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Profit-Driven Peccancy: Response to Smith and Maitre
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10328 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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Date : |
12 / 1993 |
827 Words |
| Author
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Chris Black
Chris Black is a lead political reporter at the Boston Globe.
She has also worked as Washington correspondent for the Boston
Herald American (now the Boston Herald) and the Lowell Sun.
Her assignments for the Globe have included the presidential
campaigns of 1980, '84, '88, and '92. |
In their determination to make a case that American journalism is in decline because of crazed liberal journalists and lowered standards, these academics have missed the point and misidentified the real culprit.
The problem of American journalism is a bedrock principle of modern conservatism: the profit motive. Every major newspaper, television network, and radio station in this nation--except for the Associated Press and National Public Radio--is a profit-making private business. Many are enormously profitable enterprises. All, regardless of size, must make a profit or go bankrupt--and there's the rub.
If standards are deteriorating at the three major television networks, the reason has nothing to do with ideology. The problem lies with the bean counters and business executives squeezing more out of less in order to improve the quarterly profits.
In his new book, James Squires, the former editor of the Chicago Tribune, makes a compelling case that the nation's major newspapers became addicted--like upscale crack addicts--to the heady high profits of the 1980s. In order to replicate these unrealistic profit margins in the 1990s, they followed a slash-and-burn strategy. Newspapers slashed staff and newshole (the amount of space available for news). The networks assigned fresh, inexperienced (and inexpensive) young people to cover presidential candidates, eliminated travel budgets, and used part-timers to shoot stories instead of the more experienced camera and sound technicians on staff.
The pursuit of the almighty profit and the incredible shrinking audience is being felt in newsrooms all across the country. The hideously embarrassing incident at Dateline NBC, with the doctored exploding truck, makes the case. Posed with a limited budget, the crew could not take the costly chance that the GM truck would not blow and burn in the dramatic way it needed to illustrate the story.
Richard Nixon was right about at least one thing in the 1960 presidential campaign: Experience counts. In general, a senior journalist is less likely to make the mistakes of a neophyte, more likely to bring a depth of knowledge and perspective to the reportage, more willing to put facts before flash.
Standards falling? Don't blame Dan Rather. Blame the good, sturdy capitalists who are calling the shots: General Electric, Laurence Tisch, and Capital Cities.
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