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...cultural, market, and technological developments.
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The troubled state of this country's major institutions is a familiar feature of our time. The presidency has been battered by Vietnam, Watergate, and Monicagate, Congress by disgraced Speakers and low public esteem. A good-sized chunk of corporate America--Enron and its numerous siblings; misbehaving banks and investment firms; product-besmirched cigarette and auto manufacturers--has come under a similar cloud. American universities, arguably the world's best (certainly the best-endowed) are under attack for political correctness, grade and cost inflation, and faculty dereliction of duty. Organized religion has been rocked by misbehaving evangelical leaders and Catholic priests. Only the military, which underwent its own dark night of the soul in the Vietnam era, can lay claim to an uptick in character and reputation.
The media have joined the ranks of the fallen. A Gallup poll in May 2003 found that 62 percent of respondents thought that news organizations were often inaccurate. It was not always so. During the mid- and late twentieth century, major American papers and TV networks were highly regarded for the scope and objectivity of their news coverage, and for their role as the nation's moral watchdogs toward McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate. But a multitude of scandals in more recent years has tarnished their reputations.
The media, it seems, are reaping the costs of the same Faustian bargain that has wounded other major American institutions. Society has rising expectations of its leading newspapers and television networks, as it has of its presidents, Congress, corporations, and universities. But this has a cost. When those expectations are not met--when hubris reaps its inevitable harvest--the public reaction is commensurately stronger.
But before leaping to these conclusions, it would be well to step back and ask--and try to answer--a few questions:
Is it indeed the case that the current state of media accuracy and objectivity is unusually suspect? Or is it pretty much what it always has been?
If in fact there has been a spike in media misbehavior, what is its cause: isolated instances of that random x-factor human frailty? Or is there a larger, more systemic problem?
To my delight, these questions lend themselves to the methods and mind-set of the historian. That is not often the case in public policy discourse, where an historical perspective is measured in months or at most a decade, and other forms of analysis--statistical, theoretical, anecdotal--are more favored.
I
Journalism by nature is contentious, sharp-edged, opinionated. Gossip, sensationalism, and exposure are essential ways of getting readers to read, or viewers to view, the media product. From their first appearance in the eighteenth century, newspapers were organs with attitude. In colonial America, as in Old Regime Europe, they depended on the support of wealthy individuals or factions, and reflected the take-no-prisoners mentality of their patrons. At the very beginning of the Republic, in 1789, Alexander Hamilton financed John Fenno's Gazette of the United States "to endear the general Government to the people." Two years later Thomas Jefferson riposted with Philip Freneau's National Gazette. Soon after, Benjamin Franklin Bache (the great man's grandson) and English radical William Duane made their American Aurora a virulent Republican organ--matched scurrility for scurrility by William Cobbett's Federalist Porcupine's Gazette.
No-holds-barred partisanship hardly subsided as American public life become more democratic in the nineteenth century. Almost all newspapers were wedded to and to some degree subsidized by the parties. Their readership expanded with the democratization of the electorate and the spread of literacy. The Post Office Act of 1792 subsidized newspaper delivery rates, and Congress created a dense national network of post offices. By 1840 39 million copies of newspapers were distributed annually. Popular newspaper names--Post, Express, Mail, Courier, Dispatch--suggest how important the postal system was to the American press.
A mass audience, along with new technology--faster presses, cheaper paper--led to new kinds of journalism. James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald and Richard Henry Dana's Sun, which appeared in the 1830s, innovatively avoided too-close identification with a political party. They depended for their income instead on large circulation and substantial advertising, earned by their low price of a penny and their crime-and-sex-drenched news pages.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, another significant audience began to appear: a commercial-professional urban middle class that saw itself as above mass party politics, and wanted a more responsible and objective approach to the news. Editors ambitious to shape public opinion responded. As Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune put it, truthful independent journalism would make the newspaper "the master, not the tool, of party."
Yet another addition to what would become the world of the modern media was the marriage of sensationalism and reform. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the most successful American newspaper publishers at the turn of the twentieth century, understood that in an urban, industrial society, profits and crusading journalism could be comfortable bedfellows. But exposes and objectivity were not necessarily compatible; indeed, they may well have been antithetical. The most successful newspapers of the early twentieth century--the Hearst chain, Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune, Joseph Patterson's New York Daily News--treated news and opinion as interchangeable parts of the circulation-and-power-building game, and reflected their owners' often strong political views on every page.
A similar evolution occurred in large-circulation magazines, the other popular medium of the time....
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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