the news media. In 2003, the number had fallen to six media conglomerates. This consolidation has meant less diversity of news and more bottom-line pressure. More consolidation is likely on the way.
The Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce a rewriting of media ownership rules this year. These rules currently limit how many television and radio stations one company can own in a single market. Rules also keep one company from owning both the major newspaper in a community and television stations there. Media companies are lobbying to have those rules relaxed. Do you think a less competitive news town is a good thing? Do you think it is in the public interest to have fewer reporters holding government accountable? For that’s what will happen as news departments are combined and begin to share content in order to save money. I urge you to find out more about what is at stake. Go to the website www.freepress.net to learn more.
Corporate owners want us to believe – they want to believe themselves -- that they balance the needs of investors and the community. Some try. But, the fact is the Wall Street suits have elbowed the rest of us out of the picture. It is time we stepped back in. Last year, activists from the advocacy group MoveOn did just that. They presented the chairman of Tribune Co. with a 45,000-signature petition objecting to job cuts at Tribune newspapers.
Noah Winer, a spokesman for the group, explained: “Politicians and corporations who should be held accountable by vigilant watchdog journalism will instead by covered by a staff that is stretched too thin,” he said. The Tribune leadership declined to meet with MoveOn, but the company is on notice that citizens are now watching the watchdogs.
A vigorous press requires a strong corps of reporters – and the ranks are getting thinner. Newspapers have lost about 7 percent of their news professionals since 2000. At the Philadelphia Inquirer today there are about half as many reporters covering metropolitan Philadelphia as there were in 1980. Doesn’t sound good, does it? Not unless you are a corrupt politician.
News magazines, along with radio and television, also have been cutting. This is happening not because they all are suddenly losing money; they are not, even though the Internet is giving them more competition. Television stations can make profit margins in the 40 to 50 percent range. The average profit margin for newspapers last year – even with the loss of some advertising -- was 20 percent. Many businesses would love to achieve numbers like that. Your grocer makes do with a 4 percent profit margin. The cutting is happening because most of these big media CEOs feel they must show Wall Street they can run a tighter ship than the next guy. News coverage takes the hit in too many places.
Certainly, you say, if you’re not happy with the quality of your home-town news, you can go elsewhere. You can always turn to the New York Times or USA Today if you don’t like your local fish wrap. But when too many readers turn to national newspapers or websites, it can harm a community. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the Wharton School, has studied what happens when circulation of the New York Times increases in out-of-town markets. A story in California Magazine describes what he found: When the Times moves in, voter participation in local elections decreases. It turns out these new Times readers soon give up on their local paper as a “second read.” And, in time, they become far less involved in local affairs. The title of Waldfogel’s paper is “Does The New York Times Spread Ignorance and Apathy?’ It looks like the answer is yes.
This is how the Great Unraveling of journalism and democracy plays out, one corporate cut-back at a time, one election at a time. That is why you must care about journalism’s business pressures even if you are not a news junkie.
Conrad Fink, a journalism professor of the University of Georgia, states,” If we’re less able to support vigorous, independent journalism, that’s a threat to society. It has not really occurred to most people that the heart and soul of journalism is being decided right now.”
Which brings me to the second force threatening responsible journalism: Will journalistic values or entertainment values determine what you see? Veteran journalist Ted Koppel describes how consultants, accountants and demographers drive network decisions. “No longer do the television network news divisions show the American public what it ought to see; rather, they provide certain favored age groups with what the networks believe they want to see. It is purely a question of what sells.”
Certainly TV has always cared about ratings, but in its early decades, news was viewed as a public service. TV news was not required to make a profit. Times have changed.
Ratings pressure in local television is brutal. News directors want stories that hook readers with high drama and great pictures. The result? You are about 50 times more likely to view a story on a murder than one about science, child care or pollution, according to blogger Alan Mutter. His research also found you are about 20 times more likely to see a fire on TV news than a report on education.
Try finding any coverage of politics or government on your local television news, and you will spend a long time waiting. The public interest group Alliance for Better Campaigns monitored 45 stations in six cities. They looked at 7,560 hours of programming. Of that, a mere 13 hours were about local public affairs – that is less than one-fifth of 1 percent. So much for the oxygen of democracy.
A key question for journalists is how they think about the people for whom they are reporting. Are they citizens, or are they simply an audience? Cable television has clearly decided it’s after an audience. Now they are going after us with “faux” news -- opinion shows packaged with the look and feel of real news. These news/talk shows are cheaper to produce than real journalism, which actually requires reporters. And besides, opinion mongering has proved to be popular, especially if the host offers his views with bombast and even vitriol, as so many big names do. Facts don’t matter much, and real information is lost amidst the propaganda.
Bill Moyers explains the danger: “An indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy…”
Our democracy can’t operate well with a set of “red facts” and another set of “blue facts.” It needs citizens who get the difference between fact and opinion, and viewers who understand the difference between a journalist and a talk-show host. A national survey found that one in four Americans identified radio’s Rush Limbaugh as a journalist.
We also need citizens who believe it is their duty to be well informed. That brings me to the third force threatening journalism today: the dramatic drop of interest in news by young people.
Back in the early 70s, when I was a freshly-minted copy editor just out of Ohio State’s journalism school, about 47 percent of people who were in their mid 20s read a newspaper every day. By 2002, that number had dropped to only 19 percent. If you think the reason for the decline is that young people were rushing to the internet or TV for news, you would be wrong. Only 17 percent of the under-30 crowd watches network news regularly. And while young people do love the Internet, only 11 percent say that news is a main reason for logging on. Sadly, most young Americans are just not that interested in current events.
Students in my seminar interviewed other Davidson students about their news habits – or lack of them. Most people said they hadn’t enough time, or the news just didn’t interest them much. Getting more young people interested in current events, my students decided, would require a culture shift. Somehow, they said, the news would just need to matter more. People would have to talk about it more in classes and with their friends. I think they are on to something.
Media literacy programs could be part of a larger effort to help a tuned-out generation tune back in and find its civic spirit. These courses, which have become popular in some parts of the country, should be expanded. They can help young people sort out the many different media messages they absorb each day, teach students why good journalism is important and help them become more sophisticated news consumers.
Author and journalism professor David Mindich suggests in his book “Tuned Out” that colleges could help re-kindle news interest. “One of the quickest ways to change news habits is for parents, teachers and older colleagues to make sure news matters – to us and to young people. And we need to make sure young people know they will be judged on how conversant they are too.”
Back in the sixties, when I applied to college, no one asked me about my volunteer activities. Now, colleges seek young people who care about volunteering, and they ask about it on the application. And guess what? High school kids really care about service work. They are big volunteers, and learn the value of giving back. Colleges have changed the culture. They can do it again.
What if every college had an essay question on their application asking about an important current issue? What if the College Board created a subject test on public affairs, which all schools required? Do you think that would have college-bound kids boning up on current events? Of course it would.
Civics classes should be recognized as important. Unfortunately, they have fallen by the wayside in lots of cities. Mindich talks about a visit he made to a civics class in Colchester, Vermont. The students there were able to talk intelligently about current issues. They were able to discuss the First Amendment. Mindich recalls:” It left me wondering why civics is not more universally taught. The answer is that civics and current events are valued by neither national standards nor colleges… Civics and current events are seen as expendable frills.”
They are not frills. If we agree we have to help save journalism, if we agree with Moyers that “the sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” then let us get on with our cause. Being reasonably conversant on current events would be a good place to start. We could make it so.
There is something each one of us could do to help save journalism. Professors could help by using worthwhile news articles in the classroom more frequently. Students could help by e-mailing interesting articles to their friends. Small steps count. At the start of the environmental movement, people learned to value the planet each time they recycled.
If you want to help save journalism, you could write letters or op-ed articles. You could become an advocate for policy change, joining up with one of the many organizations working on media reform. You could help start a news council – right here in North Carolina. News councils, which operate in Minnesota and Washington state, are journalists and citizens who work together to help restore credibility and public trust in the press. They act as “outside ombudsmen,” mediating and resolving complaints. By putting the bright spotlight of publicity on problems, they often can get action, stopping practices that one complaining reader might never get resolved. The Knight Foundation is offering funding to help start more news councils. Perhaps people at Davidson and journalists at The Charlotte Observer could get the ball rolling.
I will plant one more little seed of an idea here. What if Davidson College, perhaps in partnership with UNC Charlotte’s journalism program, sponsored a forum on the future of journalism and democracy and how to strengthen both? Suppose it brought together citizens and journalists from all over our region, or even the nation – students and seniors, TV news execs and political science professors, editors and educational leaders? What if they sat down together to talk about what “better journalism” might look like? They could discuss who might start that news council, and who would investigate curriculum for media literacy courses from grade school through college. They could talk about how to launch a media-monitoring group, and how to better support quality journalism.
It is important to support organizations like my former paper The Charlotte Observer, where journalists are trying to hold onto journalistic values. Some newsrooms that still do think of about what citizens need to know. So give them a pat on the back when they deserve it.
Journalists these days feel under siege – what with all the cutbacks and consolidation and uncertainties. They are attacked by the right and the left and the cost-cutters too. Journalists know they need the public. And we, the public, know we need them.
Journalists can’t save journalism all by themselves. Many are trying. They are working to become more credible. They are embracing the internet and multi-media, learning new skills to make their journalism more engaging for this new era. Most want to do meaningful work. Most hate the tabloid trends. They understand what all the criticism is about – and indeed, they are critical too.
So, why don’t we help them save journalism? What if we thought of ourselves as stewards of the First Amendment, too, right along with America’s journalists? We could decide, all of us, no more tabloid, no more leprechauns. And the stories would become better, more substantive, and we would start to read them more often.
What if students became more media literate and began to read more news? They just might vote more often. They just might become citizen journalists – the kind who value credibility. By adding their voices to the media mix, they could make news more diverse, more interesting, and more authentic.
What if news councils really did help restore readers’ trust? If we raised our sights together, with citizens and journalists expecting more of each other and getting it, journalism truly could be the oxygen of democracy. |
