Veteran journalist and author Reeves (Running in Place, 1996;
President Kennedy, 1993; etc.) reports on the state of the press
(print and television). He is guardedly pessimistic. Reporting the
news was once a fairly simple and, for Reeves, exciting and
honorable task: get the story, get it right, report it. Today,
however, journalism "is in a crisis of change and redefinition."
The reasons for this crisis are complex and interrelated.
Technology, particularly the Internet, has made information
instantaneously available to just about anyone. How do older media
like newspapers compete? The answer has become to report on what
the public wants; find out what attracts people and feed it back to
them. And what the public wants increasingly is short, untroubling
entertainment. So we get coverage of scandals, entertainers, health
tips ("evening news without news"), while more important events go
underreported. Between 1992 and 1996, for instance, network
television reporting on foreign stories, measured in minutes,
dropped by almost two-thirds. Exacerbating this move toward
news-lite is the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a
few huge corporations: Westinghouse, General Electric, etc. News
operations are minuscule parts of such corporations, but they are
not immune to the corporate demand for profits. How does news make
a profit? Give the public what it wants. Finally, journalism itself
is in part to blame for its own predicament. In its post-Watergate
zealousness to portray all politicians as crooks and all politics
as corrupt, it helped create a public mood of cynical lack of
interest in public affairs. Despite these problems, all is not
lost. Reeves sees a continuing role for journalism, and that is
simply to tell what "you and I need to keep our freedom - accurate
timely information on laws and wars, police and politicians, taxes
and toxics." Much of what Reeves says is familiar, and the pieces
don't always hold together, but in the end he gets the story and
gets it right. Nice reporting. (Kirkus Reviews)
The power and status of the press in America reached new heights
after spectacular reporting triumphs in the segregated South, in
Vietnam, and in Washington during the Watergate years. Then new
technologies created instantaneous global reporting which left the
government unable to control the flow of information to the nation.
The press thus became a formidable rival in critical struggles to
control what the people know and when they know it. But that was
more power than the press could handle--and journalism crashed
toward new lows in public esteem and public purpose. The dazzling
new technologies, profit-driven owners, and celebrated editors,
reporters, and broadcasters made it possible to bypass older values
and standards of journalism. Journalists reveled in lusty pursuit
after the power of politics, the profits of entertainment and
trespass into privacy. Richard Reeves was there at the rise and at
the fall, beginning as a small-town editor, becoming the chief
political correspondent of the New York Times and then a
best-selling author and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He
tells the story of a tribe that lost its way. From the Pony Express
to the Internet, he chronicles what happened to the press as
America accelerated into uncertainty, arguing that to survive, the
press must go back to doing what it was hired to do long ago: stand
as outsiders watching government and politics on behalf of a free
people busy with their own affairs.
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