News has become a corporate commodity, a product that is packaged to raise profits, said New York Times columnist Frank Rich during his visit to campus as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
During his stay, Rich delivered the Gary Fryer Memorial Lecture on the topic "Journalism Unplugged: The Triumph of 24/7 Media" on Feb. 8. That day, he was also the guest at a Morse College master's tea.
"Polls show that journalists are somewhere between used car salesmen and politicians in popularity among their fellow citizens," Rich told the audience gathered in the Yale University Art Gallery lecture hall for the Fryer Memorial Lecture.
This deserved lack of respect for a once-honored profession, Rich argued, reflects the less-than-reputable fusion of entertainment and journalism into a new form he has labeled "infotainment."
Rich traces the origin of this news hybrid to the CBS show "60 Minutes." In the early days of broadcast television, he noted, the FCC required networks to balance their very profitable commercial programming with a certain amount of unprofitable public information programming. Largely as a way to fulfill this FCC obligation, producer Don Hewitt of the CBS network came up with the idea for a news program of general interest composed of individual 20-minute segments.
At first, "60 Minutes" was virtually ignored by viewers, Rich said, but over time its news magazine format grew quite successful. When other networks realized that they, too, could turn the news obligation into a profitable venture, they adopted the "60 Minutes" model.
According to Rich, by the time news-magazines like "20/20," "Prime Time Live" and "Dateline" had established themselves as regular TV fare, the networks were being bought up by the large entertainment conglomerates, Viacom-Paramount, AOL-Time-Warner, Disney and the Rupert Murdoch empire chief among them.
"Once a news organization like NBC or CBS becomes designed to make profits, as opposed to serving the public foremost, and then on top of that becomes literally part of an entertainment company, ... its values change," Rich emphasized.
Profit-driven news reporting reached a new plateau in the early 1990s, Rich recalled, with the CNN coverage of the Gulf War. This, he said, was the real beginning of "24/7 news reporting, the true conversion of news events into what he calls "mediathons." A mixture of news and soap opera, "War in the Gulf," became the prototype of a new genre, dubbed by Rich as "All Calamity All the Time."
The next big development in the evolution of the "mediathon," Rich says, was the O.J. Simpson trial. In a court, he noted, nothing happens. Lacking the drama of a war, CNN found it could "pump up" the event by focusing on the cast of characters in the courtroom. Hence we had such "real life" new media stars as Marcia Clark, Johnny Cochran and Kato Kaelin.
With the next mediathon, the death of Princess Diana, CNN found that it could "add elements of fiction and get away with it," Rich averred. So much of Diana's saintliness was fabricated, he claimed, that she ended up upstaging the real Mother Teresa who died within the same week.
Rich also cited several examples of hyped or distorted news that appeared in recent months, including the misinformation that the Columbine killers were targeting blacks or jocks on their shooting rampage, and that the rescuer of Cuban youngster Elian Gonzalez was a "fisherman." He was, in fact, a toilet cleaner by profession, Rich said.
As the television news stories get closer and closer to fiction, the people who deliver the news are increasingly becoming"media personalities," said Rich.
"News gatherers are being replaced by entertainers," he said, adding that achieving celebrity, not accurately reporting the news, has become the goal of many television journalists. More often than not it is the allure of fame and high salaries that drives young people into television journalism, Rich said, noting that a top executive at the New York Times probably earns less than a news reporter on a middle-level television station.
In their quest for greater profits, news networks have begun cutting the number of reporters. It was the combination of assigning too few reporters to cover the election beat, along with the networks' competition to be the first to report a story, that led to the conflicting reports about who won what and where on election night, said Rich.
The power of "infotainment" began to take a toll on the print press, even before the rising popularity of Internet news, contended Rich, as more and more people are getting their news from the electronic media. Even his own paper, the venerable New York Times, he noted, has a smaller readership than the viewership of the Lehrer Report, one of the least-popular television news shows.
The future of high standards in journalism is not completely gloomy, Rich conceded. The New York Times, which still enjoys some influence on public opinion, is exploring new Internet venues and opportunities, and has recognized the need to get involved with TV as broadband becomes more widely available, he said.
"The Times is banking on there still being an audience for a quality product," declared Rich. Whether or not publications dedicated to quality succeed against the corporate "Goliaths," however, remains to be seen, he concluded.
-- By Dorie Baker
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