From 1945 to circa 1995 was a heyday for news corporations. America was prosperous, people were habituated to news consumption, both from newspapers and from TV and radio. News corporations were given anti-monopoly dispensations that allowed them to consolidate and dominate their geographical markets, charging higher advertising rates and making more profits. This was an age when everyone was rolling in money, when journalists did long-read pieces, when papers had foreign bureaus, plenty of reporters and plenty of editors, and virtually no competition.
But 1996 was sort of the end of that era. The world wide web had been launched at the end of 1990 and, while still tiny, was growing exponentially. Fox News was launched eight months after Fallows's article. Google was launched in 1998. The first smart phone (distributed and mobile video and audio recording with instant internet connection) was released in 1999, three years after this article. Social media (My Space) emerged in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Competition from innovative news outlets and then from Facebook and Google sucked the profits out of the traditional industry. By 2017, Facebook and Google combined take 20% of all global advertising and account for virtually all the growth in advertising. The traditional media balance sheets have been decimated.
The fat revenue streams of traditional media dried up as did long-form journalism, investigative reporting, journalist jobs, editorial jobs and fact-checking. Cheap, un-checked content is now not only the norm, it is a necessity.
Fallows is reporting from the tail-end of the old era. He identifies multiple trends debasing the media industry such that news and journalists, even then, were viewed as biased, inaccurate, inattentive to usefulness, irrelevant to viewers, and infected with the necrosis of journalistic corruption.
In 1996 the media had already fallen in to the habit of providing cheap play-by-play content over substantive news. Opinions over facts. But it was about to get worse in a fashion that Fallows could not foresee. The problem of cheap, inaccurate content was about to be exacerbated by an increasingly divergent world view between journalists and their viewers. Journalists, products of faddish academia, became postmodernists (no truth, all viewpoints are equal), urban centered, obsessed with multiculturalism, diversity, inequality, and identity. The journalist worldview became not just detached from that of their viewers but antagonistic to the bourgeois values and interests of their viewers.
The journalistic illusion that by associating with power you are actually part of the power nexus became a reality when advocacy and interest groups began providing revenue streams to journalists desperate for money, work, and relevance in a rapidly churning and devolving industry. Not everyone lost their ethics but it only takes one fly in the soup to send back the bowl.
Cheap, irrelevant, and inaccurate information, with a dash of corruption and delivered with hauteur and disdain from the viewpoint of a 1960s second-tier university faculty lounge - how could that business model fail?
In February, 1996, Fallows highlighted:
The emerging dissociation of journalists from mainstream public views.And then it went downhill.
A laser focus on the competitive game aspects of politics at the expense of policy. Voters wanted to know the substance of what politicians were going to do to solve collective problems while journalists were focusing on the tactics of political gamesmanship and who was pulling ahead and who was falling behind.
The conversion of news to an entertainment format over a substantive format.
The fact that news journalists were routinely overwhelmingly wrong in their predictions and prognostications with no consequences for being wrong.
The substitution of cheap opinions and commentary for the older factual substance.
Active management and manipulation of the press corps by the White House.
The emerging integration of financial interests between journalists and the parties they covered, advocacy groups, and other stakeholders, compromising journalistic independence and integrity.
The emerging bubble encasing senior journalists living 1% lifestyles.
The emerging condition where journalists not only had different values from their viewers but were incapable of comprehending the values and interests of their viewers.
The established disdain of the public for journalists and news media.
The following are a series of excerpts from the article highlighting the augurs of what was to come. The article is worth reading in its entirety.
Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.
[snip]
On Sunday, November 6, 1994, two days before the congressional elections that swept the Republicans to power, The Washington Post published the results of its "Crystal Ball" poll. Fourteen prominent journalists, pollsters, and all-around analysts made their predictions about how many seats each party would win in the House and Senate and how many governorships each would take.
One week later many of these same experts would be saying on their talk shows that the Republican landslide was "inevitable" and "a long time coming" and "a sign of deep discontent in the heartland." But before the returns were in, how many of the fourteen experts predicted that the Republicans would win both houses of Congress and that Newt Gingrich would be speaker? Exactly three.
What is interesting about this event is not just that so many experts could be so wrong. Immediately after the election even Newt Gingrich seemed dazed by the idea that the forty-year reign of the Democrats in the House had actually come to an end. Rather, the episode said something about the futility of political prediction itself—a task to which the big-time press devotes enormous effort and time. Two days before the election many of the country's most admired analysts had no idea what was about to happen. Yet within a matter of weeks these same people, unfazed, would be writing articles and giving speeches and being quoted about who was "ahead" and "behind" in the emerging race for the White House in 1996.
[snip]
But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part. It builds the impression that journalism is about what's entertaining—guessing what might or might not happen next month—rather than what's useful, such as extracting lessons of success and failure from events that have already occurred. Competing predictions add almost nothing to our ability to solve public problems or to make sensible choices among complex alternatives. Yet such useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
[snip]
What might these well-paid, well-trained correspondents have done while waiting for the O.J. trial to become boring enough that they could get back on the air? They might have tried to learn something that would be of use to their viewers when the story of the moment went away. Without leaving Washington, without going farther than ten minutes by taxi from the White House (so that they could be on hand if a sudden press conference was called), they could have prepared themselves to discuss the substance of issues that affect the public.
[snip]
No one contends that every contribution makes every politician corrupt. But financial disclosure has become commonplace on the "Better safe than sorry" principle. If politicians and officials are not corrupt, the reasoning goes, they have nothing to fear from letting their finances be publicized. And if they are corrupt, public disclosure is a way to stop them before they do too much harm. The process may be embarrassing, but this is the cost of public life.
How different the "Better safe than sorry" calculation seems when journalists are involved! Reporters and pundits hold no elected office, but they are obviously public figures. The most prominent TV-talk-show personalities are better known than all but a handful of congressmen. When politicians and pundits sit alongside one another on Washington talk shows and trade opinions, they underscore the essential similarity of their political roles. The pundits have no vote in Congress, but the overall political impact of a word from George Will, Ted Koppel, William Safire, or any of their colleagues who run the major editorial pages dwarfs anything a third-term congressman could do. If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
[snip]
In 1993 Sam Donaldson, of ABC, described himself in an interview as being in touch with the concerns of the average American. "I'm trying to get a little ranching business started in New Mexico," he said. "I've got five people on the payroll. I'm making out those government forms." Thus he understood the travails of the small businessman and the annoyances of government regulation. Donaldson, whose base pay from ABC is reported to be some $2 million a year, did not point out that his several ranches in New Mexico together covered some 20,000 acres. When doing a segment attacking farm subsidies on Prime Time Live in 1993 he did not point out that "those government forms" allowed him to claim nearly $97,000 in sheep and mohair subsidies over two years. William Neuman, a reporter for the New York Post, said that when his photographer tried to take pictures of Donaldson's ranch house, Donaldson had him thrown off his property. ("In the West trespassing is a serious offense," Donaldson explained.)
Had Donaldson as a journalist been pursuing a politician or even a corporate executive, he would have felt justified in using the most aggressive reportorial techniques. When these techniques were turned on him, he complained that the reporters were going too far. The analysts who are so clear-eyed about the conflict of interest in Newt Gingrich's book deal claim that they see no reason, none at all, why their own finances might be of public interest.
Last May one of Donaldson's colleagues on This Week With David Brinkley, George Will, wrote a column and delivered on-air comments ridiculing the Clinton Administration's plan to impose tariffs on Japanese luxury cars, notably the Lexus. On the Brinkley show Will said that the tariffs would be "illegal" and would merely amount to "a subsidy for Mercedes dealerships."
Neither in his column nor on the show did Will disclose that his wife, Mari Maseng Will, ran a firm that had been paid some $200,000 as a registered foreign agent for the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, and that one of the duties for which she was hired was to get American commentators to criticize the tariff plan. When Will was asked why he had never mentioned this, he replied that it was "just too silly" to think that his views might have been affected by his wife's contract.
[snip]
A third member of the regular Brinkley panel, Cokie Roberts, is, along with Will and Donaldson, a frequent and highly paid speaker before corporate audiences. She has made a point of not disclosing which interest groups she speaks to or how much money she is paid. She has criticized the Clinton Administration for its secretive handling of the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton's lucrative cattle-future trades and of the Whitewater affair, yet like the other pundits, she refuses to acknowledge that secrecy about financial interests undermines journalism's credibility too.
[snip]
Nielsen ratings reported in the same day's paper showed that the longer the speech went on, the larger the number of people who tuned in to watch.
The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
"I'm wondering what so much of the public heard that our highly trained expert analysts completely missed," Carol Cantor, a software consultant from California, wrote in a discussion on the WELL, a popular online forum, three days after the speech. What they heard was, in fact, the speech, which allowed them to draw their own conclusions rather than being forced to accept an expert "analysis" of how the President "handled" the speech. In most cases the analysis goes unchallenged, because the public has no chance to see whatever event the pundits are describing. In this instance viewers had exactly the same evidence about Clinton's performance that the "experts" did, and from it they drew radically different conclusions.
[snip]
Talk about not getting it! The people who put together this ad must have imagined that the popular irritation with inside-the-Beltway culture was confined to members of Congress—and didn't extend to members of the punditocracy, many of whom had held their positions much longer than the typical congressman had. The difference between the "welcoming committee" and the congressional committees headed by fallen Democratic titans like Tom Foley and Jack Brooks was that the congressmen can be booted out.
"Polls show that both Republicans and Democrats felt better about the Congress just after the 1994 elections," a Clinton Administration official said last year. "They had 'made the monkey jump'—they were able to discipline an institution they didn't like. They could register the fact that they were unhappy. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that with the press, except to stop watching and reading, which more and more people have done."
[snip]
Even real-life members of the Washington pundit corps have made their way into movies—Eleanor Clift, Morton Kondracke, hosts from Crossfire—in 1990s releases such as Dave and Rising Sun. Significantly, their role in the narrative is as buffoons. The joke in these movies is how rapidly the pundits leap to conclusions, how predictable their reactions are, how automatically they polarize the debate without any clear idea of what has really occurred. That real-life journalists are willing to keep appearing in such movies, knowing how they will be cast, says something about the source of self-respect in today's media: celebrity, on whatever basis, matters more than being taken seriously.
Movies do not necessarily capture reality, but they suggest a public mood—in this case, a contrast between the apparent self-satisfaction of the media celebrities and the contempt in which they are held by the public. "The news media has a generally positive view of itself in the watchdog role," wrote the authors of an exhaustive survey of public attitudes and the attitudes of journalists themselves toward the press. (The survey was conducted by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, and was released last May.) But "the outside world strongly faults the news media for its negativism ... The public goes so far as to say that the press gets in the way of society solving its problems ..." According to the survey, "two out of three members of the public had nothing or nothing good to say about the media."
[snip]
Yet the fact that no one takes the shows seriously is precisely what's wrong with them, because they jeopardize the credibility of everything that journalists do. "I think one of the really destructive developments in Washington in the last fifteen years has been the rise in these reporter talk shows,"Tom Brokaw has said. "Reporters used to cover policy—not spend all of their time yelling at each other and making philistine judgments about what happened the week before. It's not enlightening. It makes me cringe."
When talk shows go on the road for performances in which hostility and disagreement are staged for entertainment value; when reporters pick up thousands of dollars appearing before interest groups and sharing tidbits of what they have heard; when all the participants then dash off for the next plane, caring about none of it except the money—when these things happen, they send a message. The message is: We don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?
UPDATE: From recent Pew Research, the media cite themselves sevn times more often than they cite the public.
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