Downie and Kaiser are astute on the economic causes of dumbing-down, less so on the political ones. With the remorseless up-beatness of their culture, which would no doubt survive the nation being razed to the ground, they dare wistfully to hope, even after their own damning indictment, that things might be on the up after September 11th, given that more of their compatriots are now eager to know what's afoot, writes Terry Eagleton
The News About The News: American Journalism in Peril. By Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser. Alfred A. Knopf,
288 pp $25
'The historic culture," a US financial analyst wrote of an American newspaper chain in 1998, "has been one of producing Pulitzer Prizes instead of profits; and while we think that culture is hard to change, it does seem to be happening." One can imagine the academic equivalent: "After a lean period in which the college squandered its resources on producing Nobel prize-winners, it has now pulled through by leasing out its laboratories to crazed but opulent anthrax manufacturers". One US consultancy with no experience of newspapers advised a local journal that from the viewpoint of profit, a front-page story should measure six inches or less, and that a journalist should produce 40 of them a week in 0.9 hours a time.
Whereas most Irish or English accounts of such late-capitalist lunacy would wax mildly or scabrously satirical, the earnest, excessively well-mannered authors of The News About The News can manage only a solemnly self-evident "creative work like journalism cannot be governed by such arbitrary formulas". Shiny, wholesome, white-toothed and dutifully grinning, Downie and Kaiser's appearance on the dust-jacket doesn't promise much in the way of irony or iconoclasm. Despite years of journalistic experience, they still shout things like "What a story!", perpetrate flat-footed sentences such as "One of the rewards of being alive is watching the world change", and begin their book with the fatuous comment (on Watergate) that "the story is a legend now, but it really did happen". Is there any benighted eejit who doesn't believe that it really did happen?
Platitudes apart, the duo have a harrowing tale to deliver. It is of a US news media industry where what matters is shares, not stories, and thus it is typical of a nation in which lawyers now divide their day into six-minute slices and bill clients for each 360-second slice. Newsrooms are ruthlessly emptied of staff and costs are swingeingly slashed: ABC News has a correspondent in London, no doubt permanently camped out at Buckingham Palace, but nobody in Frankfurt, Rome, Hong Kong or Cairo. This dismal parochialism is even reflected in The News About the News, which only once pauses to remind itself (without asking itself why) that European TV news bulletins are much more serious and rich in content than US ones, yet attract large audiences even so. US TV, by contrast, has hardly heard of Abroad (which is more expensive to cover anyway), and over recent years has been steadily replacing its so-called hard news coverage with scandal, celebrity stories, entertainment, crime and life-style.
Most fables of Falls from the Golden Age turn out to be bogus. But things in the States really have been getting worse, as a series of case-studies here, of newspapers and TV stations, ranging from the good to the so-so to the mind-bogglingly dreadful, bears witness. American news media are run by people who care as much about the news as a hermit. Editors have become marketing strategists, radio reporters lift shamelessly from local newspapers, while TV reporters are manufactured entirely out of plastic and sound as though they are shouting through a tornado. New Jersey's Asbury Park Press generously decided to extend its obituaries of local people by inviting their relatives to send in "personalised" details, which it then proceeded to charge them for including. One newspaper executive suggested that "first-person stories by readers" might prove more consumer-friendly than hard news, a commodity now as rare in the USA as Hollywood humility or a few lunchtime drinks.
But the war against terrorism is likely to result in more media silencing and blinkering, not less. How many US newspapers, including their own, would publish an extensive inquiry into the misery and despair of the Palestinians, the terrorism of the Israeli state, America's despicable complicity with this repression, and the role all this has played in the World Trade Centre attacks? Some US news media are quite as self-censoring as Soviet or Serbian ones ever were, and it is both myopic and provincial to ignore this fact in lamenting the moral decline of the US public sphere. The United States may have been somewhat shaken in its complacent self-belief by the appalling tragedy it has just endured; but Downie and Kaiser can still write self-satisfiedly of how the US "culture of accountability . . . is an important reason why American society works better than many others". I take it they don't mean US accountancy.
In their day, the American media have indeed been the scourge of malefactors and the custodians of popular liberty, as this book proudly reminds us. The Washington Post's courageous role in Watergate was one such magnificent intervention. Indeed, the Post receives lavish praise in this study, cropping up regularly as a shining example of high moral standards, devotion to news rather than cash, international awareness and a good deal more. Since true journalism is always toughly disinterested, this incessant eulogising is presumably quite unconnected with the fact that Leonard Downie is the executive editor of the Washington Post, and Robert Kaiser is its associate editor.
Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His latest book is The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (published by Allen Lane)