Mirror View Of Media As Clear As Muddle

This week’s 25th anniversary of the Watergate break-in came at an awkward moment for the American press. Often in the past, the anniversary has been the occasion for an orgy of self-congratulation by media figures - most of whom had little or nothing to do with exposing the criminal ring that was operating with White House blessing a quarter-century ago.

This year, so much uncertainty infects the newsrooms and the executive suites of major media companies that the ritual proclamations of “free press, guardian of a nation’s liberty,” rang hollow. Bob Woodward may have been wise in heading for Europe while the rest of us marked the effort he and Carl Bernstein and their Washington Post editors put into exposing the plots in Richard Nixon’s domain.

The American press is on the rack - torn by conflicting pressures and uncertain of its own judgment.

The good news is that those citizens who hunger for solid information on public affairs are better served than ever before - wherever they live. In any community of any size anywhere in America, they have available - in addition to the local press, radio and television - a wide variety of other reliable sources:

Three national newspapers - two of them, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among the best in the country, and the third, USA Today, rapidly improving the quality and depth of its reporting. National Public Radio - on the scene wherever in the nation or the world there are important developments in politics, government, science or culture. C-SPAN and CNN - and a growing number of other cable outlets, bringing far more real-time, unedited coverage of important events than ever before. PBS, the Internet and a wealth of special-focus publications for those with greater curiosity.

Everywhere my reporting travel takes me, I find a cadre of people as well-informed about public policy as anyone who comes to seminars at a Washington think tank or forums at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

But, what is true of that self-selected information elite is certainly not true of the broader public. In far too many cases, inadequate reporting or widespread indifference has left people ignorant of essential information they need to function as citizens.

I mentioned one example of this ignorance in a recent column: the pervasive overestimation of the size of the African American population. But there are many others, from knowing the biggest elements of the budget (foreign aid being a popular choice, rather than defense, Social Security or Medicare) to the membership of NATO (a dismaying number think Russia is inside the alliance).

Confronted by this evidence and by data that the size of their audiences (both print and electronic) is stagnating, declining or fragmenting among all the “new media” outlets, news organizations are desperately seeking solutions.

Some are trying to improve the product - or at least make it more “relevant.” The movement for “civic journalism,” explicitly aimed at re-engaging newspaper audiences in community affairs, has had mixed results. The latest evaluation - in New Jersey - found that after The Record made a heroic effort to make the Senate contest meaningful, two out of five readers couldn’t even recall who was running.

More organizations are dumbing-down the product, going for soft, human interest stories or private scandals to attract a jaded public. But these offer little more than short term fixes.

In the resulting confusion, understanding of journalism’s goals or even the definition of a journalist is becoming hopelessly muddled. The decision by Rep. Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., to abandon her political career (at least for the moment) in favor of an anchorwoman’s job at CBS is the latest but surely not the last example of crossing the line. For her, it may be a smart career move, as was the switch earlier this year by George Stephanopoulos and Tony Blankley from flacking for Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich to analyzing the news for ABC.

The criticism those three - and their many counterparts - have received is largely misplaced. What is truly worrisome is the judgment of corporate news executives who have so little confidence in their own farm system - or so little awareness that important professional journalistic values are best inculcated by practicing journalism - that they are prepared to hand the most visible and influential jobs in their organizations to transplants from the world of partisan politics.

Ron Ziegler, Nixon’s press secretary and the source of much Watergate disinformation, must feel he was born too soon. In today’s journalistic disarray, he’d be a great network or newspaper hire.