Under Siege   

The public's contempt for the mainstream media seems more intense than ever before. Can this relationship be saved?

Ask news professionals to describe the mood out there about their craft and many use similar words:

"Mistrustful. Cynical. Resentful," says Sandra Mims Rowe, editor of the Oregonian in Portland.

"Critical, skeptical, hostile, unhappy," says Los Angeles Times media critic David Shaw.

"Angry," says Jim Gels, publisher of the Duluth News-Tribune in Minnesota. "At times hostile. Almost, in some cases, unwilling to listen."

Explaining our business is often an excercise in self-defense. Michael Marcotte, news director for KPLU-FM, an NPR affiliate at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, recalls his recent speech to a civic group in Fircrest, population 5,500. He started to tell his audience that "journalism should be as good as it's ever been," when "suddenly I'm the lightning rod for all this contempt."

Hostility toward the media underlies the outrage over Connie Chung's "between you and me" exchange with Newt Gingrich's mother and the bipartisan support for Sen. Robert Byrd's effort to force journalists to disclose their outside income if they want to cover the Senate (see Free Press, page 10). Debate on the proposal quickly became a press-bashing exercise; not a single senator rose to defend the beleaguered media.

It's become harder not to take the criticism personally. Gels relates a summer encounter at the golf course, when a business acquaintance demanded to know how he could hire such ignorant, badly prepared reporters. "This was unsolicited, unprompted, after a 'good morning' exchange," says Gels. The incident was "a bit of an anomaly," but Gels says he's heard similar stories from others.

Ed Breen, managing editor of the Chronicle-Tribune in Marion, Indiana, asks, "Is anyone telling you that it isn't as much fun as it used to be?"

Americans have had a falling out with the Fourth Estate, enough so that reader and viewer attitudes today are the stuff of major news stories, not just academic and trade journals. Their complaint is consistent, and rising in intensity: Journalism is "too negative, too negative, too negative," says Andrew Kohut, director of the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press. The bad blood is such that a majority of participants in a recent center survey said that the press gets in the way of the country's efforts to solve its problems.

What this means is in dispute among journalists. To many, a bad reception goes with the territory. But to others, the bleak surveys and grim anecdotes lay down a challenge. Behind them is a public sense of betrayal. And behind the betrayal are high expectations of the press, many the same expectations that we have of ourselves. The common ground deserves attention.

Why so much anger against the media? James Warren, the Chicago Tribune's outspoken Washington bureau chief, cited some of the reasons at a forum last May at American University.

"I was just jotting some notes to myself, and realizing the extent to which people do view us as hypocritical, privacy-invading, emotionally and practically remote from them, paternalistic and prone to frequent error," he said. "And there's ample evidence to support each of those beliefs. All of which melds into what I find a very depressing – visceral almost – disdain of us."

Seated to Warren's right was Joann Byrd, then the Washington Post's ombudsman. From some 45,000 telephone calls in her three-year tenure, Byrd told the assembly, she had concluded that "people don't see journalism as public service anymore."

Instead they believe "that journalists are engaged in self-service – getting ratings, selling newspapers or making their careers,..that our ideas about detachment are so much hogwash... They feel cheated, I think, that the rules changed and nobody told them."

A month before the forum, U.S. News & World Report's John Leo noted in a nationally syndicated column that there were three sessions on "Why America Hates the Press" during the American Society of Magazine Editors meeting in New York. "The self-flagellating panel discussion is almost a must at media conventions," he wrote.

Besides the talk were treatises. Leo mentioned two: In a December issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik attacked the media's "weird, free-form nastiness." In March, Paul Starobin of the National Journal took to the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review to castigate the "cynical" Washington press corps as "A Generation of Vipers."

Leo might have put his own magazine on the list. U.S. News in January identified the press' key excess as "edge" or "attitude," closing the piece with a quote from Marvin Kalb, the NBC veteran who is now director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "Why do Americans hate the press?" Kalb asked. "Because you deserve it."

The public rancor comes against a backdrop of deep concern about the future of traditional news outlets. Newspaper circulation continues to decline. Two more U.S. cities – Houston and Milwaukee – have become one-paper towns, and the highly regarded New York Newsday folded in July (see page 56). The networks and newsweeklies struggle against marginalization in an ever-fragmenting marketplace. New media are on the rise in forms that much of the public finds more responsive, from talk radio to the Internet.

So if the mainstream media seem feverish with self-examination, they aren't lacking cause. But have Americans really come to hate the press? Or have they just turned up the volume of a not-so-recent message – that they're fed up with the very forms, conventions and behavior that disturb the press itself?

As Leo observed in the April column, "So many people are so mad at reporters and journalists..they fail to notice how many reporters and journalists share their opinions." Put that way, what looks like a ruinous parting could actually present opportunities for reconciliation. They lie where the public mood converges with our own doubts about our performance.

The American public has always had a cranky side in its view of the press. Twenty-one years ago, the Gallup organization asked 611 adults how much confidence they had in the mass media when it came "to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly." Sixty-nine percent reported either "a great deal" or "a fair amount." But between a quarter and a third – 29 percent – reported "not very much" or "none at all." And this was in April 1974, just months before Richard M. Nixon resigned his presidency over the Watergate scandal – when journalists, according to the rosy view from the '90s, were the saviors of the republic.

Those numbers are almost reversed today. In January, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll of 500 adults found that only 26 percent had a "very positive" or "somewhat positive" impression of the news media. Fifty percent had either "somewhat negative" or "very negative" impressions, and 22 percent described themselves as "neutral."

"There's more criticism of the way the press conducts its business, particularly its watchdog role," Kohut says. "And the attitude is more fundamentally negative than in years."

Gallup surveys show that in the dozen years from 1981 to 1993, the share of Americans who felt that journalists had high ethical standards slid by more than a quarter, from 30 percent to 22 percent.

These are disturbing findings, to be sure. However, in the puckish words of Robert Lichter, codirector of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, "it's important not to be too negative in writing about negativity," lest you contribute to the negativism surrounding the media. Lichter says the public may be "surly. Certainly suspicious. But I think somewhere in there you'd have to use ambivalent."

Deep in a 1993 poll, the Los Angeles Times asked 1,703 respondents whether they had more, less or the same amount of confidence in the news media as they had five years before. The largest share – 43 percent – reported that their confidence was unchanged. Thirty-two percent had less, with most citing sensationalism, incomplete or selective reporting, bias or unfairness, and inaccuracy. Nearly a quarter, 23 percent, actually reported a rise in confidence. Their top reasons demonstrated a healthy appetite for information: more news coverage, more and new technology, and immediate or live coverage.

That data may be spun in any number of ways, some grim. One reading, however, leaves wiggle room for optimism: People haven't given up. Many recognize and appreciate that changes in the media will deliver even more of what they want and need to know. What they complain about includes the same things a lot of thoughtful journalists dislike about the way the job is being done.

The correlation between the public's attitude and the press' isn't perfect. But even on points where a minority of the press agrees with the charges against it, the minorities are large, in the neighborhood of 40 percent.

Early this year, the Times Mirror Center compared views of the media among the public, the press, and national and local opinion leaders. "What we found is that the public had a favorable attitude toward the press, but objected to some of its practices," Kohut says. While the public gave overall grades of A and B to the print and electronic media, he adds, the press was also judged "too intrusive, too negative, driving controversies rather than just reporting on them."

Meanwhile, Kohut says, "the press owns up to a lot of its own criticism." The spring study, titled "The People, the Press & their Leaders," found that a majority of the newspeople surveyed thought that public anger with the press was justified, either in unqualified terms or in part.

Forty-seven percent of those working for the national media and 56 percent of the local journalists polled answered either yes or a qualified yes when asked if there was validity in the charge that "the personal values of people in the news media often make it difficult for them to understand and cover such things as religion and family values."

An overwhelming 80 percent of the national journalists and 75 percent of the locals agreed that "too little attention is paid to complex issues." And 58 percent of the national sample and 51 percent of the local agreed with the public's complaint that "the press inadequately covers positive developments."

The biggest difference between the press' self-assessment and the views of its audience was over the adversarial nature of the media. But even here, a third of the journalists found validity in charges that "the press is more adversarial than necessary." Meanwhile, 41 percent of the national journalists and 33 percent of the locals said that in covering the personal and ethical behavior of politicians, the press was fueling controversy rather than only reporting the news.

The survey made headlines for its finding that the press is less cynical than the public in its view of politicians. The news value was in the element of surprise, given the hits the press takes for excess cynicism. Some observers, however, were at no loss to explain.

"The press sees leadership up close and personal, and sees the good with the bad," Kohut says. "The public, increasingly, sees only the bad."

We know what's wrong, well enough that when we hear it described a lot of us squirm.

In 1989, The New Yorker's Janet Malcolm wrote "The Journalist and the Murderer," an account of how author Joe McGinniss maintained Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald's cooperation during research for the book "Fatal Vision." MacDonald was kept in the belief that the book would cast doubt on his guilt in the celebrated murders of his pregnant wife and two children, even after McGinniss' opinion began to tilt against him.

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible," Malcolm observed in her opening paragraphs. "He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Malcolm soon would face ethical problems of her own, accused of fabricating quotes in a legal battle that ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, the "Fatal Vision" story caused discomfort in America's newsrooms. At the Milwaukee Journal, a veteran editor tacked Malcolm's piece to a bulletin board with a memo recommending it to the brave. Anyone but a journalistic virgin or saint had committed McGinniss' offense.

Eugene Assaf is an attorney with the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis, a Chicago law firm that represents a number of corporate clients against the media. It handled the 1993 lawsuit against NBC after "Dateline" rigged the explosion of a General Mot©rs truck. Assaf indicts several practices that he feels contribute to journalism's credibility problems, specifying that he does not speak for his firm or its clients:

"Reporters request to talk about subject X, and you sit down for the interview and they start pulling out documents that relate to Y and get hostile," he says. Such behavior is "increasingly common, not the exception."

He finds fault with an unexceptional strategy of investigative reporting: "The [last-minute] call to the subject... One does not get to participate in the formation of the story. The story is already done." The reporter may refuse to go off the record, when he has likely done so with others as the story progressed. He imposes a deadline. "The story is going to run in a couple of days. Ask how long they've been working on it, and they tell you three months," Assaf says. "That's not fair."

Assaf doesn't see much bias of the ideological variety. The liberal-conservative paradigms "avoid the issue," which to him is bias in favor of negativism.

Assaf's comments could be dismissed as self-interested. But like Malcolm's McGinniss story, the lawyer's observations prick the conscience.

Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Washington Post and author of the 1993 newspaper critique "Media Circus," pulls no punches: "I think we bear 95 percent of the responsibility for the low repute in which we are held. In no other profession would top executives scratch their heads and wonder why it is that a substantial proportion of the customers think they're scum."

Newspaper ombudsmen deal with unhappy readers for a living. How do they gauge the public mood about the media? While suggesting that some perspective is in order – "People who like what the paper is doing do not call us," wrote Gina Lubrano of the San Diego Union-Tribune – several of the eight ombudsmen who replied to an AJR questionnaire gave the critics their due.

Ombudsman Pat Riley of the Orange County Register summarized the common themes in his response: "The dread blame-the-messenger factor," inescapable since the media must deliver some bad news; allegations of bias; accuracy problems; the ready availability of live coverage, which has enabled Americans to judge for themselves and to catch errors of fact or opinionated nuance in reporting.

John Sweeney, public editor for the News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, wrote that the press "makes an easy target. We make too many mistakes. We're hard to read. We avoid real issues and go for scandal or inside politics. We still think we're the only game in town. And we really don't listen to our critics..no matter what we say."

Jean Otto of Denver's Rocky Mountain News wrote that the public seems "willing to draw lines that the media, whose primary concern is news, have been unwilling to accept. Every time an ordinary person, or even a public figure, faces a battery of reporters and photographers out to get a story, people put themselves in that person's shoes and hate the press for going too far."

Otto also teaches journalism, and finds her students "much more restrained about what they think journalists should do. They want respect for people's privacy, public figures and celebrities no less than the family next door... They often put human values above news values and think the media do too little of that."

The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz wrote that "in many ways, the media seem to have given up all pretense of being objective middlemen, simple purveyors of information. All over the TV and radio dial, journalistic pundits constantly proffer their boisterous opinions on the weighty issues of the day (see "The Pundit Explosion," page 24), reinforcing citizens' perceptions that they are not simply delivering the news, they are shaping the news. If that's the case, they are much fairer game for people who are unhappy with the news they read and see."

In the view of many experts, the relationship between the mainstream press and mainstream America can be summed up in a single word: alienated. For a complex variety of reasons, they say, the press is out of touch with the real concerns of real people, especially on two fronts – political and cultural. And the real people, meanwhile, have it in for the press.

"Journalists have made a virtue of alienation," says Jon Katz, a longtime newspaper editor and former media critic for Rolling Stone and New York magazine who now writes for Wired. "If you ask a journalist, 'Do you know people are ticked off at you?' they'll say, 'Yeah, it means I'm doing my job.' "

William Greider, a former Washington Post assistant managing editor, remarked upon alienation in his book, "Who Will Tell the People": "Like the other primary political institutions, the press has lost viable connections to its own readers and grown more distant from them... As an institution, the media have gravitated toward elite interests and converged with those powerful few who already dominate politics. People sense this about the news, even if they are unable to describe how it happened or why they feel so alienated from the newspapers that purport to speak for them."

The 1992 presidential campaign was instructive. It marked the first time that both major party candidates, not to mention a renegade third, made substantial use of "new media" – talk shows, MTV, other electronic forums with voters. It was an end run around the press corps. Far from objecting, the citizenry was enlivened.

"Ross Perot went to the extreme length of shunning the press and mocking it," Thomas E. Patterson, a Syracuse University political scientist, wrote in his 1993 book, "Out of Order." Perot's "fights with the press helped him: Each time he criticized the press, the switchboard of his Dallas headquarters lit up with calls from people volunteering to join his campaign."

And there is research to support the notion that the public views the press as part of the problem.

Five years ago, the Kettering Foundation sought to assess the health of American democracy. With the Harwood Group, a Maryland public issues research firm, the foundation conducted focus groups in 10 U.S. cities. When the work was done, David Mathews, Kettering's president, wrote that there was nothing less accurate than the popular view that the public is apathetic about public affairs.

"In fact, they are just the opposite," Mathews concluded in "Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America." "They feel as though they have been locked out of their own homes – and they react the way people do when they have been evicted from their own property." When people named "exactly who dislodged them from their rightful place in American democracy," they pointed at "politicians..at powerful lobbyists, and – this came as a surprise – at people in the media. They see these three groups as a political class, the rulers of an oligarchy that has replaced democracy."

When the Kettering researchers probed their focus groups on the subject of the media, participants complained that oversimplified sound bites left them bereft of any real substance, that reporting on policy issues was hampered by media negativism. "Scouring the streets for personal scandals, badgering some people on aspects of their personal lives, playing up arguments over small points between campaigners and among officeholders – it is this kind of coverage that troubles the American people," the study concluded.

The public journalism movement, an effort to "reconnect" newspapers to their communities, grew in part out of such frustration with political coverage dominated by charges and countercharges and inside baseball at the expense of substantive issues that affect voters (see "The Gospel of Public Journalism," September 1994).

If you had only one line," Jean Gaddy Wilson advises, it should be this: "Demographics is destiny." Wilson, executive director of New Directions for News at the University of Missouri, says the mainstream media have fallen behind the demographic curve and all that it portends.

Newspapers, newsweeklies, conventional television represent old authority to many Americans, she observes. "Old authority doesn't fit current reality. People live very different lives than the events that are put forward every day [as news]... 'Roseanne' and 'The Simpsons' teach us more about ourselves."

Wilson notes that no one thing has caused this disconnect. She names a few contributors: "One in eight of us was born in a foreign country... Men are becoming single parents... Well-educated women are choosing to have kids without men. The vast changes in aging. People don't retire, they undertake another career... Forty-six percent of children 13 to 17 own a computer."

Media content too often fails to fit the dynamic demographics, she says. Moreover, it follows the old formulas with slavish dedication.

And so Americans fail to see themselves in the one form of commerce protected by their Constitution. That their perplexity and disappointment convert to anger doesn't surprise Wilson. "This was once a place you could trust," she says of the press. "It's as if your mother said she loved you and she turned out to be terrible."

Wired's Katz feels that two developments in particular have put the mainstream press in trouble: First is the "tragic alienation of the young, which has come about through a relentless attack [through the media] on youth culture." The message traditional media deliver to youth is that they are stupid slackers, that they can't or won't read, Katz says.

Second is a trend that he thinks history will view "as a terrible mistake – this broadening of the journalistic mandate to include people's privacy. Journalists have actually permitted themselves to become the new moral squads..[and] I think people resent it tremendously."

He says the latter development, which made Donna Rice, Gennifer Flowers and Paula Corbin Jones household names, has made the journalistic agenda completely different from the public agenda.

Jim Warren says blame for the current mess must be shared. "Yeah, we screw up..," he told the American University audience. "But I also think that somewhere out there is a basic misunderstanding of what we do, how we do it and our role in a democracy."

Max Cacas, NPR's news operations producer, makes similar points. When Americans complain that mainstream media content is irrelevant to their lives, Cacas says, they are failing to uphold their end of an implicit democratic bargain.

"Think about your news junkie... For the most part, that person is going to be well-educated. And then – I hate to say this – I look at the average American who says he doesn't understand why we should care about the U.S.-Japan trade dispute... People aren't being told that the way to understand this is to study."

San Diego's Lubrano acknowledges that a core of her paper's readers have valid complaints. But beyond them are people who get "angry when newspaper stories do not reflect their values and opinions... That anger has been mined by talk show hosts whose political agendas attract listeners of like mind... They fan distrust of the written word by telling listeners what they want to hear."

Larry Fiquette, readers' advocate for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, believes much anti-media sentiment amounts to shooting the messenger: "It's the hot issues of our times..that stir most of the criticism," he wrote. "The messenger covering those issues draws the attention and the apparent hostility... The anger we're hearing stems more likely from Americans' impatience with their leaders' efforts to solve the nation's intensifying problems."

David Bartlett, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, says bleak assessments are magnified by the fact that "the press is the most self-examining and self-critical institution in the world" and by the self-interested nature of much criticism from the outside.

Bartlett says the words he'd choose to describe the public's view of the media mood would be "a lot less negative than our critics would have us believe... The public is skeptical of all big institutions, the media included. And I think that's healthy... I think it's a gross and self-serving misreading of the various polls and studies to suggest that the public is hostile. As long as I'm doing better than the politicians I write about, I'm content."

NBC reporter Gwen Ifill no doubt spoke for many when she observed at American University, in what seemed like a single breath, "We spend an inordinate amount of time navel-gazing, looking at ourselves and saying, 'Oh-woe-is-me-why-do-they-hate-us, oh no – they're yelling at me!'

"I think it's supposed to be my job to take the yelling... For some reason, people just really enjoy bashing us. And I think it's perfectly fine... I don't think that we can expect or demand anyone to feel sorry for us. We are in wonderful perches. I get to sit in the front row and ask the president of the United States questions. I am paid better than most average people for doing what I get to do and what I love to do."

Here she almost paused. "So it doesn't bother me a lot that people hate me."

But for every brave front, each suggestion that the mainstream news media simply go about their business and wait for the pendulum to swing, there is a news professional troubled by the public mood and searching for a way to respond.

Boston's Jurkowitz: "I think we ignore these issues at our grave peril." San Diego's Lubrano: "To be stoic about public opinion is suicide, especially when reader complaints are justified." Duluth's Gels: "No brainer. We all should be worried about it. [It's] the cancer of readership decline."

Advice abounds, from within and without media ranks. At its core is recognition that the mainstream media must communicate more responsively and responsibly, and do both more nimbly. One suggestion recurs: listen. We can't occupy the center of an information universe that no longer has one.

To Jean Gaddy Wilson, "the great yawning opportunity for the media is for them to listen to the people who receive the messages" and change according to the feedback they hear, "just as a number of restaurants are having to develop foods that are low fat – getting rid of the damaging material."

Richard C. Harwood, consultant on the Kettering study, says journalists must ask different sorts of questions and listen differently to the answers elicited – in effect, to share power in shaping coverage. This means, he says, "opening up the conversation rather than looking for the quote for the third graf."

Syracuse University's Patterson tells journalists to "stop making themselves the center of their stories," a problem he says is greater in television but which nonetheless occurs in print. If the messages themselves are given more play, he says, the interpretations journalists love to make will naturally have more credibility.

Lubrano noted that "fewer than 40 newspapers in this country feel they owe their readers a forum by establishing ombudsmen positions. Ombudsmen will not stop readers from being angry at newspapers, but they will give them a voice. Our readers like the idea of having someone around whose job it is to listen to them, especially in these days of voice mail and changing technology."

From Indiana, Ed Breen acknowledges that "if you talk to old codgers like myself, we sat around newsrooms for 30 years and issued decrees about what was good for newspapers. We listen more to readers these days." He mentions Gannett's News 2000 program, which at the Chronicle-Tribune includes a reader advisory group that meets monthly. The paper receives – and runs – more letters to the editor. Asked if the techniques are working, Breen says, "I think it's too soon to tell."

Gels suggests that news executives "get more in touch at the level where things actually happen – reporters, newsmakers, assigning editors – and truly listen... Empathize with our readers, and figure out how something is going to affect them before we print it."

At the Oregonian, Sandy Rowe keeps a file filled with clippings dating back to the 1980s, "all of which have a lede: Credibility of news media has never been lower." She believes the press has heard the message, but that "we have not acted on it enough. Too many of us have tried to see it as someone else's problem, as a problem of perception." Acting on the message, she acknowledges, "has to be a long process, not an event."

She urges journalists to develop expertise. "Not enough of us know enough about the subjects we report on. And when there weren't as many media outlets and things weren't as complex, that may have been satisfactory." It isn't any longer, she says.

Doesn't the public bear part of the blame for the decay of public discourse? Is there a laziness factor out there? Rowe regards the question as irrelevant. "We can only take responsibility," she says, "for our share."