N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , MARPRIL 2004
PAGE 5
A PRESS AGAINST THE WALL
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JUST THE FACTS
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
“TV NEWS REPORTS ARE VERY PARTICIPATIVE. THEY GIVE YOU THE NEWS AND YOU HAVE TO IMAGINE THE TRUTH.”
BY LOLA GALÁN
The fight for survival has never been this desperate.
First there was the financial crisis: the advertising drought that
began in 2000 — which is finally showing signs of relenting,
according to experts — and pitted the print media more bitterly
than ever against television, radio and the Internet in the fight
for advertisers. This drop in revenue has dealt a nearly mortal
blow to newspapers, which were already struggling to survive
in many countries.
And then came the ethical crisis: a series of recent
scandals have cast doubts on the moral credibility of such
behemoths as The New York Times, throwing many newspapers
into a state of turmoil that is changing the way they look at them
selves.
Spurred by these events — which included publication
of a book accusing France's Le Monde of biased coverage —
the Paris-based newspaper embarked upon a mission: to
research the state of the world's press. The result is a special
report, available on its website, and aptly named Around the
World in 80 Newspapers.
The findings are bittersweet when it comes to circulation
figures. Spain, Italy, Turkey and France rank among the lowest
in terms of newspaper readership. Asia, on the other hand, is
paradise for the printed word. Five Japanese dailies head the
list of the 25 newspapers with the highest press runs in the
world. Yomiuri Shimbun ranks number one with 14.2 million
copies printed daily — a far cry from the paltry figures to be
had in Spain, with a daily circulation of barely four million for
the entire sector.
Even a prestigious paper like Germany’s Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), despite all its influence on national
politics, prints no more than 385,000 copies a day, a ridiculous
figure compared with the four million boasted by some of the
more popular German periodicals. And advertising revenues
naturally follow suit.
“Our last weekly classified ads page carried 30 pages
worth of advertising. Three years ago there were 200 pages,"
said Giinther Nonnenmacher, newsroom chief at FAZ, to Le
Monde researchers.
In the United Kingdom, the pressure to sell is such
that stalwart mastheads like The Times and The Guardian
were forced to completely restructure their front page to remain
competitive. Meanwhile, both The Independent and The Times
have launched tabloid-size versions to please commuters who
were tired of dealing with the oversized dailies inside a packed
train. The Independent has increased sales by 45,000 copies
since it launched the new format.
The economic pressure has been compounded by the
arrival In many countries of free papers.Sweden was the pioneer
in 1995 with a publication called Metro, which is now sold in 15
European countries. Metro and its imitators rely solely on adver
tising revenues for survival, stretching the advertising pie even
thinner.
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“The best Italian reitaurant between San Francltco 4 Seattle."
-JONATHAN NICHOLS. THE OREGONIAN
“The b e lt Italian restaurant In Aitorla, eyed"
-KICHAkD FENCSAK, THE DAILY ASTOklAN
1149 COMMERCIAL ASTORIA
(503) 325-9001
But it’s not all about numbers.The press is going through
a real identity crisis, perhaps due to the fact that “today’s media
are a whole, they’re like a river where we all bathe continually,"
according to U.S. sociologist Todd Gitlin. And it’s difficult to see
where the water is coming from. The influence of some media
outlets over others has led to a sustained process of transform
ation whose ultimate goal is usually to win over new audiences.
Information is transformed, interpreted,sometimes even touched
up in order to prepare it for consumption by the hungry reader-
spectator. Like the splendid tray laden with turkey and grapes
that President George W. Bush effortlessly balanced before
the cameras while visiting the troops stationed in Baghdad last
Thanksgiving. It turned ou, it was all made of plastic, as the
White House was forced to later acknowledge. As the famed
media designer Roger Black once said, “you have to be visual
and narrative,” no matter what the medium.
In the midst of all these issues, Le Monde sought to
answer the existential questions besetting the media: What is
the press? Can societies — democratic or otherwise — do with
out serious media? Can we do without independent media when
facing big powers?
The replies come from a wide range of papers around
the world, and can be summed up the following way: “The press
wants to maintain a certain notion of democracy and freedom in
a new world marked by economic and technological change.”
It would appear that Western-style democracies are the
best breeding ground for the development of a free, independent
press. But the war on Iraq provided a clear example of the low
tolerance threshold for any kind of deviant opinion.The difficult
ies of going against the flow were evident in American and
European media.To Le Monde, the conclusion to be drawn from
this is that the press faces three major challenges in the third
millennium.
The first challenge is ethical. Journalists are forced to
work with a constantly changing medium that demands speed,
thereby increasing the risk of leaving ethical concerns to one
side. The second challenge is economic, as print media need to
find new business models to make up for the extra competition
posed by other sources of news and information. The third
challenge is institutional and has to do with the power of the
press, which often goes unsupervised by any kind of oversight
body.
It's perhaps no coincidence that 2003 saw scandals like
the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times which began with
a reporter being fired for making up information and ended with
the unceremonious departure of the executive editor Howell
Raines (replaced by the previously deposed Managing Editor
Bill Keller, one-time reporter for The Oregonian). Meanwhile,
the British Broadcasting Company was facing trouble of its own
following the suicide of scientist David Kelly and the famous
“sexed-up" dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Both
events made it painfully clear that the prime matter used by the
profession can be at times explosive.
Fortunately for the business, there isn’t a uniform audi
ence out there Rich countries boast a host of different social
sectors with different needs and interests. This explains the
success of a firm like the Bloomberg financial news agency,
created in 1981 by Michael Bloomberg, now the mayor of New
York City. Bloomberg's annual turnover is currently $2.6 billion,
proof that quality news can work as a business.
The main thing to remember is that the journalist is
beholden to one fundamental principle: truthfulness This is
the first of the nine commandments in the journalist's bible,
The Elements o f Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know
& The Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosen-
stiel. Written in 2001, the book has already been translated into
11 languages.
The second commandment in the book states that the
journalist must remain loyal to the citizens first Beautiful words
that are not always easy to apply
Lola Galán wrote this article for the Spanish newspaper,
El Pais, from which it has been reprinted El Roto is the paper’s
editorial cartoonist Thanks to John Nelson of Astoria for bring
ing a few copies home from his annual winter in Spain.
The pursuit of objectivity has always been a chimera,
and too often a fabrication disguising parochial brainwashing.
Objectivity at best is always questionable, acutely vulnerable
to powerful and deceitful interests that are seldom in the public
interest.
The staunch era of objectivity in reporting humanity’s
daily turbulence has never been entirely successful. The rules
were that personality was to be left out of reporting the facts
of events. Human minds, however, are not autonomic; they
are colored with imagination and bias which is synonymous
with angle of reference.
The pursuit of objectivity as the cornerstone of journal
ism was promulgated by such well-placed commentators as
Walter Lippman in the early years of the 20th century. The
bad old days of feckless and unsavory partisanship by the main
stream press were declared over and the era of ‘history shot on
the wing' (Gene Fowler's expression) was ushered in as the new
infallible form of American journalism. Editorial commentary
was separated from reporting in essence as well as in sections
of newspapers and later on radio and television news broad
casts.
Objectivity in reportage is fine in theory as an ideal but
human beings who record events are creatures of their cultures,
classes and education, and their attempts at unbiased witness
are shaped by conscious and/or subjective prejudices as well
as by infused values.
The insidious aspect of objectivity is that inevitably the
form is manipulated to disguise partisan ideas and perspectives
by those who manage and rule society and dominate the major
media.
The partisan press is at least open about what it repre
sents and the axes it grinds. A reader knows exactly where the
editors and reporters of an advocacy publication (or broadcast
media) stand. In the bad old days when the mainstream press
was unabashedly partisan, readers were exposed to a vigorous
variety of ideas and opinions. For all its renowned excesses,
prejudice and hysteria, the partisan press was in thunderous
opposition with itself while under the rubric of objectivity today’s
media cautiously imitates itself.
The concept of objectivity might be regarded as a
conspiracy of projecting a status quo, which is a particular
way of viewing things and is obviously a partisan operation,
and disagreement with this agreed upon fiction is contrarily
dismissed as naive or as dangerous partisanship or advocacy
(even as treason in this post 9/11 period) on the far-out fringes
of American journalism. Yet it is the fringe that is vigorously
redefining ideas, concepts and principles of contemporary
journalism.
Journalism is bursting out in a variety of directions,
some like infotainment and simulated events unfortunate, but
other spinoffs act as stimulants to broaden the definition and
scope of journalism — the most exciting and consequential is
the Internet which is vehemently partisan in all of its spheres.
The central purpose is to inform — but that is not a
passive occupation. The purpose of informing presumes a
consequence, an action or reaction regarding the information
that is disseminated.
The broadest definition of a reporter, therefore,
is anyone who has something to report, regardless of whether
they are schooled or employed in journalism.
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