Good
News and Bad News
for Television Journalism
Overall, television news is losing sight of citizens
in its quest to deliver as many consumers to advertisers and maximize
profit, said speaker after speaker.
Former ABC News Executive Producer Av Westin said
that minute-by-minute ratings are used to keep African-American reporters and
anchors off the air because these measures of audience size show blips when
black talent is reporting. In over 100 interviews with network journalists, he said he was told
“blacks don’t give us good demo[graphic]s [viewers with good customer
potential].”
“We are on a downward slope,” Westin said, “the
bottom line has trumped the journalistic line every single time.” His
generation of news directors was trained by Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly and
Walter Cronkite, Westin explained, but the current generation of news
executives are schooled only in “ratings, ratings, ratings.”
Rick Kaplan, former news executive and producer at
CNN and ABC News, said the minute-by-minute audience ratings are being used
more and more to decide what’s included and what’s not in newscasts, to the
detriment of journalism. “It’s a tremendous mistake to ask what people want
from the news,” he said. “We may expect more of the public than it can deliver,
but that shouldn’t make a difference in how you report the news.” Avoiding
telling people what they don’t want to know for fear they will switch channels
is “the opposite of journalism.”
Kaplan, who recently resigned as executive producer
of CNN, said producers now calculate the cost/benefit ratio of stories. “You
now think twice when you send crews…. Is this a story that’s going to get me an
audience return.”
Journalism Professor David Kurpius reported on
surveys of local TV news showing 26 percent of news time spent on crime.
Education rated less than 5 percent of the newscasts. “Fear is entertaining,”
commented Matthew Kerbel, another journalism teacher.
In his keynote address, Professor Robert McChesney,
argued that the “glory days” of American
journalism lie in the past--from
the 1950s to the mid-1980s. Issues important to the poor and lower middle
class are overlooked by news corporations focused on the wealthier consumers
advertisers favor.
“Business news is going mainstream,” he noted, while
labor reporting languishes. The number of prisoners in the U.S. has tripled
recently, but attracted little notice because most inmates come from poor
families. White collar crime is rarely reported and not rigorously prosecuted,
he said.
McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois
and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, charged that public relations
practitioners hired by powerful companies and government do more and more of
the reporting for newsrooms in which fewer reporters attempt to fill more
newscast time and space on web sites.
--John McManus (the author participated on one of the
panels)
