MEDIA'S MANTRA: SHOW US THE MONEY!

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Author: Herbst, Susan1

I recently got into terrible trouble when I spoke to a corporate audience about media and broke the news to them that it is not the press' job to educate the public or necessarily to improve democracy. Nobody actually threw anything at me, but I had to fight people off afterwards just to get out of that forum.

The truth is, we live in a capitalist society where the media intentionally are for-profit organizations--with the exception of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System--just like McDonald's. Do not kid yourselves; to them, the bottom line is everything. Now, that said, I do believe that journalists should be fair and try to self-regulate, as do other professionals.

Truth be told, journalists struggle with the fact that they have a profession. They have professional organizations and put out related magazines, but they need to think about how they can set up norms and have internal inside-the-system forms of punishment. Physicians do it, although not too well. There are plenty of problematic doctors out there. Obviously, some professions self-regulate better than others. In the academy, we have something called "peer review," and that is a way that we regulate ourselves. One of the struggles for journalists is that they have not figured out--in their for-profit world--how to self-regulate. For example, when Fox News crosses the line, how can the network be punished? There is a fundamental problem here--journalists have no incentive to work together since they are competing organizations. NBC, CNN, and ABC do not receive any benefit for collaborating with each other, behaving better, or telling the truth more clearly and more often.

What does it mean that journalists are not really responsible for educating us or for enhancing democracy? If you press journalists, they will say they hope that they do those things but, in reality, their goal is to succeed in the profession as defined, and again, that is very much a for-profit world. What this means is that we cannot depend on journalists to carry the torch of democracy. Journalists do not have this responsibility, and even if they wanted it, they cannot exercise it since their editors may not think that is the best story to sell on the nightly news or in the newspapers. Their job is to get audience ratings and sell papers. You can go under pretty easily if you are not selling stories. So, do not blame the media. They could be better, but mostly, it is on us, the citizenry.

Once we did have an openly partisan press, and you could argue that we still do. In 19th-century America, there were newspapers that came right out and said; We are a Republican publication; we are a Democratic tabloid, and our coverage and editorials will reflect that. A lot of people argue that such a situation is not so bad. They maintain that it is better to have some really openly partisan papers than have the kind of wishy-washy neutrality that we mostly get stuck with today.

One of the advantages of having a partisan press is that there are several competing newspapers. Each one gets to make the strongest possible arguments in support of its stance on an issue. So, you get some very clear voices in conflict with each other Then it is incumbent upon citizens to try to navigate these voices. Today, papers are supposed to be objective, so you get a lot of, on the one hand, on the other hand, but no real clear argument on what policy should be. Fox News, for example, is pretty blatantly partisan, so we do not have to press them about their partisanship, but The New York Times should just come out and say; Look, we are a Democratic paper, and let's just cut the nonsense about objectivity and neutrality.

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By Susan Herbst

Susan Herbst, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, Philadelphia, is author of Reading Public Opinion: Political Actors View the Democratic Process.