THE WORLD SEES NEWS THROUGH NEW YORK EYES

BY BRENT CUNNINGHAM

Richard Berke's page-one story in The New York Times on October 25, 1999, turned Senator John McCain's temper into a campaign issue overnight. Until then, McCain's moods had been mentioned matter-of-factly, but were not part of the political conversation. Berke's story touched off weeks of coverage and debate in the media. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NPR, CNBC, as well as newspapers around the country, ran with the story. Even McCain's hometown paper, The Arizona Republic, followed the Times. New York rules.

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When the Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the 21st Century -- dubbed Air 21 -- became law in April 2000, the story for underserved cities around the country was the addition of flights to New York and D.C., and how that could boost economic development and quality of life. But the national media, led by New York, paid little attention until they could see it from the other end. Only last fall, when the flood of new flights swamped La Guardia Airport, the hub of the Boston-to-D.C. corridor along which many in the media establishment move, did Air 21 win major-issue status. flight logjam: how the government turned la guardia into a flier's nightmare, was the page-one headline in The Wall Street Journal in December. can capitalism reduce flights and delays at la guardia? asked The New York Times. New York rules.

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Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's troubles in 2000 -- prostate cancer and a broken marriage -- were national news in part because they ended his senate race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, but also because outside New York Giuliani is a minor celebrity, the blunt-talking lawman who tamed The Big Apple. But did it deserve a two-part segment on the Today show? Should NBC Nightly News and National Public Radio have ranked it among the year's major stories? And still the story has national legs. As recently as January 24, Giuliani was on Good Morning America discussing his health. Meanwhile, Mayor John Norquist of Milwaukee couldn't buy that kind of attention (not that he wanted it). Norquist's affair with a staff aide -- remember that? -- got a brief spasm of national coverage in December, primarily because Norquist, who is married, took the extraordinary step of apologizing in a full-page ad in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. New York rules.

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Nearly all our national media revolve in the same tight orbit, part of the more than 10,000 journalists roaming the island of Manhattan. The three main networks, The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Newsweek are all close enough for journalists there to meet for a quick lunch. Here, too, are most of the book publishers and virtually every national magazine -- from Vanity Fair to the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity. The ad folks who fill our national consciousness with slogans and images are in the neighborhood, as are the fashionistas who tell us what to wear. It is a largely self-selected group in a self-selected city, larded with Ivy Leaguers, a bit clubby. Some take the train from Westchester, others the subway from Brooklyn. Some lunch at Michael's, others at their desks. Some vacation in the Hamptons, others schlep to Jones Beach. Some play softball together, others drop into separate New York worlds after work. But they all read The New York Times. And most read The New York Observer -- the irreverent score-keeper of the city's power class -- "as if it is the Koran," says the media critic Jon Katz. Whether they were born here or not, they see the world through a New York lens. "Manhattan will New York-ize you," says Michael Barone, a senior writer for Washington-based U.S. News & World Report.

There is something inevitable about Manhattan as media capital. "New York as a city is to the United States what the New York media are to the broader U.S. media," says Alex S. Jones, a former press reporter at The New York Times who now heads Harvard's Shorenstein Center. "Not only the largest and the richest, but arguably the most important." Or, as a slightly irritated Clyde Haberman, a Times metro columnist, put it: "We're the biggest city in America. I don't think it's much more complicated than that." Many things happen in New York that are important to greater America: from hip-hop, which ushered urban culture into the suburbs, to Wall Street to the current trial of the embassy bombers. "New York attracts the best and the brightest in so many different worlds that some of the best things that happen there are genuinely important," says Brian Duffy, the executive editor of U.S. News & World Report.

But this convergence of geographic destiny, human nature, and powerful media means that life on this small island provides the context for national news, and shapes the news agenda. "The New York press has outsized power to inject stories into the news cycle," says Jones. "That is the power of New York, if there is such a thing. It's where stories get started, because the decisions are made there." News from all around the country passes through the New York filter. And despite conscious -- and often successful -- efforts on the part of many of these New York journalists to break free of Manhattan myopia, the America portrayed in the national media isn't always recognizable to readers and viewers west of the Hudson.

MANHATTAN MYOPIA

Some argue that this media provincialism is on the wane, others that it never existed. "I always thought that was bullshit," says Reuven Frank, a former president of NBC News. But ask journalists outside of New York, and they say it is as plain as night following day. "One in eight Americans lives in California," says David Yarnold, executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News. "The East Coast media do not understand or tell the story of the west." This phenomenon has results. Giuliani's tussle with the Brooklyn Museum of Art over the "Sensation" show becomes a seminal art-world event, but the Missouri Arts Council's refusal to fund a performance of "Bent," a controversial play about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, is ignored. New Yorkers projected Gore's election-night "victory" in Florida before all the polls had closed. Maybe they didn't know Florida has two time zones.

But in a broader, more subtle sense, decisions made each day by journalists in New York determine which issues become national news, what gets emphasized, what gets downplayed. In short, what is important for all of us. As a result, some New York (and northeastern) stories inevitably get inflated, while others from elsewhere are minimized, distorted, or missed. "Because so much of the news we get is packaged in New York, we are captives to how it is delivered," says Evan Smith, a recovering New Yorker who now edits Texas Monthly. Jim Squires, a former editor of the Chicago Tribune, says the New York press is "often the last to know of some of the most important stories going on in the country. Look at the impact of companies like Wal-Mart." Or look, others say, at the transformative power of the Internet and the emergence of Silicon Valley as an independent economic engine. Or the rise of immigration in middle America. Back in 1995, for example, The Des Moines Register was writing about the city school system's need for more teachers and tutors to meet the growing number of Hispanic, Bosnian, Sudanese, and Asian students. Yet during the 2000 Iowa caucuses, as the Register, tongue firmly in cheek, pointed out in an article that January, the national press often had difficulty seeing the new Iowa. iowa is a corny cliché in visitors' reporting, read the headline. Daniel Pedersen, a veteran Newsweek contributing editor in Atlanta who has worked in bureaus in Los Angeles and Houston, says that his story pitches in the early '80s on the northeastward migration of Mexican-Americans drew yawns from his New York editors. "It is clear to me that, as a nation, we would have more quickly understood the meaning of this migration if the national press were based in Los Angeles," he says.

This New York sphere of influence is evident at both Columbia University's journalism school -- described by some as the "nursery" of the media elite -- as well as here at cjr. With a limited travel budget and a glut of media talent a subway ride away, cjr editors are constantly challenged to ensure that voices -- and issues -- from around the country get into the magazine. The school, meanwhile, serves as the unofficial convening authority for the city's media community. The line-up for this semester's magazine lecture series, for example, includes top editors from Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and the now-deceased George. The memorial service for the Washington journalist Lars-Erik Nelsen was held at Columbia University. And then there's Al Gore. The faculty is culled, largely, from this same community. Bruce Porter, an assistant professor at the school and a magazine writer, says the "eastern establishment take" that is often found in New York publications comes not from playing squash or having dinner with someone, but from "sharing a point of view and, because of that, gravitating to a place where that point of view is acceptable and helps you establish a career."

There are inherent difficulties in attempting to write for a national audience, says James Carey, a professor of international journalism at Columbia. "It makes it difficult to really imagine who you are writing for," he says. "Our imagination moves on tracks, generally geographic tracks. Today, these tracks are the airline routes. We think in terms of a bicoastal country, with the Mississippi River running down the middle. Our imagination runs out of New York to places with New York connections, and our national society gets defined this way. The national media produce a national class system. We define the local through the national: 'Oh, look, they're doing the same thing in Waterloo, Iowa, that we do in New York.'"

What we know in our daily lives, Carey says, is the context for what is normal, and in New York those things get amplified through the concentration of national media.

THE DISCONNECT

Last year, Peter Brown, an editor at the Orlando Sentinel, surveyed journalists around the country and documented the demographic gap between reporters and their readers. Brown, a former Nieman Fellow, says he skipped New York because he "accepts it as a given that they are out of touch with the rest of America." According to Brown's study, as a group, journalists are more likely than their fellow Americans to be single, socially liberal, and affluent, and less likely to have children, go to church, and own homes.

Manhattan is arguably the least representative place in the country. Life here is different. We ride trains rather than drive cars. We pay ridiculous amounts of money to live in rented apartments with notoriously tiny kitchens. We cook less, opting instead to order in or dine out on everything from Afghan to Ukrainian food, not exactly staples at the local mall. We take for granted the staggering array of cultural options -- theater, film, dance, art, music, museums. New York journalists are different. A 1998-99 survey by The Pew Research Center found that journalists working for national news organizations in New York view their jobs differently than their colleagues who are based elsewhere. For example, only 19 percent of these New York journalists thought the press is "more adversarial than necessary," whereas 40 percent of the non-New Yorkers thought so. Nearly 40 percent of the New Yorkers considered the celebrity interviewer Larry King a fellow journalist, while only 17 percent of those outside New York did.

Yet what is important in the lives of New York journalists, and the lives of their friends, can influence what becomes news. "If you live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and you are a young parent, you might see an issue developing about nannies," says Roger Cohn, a former executive editor of Audubon magazine who now edits Mother Jones in San Francisco. "It's easy to extrapolate that as some kind of trend. But you get out here and you find that proportionally fewer people use nannies." A 1996 Newsweek cover proclaimed -- over an ominous cap-and-gowned silhouette -- "$1,000 a Week, The Scary Cost of College." A thousand dollars a week? That's nearly $40,000 an academic year. Meanwhile, 80 percent of college students in this country attend public schools, according to The College Board, where the average cost of tuition, room, and board is $8,400.

The economic extremes of life in New York are a factor. "New York-based reporters are much more often in self-pitying mode, suffering from this money mania because they have such a skewed view of what it takes to live comfortably," says James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent. "This makes it hard in any genuine way to identify with the family living on the median income. Going out to Idaho, or even to New Jersey, to report on that family is akin to going to Ethiopia."

More fundamentally, we absorb the notion (even if we know better) that what happens in New York is generally more sophisticated, intelligent, interesting -- in short, more important -- than what happens "out there." It is not conspiratorial. Indeed, it is often unconscious. In a way, it comes with calling yourself a New Yorker. The city is a symbol, the legendary proving ground, the inspiration for songs, and the setting for countless movies. "It's the place where you reinvent yourself," says Alex S. Jones. "It is the terror of kicking over the traces and having to start your life anew in such a crowded, arrogant, competitive place. That is the stuff drama is made of . . . . If you are there, you belong there, whether you are a stockbroker or a drag queen." A former senior editor at Newsweek says that Maynard Parker, the magazine's late editor, used to say "Everybody out there wants to know what's going on in New York." America is fascinated by New York, in a kind of love-hate way. But that fascination can be easily overplayed.

SAME OLD STORY

The dawn of the digital age promised to fragment the news business, breaking -- or at least loosening -- New York's chokehold on media power. Maybe it will, but it hasn't yet. San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with the rest of the country, are still on the receiving end of news more often than not. "One myth created by the dot-com movement," says Fallows, "is that it wouldn't matter where people lived. For reporters it may be true, but that's the exception. It is natural that there is a capital of this intellectual community." There are even signs that the influence of the New York media is growing. Economic realities have humbled stand-alone online news operations, opening the door to consolidation. The New York Times is now dropped on doorsteps from Seattle to Florida. Its news service has 650 subscribers worldwide. The Times also cut a deal last year with Starbucks to be the only paper sold in the ubiquitous coffee shops. The AP budgets and advisories -- culled from around the country but assigned value by New York editors -- along with the Times's budgets and advisories, are powerful guides for editors. "I've sat in a lot of news huddles," says Deborah Howell, who runs the Newhouse News Service bureau in D.C. and is a former editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, "and I know a lot of editors who look closely at that Times budget to inform their decisions." The newsweeklies, too, pay attention to the news judgments of the major dailies. "That is how a lot of ideas get validated," says Fallows, who used to edit U.S. News & World Report. "The clearest way to know that something is on the news map is for the Times to write about it."

Another reason why no great wave of democracy has swept the news business is the enduring power of the pack. Gregory Curtis, a former Texas Monthly editor, says "a prominent New York journalist" interviewed him about President Bush after the election. During the interview, the reporter said the problem with Bush is that he "just isn't very curious." Curtis, now an editor at large for Time, Inc., says it was the first time he had heard it put that way. "Then, a couple weeks later," he says, "I am reading a story on Bush and foreign policy in The New York Times Magazine, and there is that same idea phrased almost exactly the same way. I thought the two reporters must have discussed it at a party or something. Then, at the inauguration, there is Sam Donaldson saying that the trouble with Bush is that he lacks curiosity. I can't explain how it happens, but certain ideas achieve a critical mass in the national media." It could be that Bush isn't curious. But the timing is, well, curious.

How it happens is simple. "The dominant emotion in journalism is anxiety," says Danny Schechter, a former producer for 20/20 and CNN, and a cofounder of Globalvision, an independent production company. "There is nothing to be gained by being out in left field with something unless you are absolutely certain it is true." The result, says Schechter, is that there is too heavy a reliance on the news judgments of an elite few, and a narrowing of the public debate. David Halberstam, the author and former Times reporter, puts it more succinctly: "Everyone in journalism steals from everyone else."

When the story in question is a New York tragedy, the pack effect is magnified. In 1992, Malice Green, a black, unemployed steelworker, was stopped by Detroit police who suspected Green was carrying drugs. In the struggle that ensued, the officers beat Green to death with their flashlights. Two officers were convicted of murder. The incident, in the wake of the more spectacular but less tragic Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, was covered by the national press. But that coverage didn't approach the crescendo that turned the King beating, and more recently the Amadou Diallo shooting, into national referendums on police violence. A Lexis-Nexis database search for Green's name in 1992-1993 turned up 1,200 stories, most written by Detroit papers. Plug Diallo -- the African immigrant shot to death in the Bronx two years ago by the New York City police -- into Lexis-Nexis for 1999-2000, and more than 8,000 stories come up, including a Time magazine cover story.

LEADER OF THE PACK

Despite all of the new voices, The New York Times is still the country's most influential news source. Joseph Lelyveld, the Times's executive editor, declined to discuss his paper's influence on the news agenda. But Herbert J. Gans, a Columbia University sociologist who has studied media influence, says that in any profession there is a standard-setter. "There has to be one paper that sets the standards, and usually it is the elite paper," he says. "They are the richest, they get the biggest staff."

The paper's influence can be direct. On January 2, for example, -- which is the day after a national holiday and thus a traditionally slow news day -- NBC, ABC, and CBS all picked up an enterprise story from the Times's front page on how snack food makers are putting less in their packages and charging the same price.

And the influence can also be subtle. "Foreign correspondents know that what the Times guy writes is what their editors will be reading first thing in the morning," says Halberstam. National correspondents, too. This influence is clear when the Times makes a mistake. On August 19, John Noble Wilford's front-page story in the Times reverberated around the world. "The North Pole is melting," it began, and went on to say how for the first time in more than 50 million years the ice that covers the Arctic Ocean at the pole had turned to water. It was global warming writ large. Papers from Anchorage to London picked up the story. ABC World News Saturday led with the ominous news that night. Turns out, a swath of the pole ice melts every year.

But this ability to elevate an issue -- even a flawed one -- to international prominence is evident time and again at the Times. There was a 1998 cancer-cure story, which overstated the impact of two new drugs. It led the three network newscasts the day it appeared in the Times, and was on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report the next week. The story and its fallout prompted U.S. News to take a detailed look at how the Times still drives the news agenda. "The front page of The New York Times is still the benchmark," Paul Friedman, executive producer of ABC World News Tonight told U.S. News at the time. "Lots of people who are insecure about their own news judgment . . . go crazy if they see it in The New York Times." Consider the way an allegedly subliminal ad by the Bush campaign, which emphasized the word "rats" in "bureaucrats," became the big story for several days after it appeared on the front page of the Times, even though Fox News had reported it two weeks earlier -- to virtually no effect.

The Times's influence is difficult to measure. cjr commissioned Andrew Tyndall, who monitors network news content in his weekly Tyndall Report, to compare the Times's front page with the nightly network news lineup over the last six months of 2000. Tyndall's numbers show that, in terms of daily breaking and event-driven news, the Times more often than not prints stories the morning after the networks air them. During the 130 weekdays Tyndall examined, for example, CBS covered 151 stories that were on that morning's front page while the Times put 249 stories on its front page that had been on CBS the previous evening. (For ABC, the numbers were 159 and 225, and for NBC they were 181 and 228.) This illustrates a couple of things. First, as a paper of record, the Times often serves as news ratifier rather than trend-setter. But perhaps more importantly, this shows how the rise of electronic media, and the subsequent non-stop news cycle, have changed the news-flow dynamic in the last twenty years. Tyndall says, "The news cycle is now less than twenty-four hours. So much happens during the day that what a mainstream audience sees on television news each evening reflects events that have happened since The New York Times was published, rather than twenty-hour-old news judgments."

Straight numbers, though, do not tell the full story. For example, each evening a budget of what will be on the Times's front page the next morning is dropped into the computers of the hundreds of news outlets that subscribe to the Times's news service. How this affects the news judgments, both within New York and beyond, is hard to quantify.

More importantly, Tyndall's study doesn't get at the indirect influence of how the Times frames an issue in its analysis and enterprise pieces. In this regard, the paper's impact on the news agenda is often not same-day. Consider the McCain temper story. It ran on a Monday. That evening, there was nothing about it on network news. Tuesday morning the trickle began. MSNBC mentioned it briefly. So did Good Morning Arizona. The Arizona Republic said McCain's temper had "emerged as a national campaign issue . . . as The New York Times raised the question of whether McCain's personality could become a major drawback for him." By Wednesday the story was picking up steam. CNN had it on Inside Politics, and Fox News's Brit Hume mentioned it in his report. Thursday it was on Crossfire. Nearly two months later, McCain's temper was still in the news, turning up in December in a 60 Minutes II segment, on The Late Show With David Letterman, and in a substantive piece on ABC World News Tonight.

"My friends at the networks will say, 'You don't understand the important function you play,'" says Richard Berke, the Times's national political writer, who wrote the McCain story. "You still have the network executives waking up in New York and reading the Times. It's their paper."

WILL IT CHANGE?

Several people interviewed for this article asked, rhetorically, if the situation would be any different if the national media were based somewhere else, Los Angeles, for example. The answer, it seems, is both yes and no. As Brown's survey showed, journalists as a class share certain traits and values that set them apart from mainstream America. So on the one hand there would still be, as Danny Schechter says, too much news "about the people who run the world rather than the people who have to live under that rule." But on the other hand, news would undoubtedly reflect more of the concerns and interests of southern California and the wider American west. The power crisis -- a national story as it is -- would be a page-one fixture. Same with the murder of L.A. police chief Bernard Parks's granddaughter. Former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir's Revlon-backed junket to the Oscars, meanwhile, might rate a line or two in gossip columns. (The Safir item, by the way, turned up in newspapers around the country, in Newsweek, and on the CBS Early Show.)

West Coast tunnel vision is no improvement, of course. "The problem is that we don't have a fully varied national media," says Roger Cohn. "And the worst thing about it is that there are everyday problems and injustices that are not being exposed because they don't make the radar screen in New York."

Good reporting can -- and often does -- counter this unavoidable provincialism, says James Carey. "What matters is the degree to which we check our assumptions against the data, that we write it with care." USA Today -- the national newspaper not based in New York -- has systematically tried to steer clear of the New York-northeastern vortex. In the early days, there were staff meetings and memos on the dangers of "eastern bias." Today, that has mostly given way to a heavy reliance on its national network of bureaus, says Taylor Buckley, who retired in 1999 after seventeen years at the paper, during which he was the unofficial eastern-bias czar. He says USA Today needed to "create this artificial barrier" and constantly remind itself that it was a national paper. "I used to raise hell with reporters who framed a story geographically, because the sweep inevitably began in the east and moved west, or began in the north and moved south. It's a small thing, but it betrayed an eastern bias. It's not conspiratorial, it's just who they hang out with, what they read."

The Times tweaks the front page of its national edition to reflect a more geographically diverse audience. Most of The Wall Street Journal's reporting staff is based outside New York; its technology coverage is based in Silicon Valley, for instance, and its national staff for retail reporting is in Chicago. Getting out of Manhattan is key, either in person or with correspondents and stringers. Priscilla Painton, an assistant managing editor at Time, points to two cover stories -- "The Backbone of America" in July 1997 and "Life on the Mississippi" in July 2000. For the first, a team of reporters, editors, and photographers rode a bus along Highway 50 from Maryland to San Francisco, gathering stories on things like economic disparity in an Ohio school system and the struggle of a ranching community in Colorado to grow. For the second, a similar team rode a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans, dredging up stories on a gay, black writer in Memphis, for example, and the effort to revitalize river towns in Iowa. "We risked ridicule," Painton says. "Any time you say you're going to put a bunch of journalists on a bus across country, there are people who will say, 'There go the New Yorkers trying to discover America.'"

Painton's plaint demonstrates the impossibility of covering a beat as large and diverse as America to everyone's satisfaction. Newsweek's Daniel Pedersen says he hopes the democratization of the media that some argue is under way is never fully realized. "The world needs an editor," he says, "and the ones we have are pretty good. They are not perfect and can be a bit provincial, but so can everyone else."