by Neil Hickey
Neil Hickey is CJR's editor at large.

Don't look to television or radio for a whole lot of regularly scheduled, systematic, tough critical analysis of how well or poorly news organizations are doing their jobs. The meager landscape looks like this:

* Reliable Sources: CNN's weekly half-hour, featuring The Washington Post's "Media Notes" columnist, Howard Kurtz, and the veteran newsman Bernard Kalb.

* Fox News Watch: Eric Burns moderates the Fox News Channel's thirty-minute panel show "devoted to exposing media bias in the coverage of weekly news events."

* Terence Smith on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: the former New York Times and CBS News correspondent musters media mavens, news executives, critics, authors, Wall Street analysts, and shoe leather reporters for chat about media and public affairs.

* On the Media: A weekly NPR hour hosted by Brian Lehrer with the purpose of (according to NPR) questioning "common beliefs" about how news gets reported.

* CounterSpin: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's weekly radio half-hour on more than a hundred noncommercial stations, highlighting "biased and inaccurate news . . ., gaffes and goofs by leading TV pundits . . . ."

* Media Matters: An occasional PBS prime time newsmagazine, with former New York Times press correspondent Alex Jones as host.

Reliable Sources producer Lucy Spiegel feels her team works well together. "The wonderful thing about having Howard [Kurtz] and Bernie is that they're from two different generations of journalism," she says. The program "has never been shy," she insists, about knocking CNN, as it did over the network's Tailwind story. At the start of each program, Kurtz states the show's mission: "We turn our critical lens on the media."

Fox News Watch, as a feature of Rupert Murdoch's conservative Fox News Channel, is putatively on the lookout for liberal bias in the press, with panelists handpicked for their politics. But the program actually is less Murdochian than it might be -- there's no stern mandate merely to nail liberals in the press.

None of the old-line commercial broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) has a press criticism program in its regular schedule. How come? "It's a paradox. Obviously it's not in the interest of media corporations to do a lot of incisive criticism of themselves," says Brian Lehrer (no relation to Jim). Inter-network criticism of each other's news coverage isn't really feasible, says Richard Wald, former ABC News executive and now a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. No matter how much a network might deny it, knocking the competition can easily be seen as motivated by self-interest.

Most of the country's 1500 dailies have a TV critic, either homegrown or syndicated. They dutifully watch many hours of television programs every week, and steer their readers onto the good stuff and warn them about the rest. Entertainment shows are their main subject, but TV critics on the nation's newspapers are giving more and more column inches to critiquing TV news -- its programs, personalities, and performance.

"A third to a half of my column is usually devoted to TV news," says Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Howard Rosenberg. "It's the area of television that most intimately affects people." He's been at it since 1971, first at the Louisville Times, and for the last twenty-two years, the Los Angeles Times, which also distributes his column nationally.

Rosenberg -- like many of his peers -- sits at home before four television sets, and passes judgment on TV journalists' handling of the news. He can be as lavish with praise as with blame. TV news's coverage of the global millennium celebrations was, he wrote, "a taste of the television that could be -- one using its glorious technology to build cultural bridges and elevate awareness of distant peoples . . . ."

Tom Shales, The Washington Post's chief TV critic since 1977, derives much of his considerable influence from being in the nation's capital and thus read by power brokers in politics and the regulatory agencies. (He's also syndicated to 120 papers.) Sardonic, witty, wry -- Shales serially enrages, amuses, and startles his readers. At The New York Times, Walter Goodman's reviews of news-oriented programming are deadly earnest, well-reasoned, dispassionate, and equitable.

According to Eric Kohanik, president of the Television Critics' Association, viewer interest in news programs accelerated in the 1990s, first with the gulf war ("the first, live TV war") and then with stories like the O.J. Simpson trial, Princess Diana's death, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It coincided with an "overall decline" in the quality of entertainment programs. "Television's idea machine was running dry, so news programs stepped up to the plate and began to fill a void."

At Newsday on Long Island (New York), columnist Marvin Kitman (thirty-one years on the job) approaches his mission with the verve of a stand-up comic -- needling, lampooning, mocking news shows and personalities. "I love covering TV news," he allows, "especially national news. Anybody who earns more than a million dollars a year is, to me, fair game. I'm fascinated why some TV people are paid $7 million for the little amount of work they do. Readers love it when I make fun of these multimillionaires."

Does he ever read other TV critics' columns? "Never. Many are just mouthpieces for the network p.r. machine. I don't want to be influenced by them. I can make my own mistakes."

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