Easy Listening, Hard Choices   

The public's voice must be heard, but it can't overwhelm journalistic judgment.

"Listen to the voices."

– Sly and the

Family Stone

t's become a popular rallying cry in many American newsrooms: Listen to the readers (or viewers or listeners). Convene some focus groups and find out what the people really want.

Obviously there are good reasons to listen. A news organization that is out of touch with its constituency is doomed to fail.

Listening can stimulate bold new thinking about what to cover, and how. For too long American journalism was awfully formulaic: government, courts, cops. Too many building stories. Too many process stories. Not enough people stories.

One of the more exciting developments in American newsrooms is the ever widening range of beats. Covering what people care about passionately, covering things that deeply affect their lives, makes all the sense in the world. More attention to lifestyles, religion, family issues, the elderly – it does nothing but make a newspaper or television station better.

And on a micro level, listening to people – whether at big official meetings convened by the paper or, even better, by reporters out in the field instead of in the office or the press room – is a marvelous trove of story ideas, which are, after all, the lifeblood of journalism.

When I was the city editor of the Miami Herald, the paper sent a bunch of senior editors on a barnstorming tour through Dade County. Every few weeks we would show up in a different neighborhood – Coconut Grove one time, Homestead the next. The paper ran so many house ads for these one-night stands that a friend of mine complained they were becoming dartboard material.

This was an intense pressure cooker of a newsroom, and Miami was (and is) an incredibly hot news town. There were times when adding these gigs to an already oversubscribed life seemed about as enticing as the city's August humidity.

But I never left one of those meeting without a long list of tips and suggestions to follow up on.

Years before, when I was on the metro desk of the Philadelphia Bulletin, my boss and I wanted to make our report better reflect the grit and the funk and the quirkiness of that wonderfully idiosyncratic city.

ão we decided to create a neighborhood team. We divided the city into four quadrants and assigned a reporter to each one. Their mandate was to cover the life and the rhythm of the city, not the ins and outs of the bureaucracy.

It was astonishing how hard it was to convince them we were serious. It was clear that they were more comfortable gravitating to the zoning board than the street corner or the playground. But once the message got through, the alignment paid big dividends.

So sure, listening is a no-lose. But what do you do with what you hear?

The voice of the people should be a factor in decison making about coverage, perhaps often a big factor. But a factor, not a blueprint.

Take the CBS TV affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. It was so troubled by its newscasts' low ratings that it fired the news staff and canceled the news for over a month (see Free Press, page 14).

When the news was resurrected in February, it featured a minute per news category – a minute for local news, a minute for state news, a minute for world news. And essentially no reporters.

"Everything in these newscasts," says Eric Land, WIAT's general manager, "is there because people in focus groups told us that is what they wanted."

You got a problem with that? Yeah, I think I do.

®ake Bosnia. This was the ultimate anti-focus group story. I doubt if Bob Woodward, Seymour Hersh and Mike Isikoff together could have found a focus group that was demanding more bBosnia coverage as Yugoslavia unraveled. (Okay, maybe one made up exclusively of NPR listeners.)

Òut some news organizations didn't care. Their instincts, their news judgments, their journalistic souls told them that this was a story that mattered. This was important. This was work that needed to be done.

Thank goodness those news organizations listened – to what they knew was right.

Or take the Monica Lewinsky coverage (see "Double Vision," page 30). All the polls show that people are turned off by the coverage, think there's way too much of it, hate the sleaziness of it.

There are certainly some lessons to be learned from listening to the naysayers. Too many members of the massive mélange we call the media fired before they were ready. Too many unquestioningly doled out somebody else's undercooked stew. Many people knew that and didn't like it one bit.

But there was another element to the public reaction. You often had the sense that people just wanted it to go away. The economy is fine; the country is fine. Sure, there may be some questionable behavior, but let's not get too worked up about it and ruin the party.

üet the saga of the president and the intern isn't just about private behavior. It includes an investigation of whether the man who's supposed to uphold the nation's laws may have broken some. It includes serious questions about the character of the president. No responsible news organization can in good conscience turn away from its responsibility to cover the hell out of that story.

Carefully, of course, while sticking to standards and making sure what you report is true and fair. But covering it as hard as you can.

The voice of the public is a critically important voice. But it's not the only voice. And it never should be. l