By Brigitte L. Nacos
Recently, news organizations have
made plenty of news themselves. Not only newspapers that either closed shop,
offered another round of buyouts, or fired newsroom and other staffers. The
broadcast networks, too, have shrunk their news divisions and continue to swing
the ax heavier these days. Following the lead of CBS News, ABC News will cut
one fourth of its staff. Declining audiences and thus lower advertising rates
plus loss of advertising to cable channels are reportedly pushing ABC’s and CBS’s
news divisions to the brink—although an article in today’s New
York Times notes that “Executives
from CBS News and ABC News said the top corporate executives for both networks
remained outspoken supporters of the news divisions.” Don’t trust such
assurances. It’s the bottom line that counts. That’s why the situation is for
the time being different at NBC where the news division--thanks to MSNBC and
other cable outlets—continues to bring home bacon for its corporate parent
General Electric.
All of this reminds us that the
“[n]ews is a commodity” and “a product shaped by forces of supply and demand…”
as James T. Hamilton writes in his excellent book “All the News That’s Fit to
Sell.” If the news is understood as commodity, one would expect that the
content of the product--what is reported and how—depends on business judgments.
Here, the contemporary crisis of the press refers to news providers’ problems
and failures in the economic marketplace.
But news media organizations differ from other enterprises because, as Walter Lippmann recognized nearly 90 years ago, the “community applies one ethical measure to the press and another to trade or manufacture.” This double standard is justified and comes along with the responsibilities of a free press. If the news is understood as a public good, one would expect that in return for utilizing public air waves as carrier of news and entertainment, broadcasters would be committed to providing public affairs information and monitoring government on behalf of citizens.
If this sounds idealistic and removed from the real world, a
look back at the very same networks’ past would serve today’s corporate owners
well. In his
book “Who Killed CBS?” Peter J. Boyer explains so well how the news
division was not expected to make money—only not to lose too much, because CBS
News was “what gave the company its real worth.” The entertainment divisions
were to make the money--and, yes, subsidize the news. This started with company founder, William S. Paley,
who “made the news department a favored child” and “fostered a news
organization with standards and ambitions that far exceeded the imperatives of
the commercial broadcasting industry he was helping to build.” While for
decades CBS News was the gold standard in broadcast news, the other networks,
too, strove for excellence.
To be sure, the proliferation of cable and satellite
channels and the emergence of the Internet as important information source,
especially for the younger generations, cut the networks’ revenues in their
entertainment divisions as well. But in spite of all the wining about the fall
of the broadcast news, the fact is that the three networks’ evenings news still
has a combined audience of well over 20 million, and none of the cable news
programs comes even close to any of the three evening news broadcasts or, for
that matter, the morning infotainment shows.
For all the changes in the news media landscape in the last decades, the loss of commitment to quality news divisions on the part of the corporate owners and their greedy imperatives rank high on the list.
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