From the Head Fellow: Telling Rotary About the News Business
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75
We in the business have known its ills for decades. Only recently, however, have Main Street groups invited me to explain whatís going on in American journalism. Its serial implosions mystify them. To my civic-minded Rotary hosts, it seems like a sudden tornado that slams into the store without warning.
More like Wal-Mart, I tell them, a commercial neutron bomb that sucks the life out of downtown while leaving the buildings intact. I start with simple questions.
Citizenship: How many think democracy needs an informed public? How many read a newspaper or check broadcast news on a daily basis? Everyone.
Civic affairs: Who can name two bills being discussed in city hall before thereís a vote, i.e., when thereís time to register opinions with their representatives? Not many. How about at the statehouse? Practically nobody. Congress? Between crises, only a half-dozen or so feel informed about even a couple of bills circulating through Congress.
Audiences seem baffled by their shared unawareness. So I explain that most news organizations donít have their reporters just hanging around important places waiting for something to happen anymore. Nor do they cover much of the daily humdrum of public life. Broadcasters choose stories for ratings over news value, a practice that has helped make Comedy Centralís fake news look, well, a lot like actual news. With audience temperature rising, itís time for pop quiz #3.
Business practices: How many of you business people, I ask, make a profit of five percent on sales? Lots. How about ten percent? One or two. Twenty percent? Nobody, and some giggles of disbelief. Well then, how about 50 percent? At that point, somebody asks whether the speaker is putting them on. So I tell them what everyone in journalism knows:
Fifty percent is what prosperous television stations make. Some newspapers also earn profits in that range but in recent years they've averaged 20-25 percent. That's still double what they earned for several decades ending in the mid-1980s, when the steadily increasing profits engineered by corporate owners replaced steady community coverage as the must-do goal of all but the very best, exceptional few.
On Main Street, these figures are incendiary and there's gasoline close to this fire—right down the road in Detroit. A five percent profit is what auto companies (U.S. or foreign) make in banner years; usually it has been half that. Their margins are slim because of what it takes to make the product reliable.
What would have to come out of, say, a minivan, to enable its manufacturer to make twice as much money? How about ten times more? What would happen to the tires? Brakes? Gasoline tank? Would anyone want soccer moms relying on those things to drive the team around?
Cheapening the journalistic machinery produces just the results youíd expect—freaky collisions, frequent breakdowns and fraudulent claims. Faked newspaper circulation figures are one direct result of emphasizing profit over product. So, I argue, are many of the editorial scandals. Their root cause is a stampede for sizzle, which is supposed to build audiences and, thus, advertising. Columnist Dave Barry captured the morale crash by imagining the new ideal newsroom—one reporter reduced to looking out the window because actually leaving the building to look for news might cost money. At this point, someone usually asks, Who let this happen?
Media concentration has simplified the answer. Thousands of individual owners have been replaced by a handful of corporations. Fewer than a dozen CEOs control most of what a nation of 300 million sees, hears and reads as news. Although what has happened to journalism on their watch is simply terrifying for the public life of the country, those who run these companies are not evil. Like the rest of us, they merely respond to a reward structure. Theirs, they say, is determined by Wall Street, which tells them "More profit in good times and more profit in bad times; less profit and you're gone."
I take them at their word. Wall Street, however, isn't the only street that matters to media moguls. Main Street is also important because it represents advertisers. After bemoaning media concentration for decades as a board member of every do-good group that invited me (Committee of Concerned Journalists, Project on the State of the American Newspaper, Project for Excellence in Journalism, etc.), I've found something to like about it. To reach all the people who matter, you only need ten e-mails. I offer them.
Of course these e-mail addresses are only the ones generally available; each magnate doubtless has private channels. But somebody in each shop has the job of telling the boss what's going on out there. Editors get letters to the editor; why not letters to the CEO? Ten thousand e-mails every week (Rotary alone has 400,000 American members) politely asking for more quality news might enable Main Street to talk back to Wall Street. Conditions seem favorable. Media flop is one of America's few non-partisan social issues.
