CJR - "The Press is AWOL", by Joan Konner

March/April 1995 | Contents

Publisher's Note

On January 26, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism hosted the annual Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards for Excellence in Television and Radio Journalism. The occasion has become a gathering of the electronic clan to talk about what has happened in the past year in the industry and to celebrate those who have done outstanding work. The awards ceremony was hosted by Tom Brokaw and broadcast on PBS stations around the country. It was preceded by a day-long forum on issues and trends in electronic journalism, at which the keynote address was delivered by Bernard Kalb, moderator of "Reliable Sources" on CNN and former foreign correspondent for CBS, NBC, and The New York Times. His remarks are excerpted here.

Some people collect Chinese porcelain, some collect Persian rugs. I collect decades. I love wandering, rummaging through old decades in search of glitter and litter, integrity and trash, gibberish and substance. I wander through these decades in a personal and in a thematic way. I've wandered through my various journalistic travels -- to when I first arrived in Asia in the late '50s, a less frantic time. I remember being handed a cable on a silver platter at the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok from The New York Times saying: Kalb, please cover anti-American riots in lobby of your hotel. So leisurely a time.

The '60s weren't that carefully plotted either. I'm thinking of Vietnam and the early days prior to satellite where you would take your film bag and give it to anybody leaving the country for a drop-off at Bangkok en route to CBS in New York. You never knew what destination your film bag would turn up in, and I remember I once got a cable saying, Kalb, please explain your film in Alaska.

And yet it was less than that haphazard. There was, indeed, a dimension of journalistic responsibility. I'm thinking of the capacity of the media to punch through some of the gibberish of the "five o'clock follies" -- the daily briefing -- in Saigon . . . the power and the impact of investigative reporting with the disclosure of secrets . . . and the pummeling of America with deception and deceit as anthologized in the Pentagon Papers.

In that ten-year span overlapping two decades you come up with a serious crescendo of journalistic responsibility. The media on guard. For the most part that is not true today of television news.

If you believe, as we all do, that the press is the sentinel of democracy, the sentinel, for the most part, is AWOL. At a moment when there is an escalating and a pyramiding of a variety of crises and challenges confronting the United States -- economic, social, racial -- one would think that the media would be analyzing, probing, investigating America, making it clear to us. Instead, there is for the most part a dance with trash on the part of television news and the television networks.

There is a greater dimension involved in all this, and that has to do with the fact that the accumulating consequences of journalistic shallowness lead to the creation of a vacuum. And vacuums are politically exploitable. So it seems to me that this is a particularly dangerous moment. Exploitable for demagoguery in which instead of focusing on issues that need to be laser examined, we are being fed a constant diet, the OJisation of America, so to speak.

A public that is misinformed, underinformed, ill-informed, is not a country with citizen-using democracy. If you are prepared to entrust democracy to politicians, then you can live with the kind of programs that you're getting today. But if you believe that democracy requires nourishment, requires real journalistic vitamins rather than a lot of empty calories, the emptiness to a large extent of television news has, in my view, very dangerous consequences.

I keep thinking of the impact of the proliferation of TV news outlets -- the nets, cable, the magazine shows -- all fighting for a large chunk of the audience. And this has splashed the country with news, so as we have moved into what I have called the lurid or the trash dimensions or the sex/violence/murder sensationism, the upshot is a very cockeyed portrait of America.

I do not inhabit the America I see on television. Guns, crime, murder, incest, lust * these are not my neighbors. And even when crime figures are going down, television, because of its instant magnification of reality, offers up a constant portrait of America that does not at all resemble the America we live in.

What is the solution to this thing, this increasing crescendo of electronic emptiness? Do we count on the revolt of the masses? Do we go back to my old friend at City College, Paddy Chayevsky: I am fed up and I won't take it anymore? Do we take the dials off and throw them into the Hudson?

I cannot be very reassuring. I'm afraid that ten years from now, in the year 2005, when the decade examinists look back at this one, what I am indicting today will look absolutely golden.