News as Entertainment and Entertainment as News - Forum Summary

This is a summary of the sixth forum of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. The forums form a coordinated inquiry, which with other research, will lead to a monograph outlining the common principles journalists share.

This forum was the first to turn specifically to trends that some journalists believe may be signs of pressure that are getting in the way of journalism always fulfilling its responsibilities. We heard four distinct perspectives on the shift toward news as entertainment. The first was that news as entertainment was worrisome not because it threatened journalism but because it threatened society's sense of distinction between fact and fiction--of the real and unreal. The second was that journalism can take various forms, and has always been mixed with entertainment. Indeed, journalism is probably much less corrupt from an ethical and commercial standpoint than it once was. What is different now is the sense that journalism is simply another commodity, a product, whose purpose is profit. That was not true of publishers of the past. The third concern was that in the wake of this shift toward showmanship the next generation of journalists are not being taught values of accuracy, of ethics, that were hard fought and won by past generations. Finally, we heard that this is likely to change only if journalists can address through a sense of personal ethics and personal shame what the owners of media are doing. Yet how are social values or moral values measured? The question of changing the impetus to see news as another amusement must be addressed carefully. Abstract arguments will not do it.

Journalist and USC professor Richard Reeves began by offering an overview of the shift toward entertainment as news. The most important implication of that trend, he argued, was the blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction, which is melding journalism, literature, the arts and entertainment a industry known as 'the media'

"Journalism today is at an exciting time, but a very, very dangerous time, and there are three kinds of challenges to the way we see ourselves and to what it is we do in our profession.

"The first [challenge] is being in a time of terrific technological change where news cycles are disappearing and even news magazines go on the net to report so that they can have an around-the-clock connection to the people. I don't think there's much you can do about technology...

"The second is that due to federal inheritance laws and a lot of other things, the ownership of the press itself is changing. So that Ted Koppel becomes an employee or cast member of Disney; and if it's not Disney it's General Electric or Westinghouse. And there's not much we can do about that...

"The final [challenge], which I hope we'll be talking about today is the line between fiction and non-fiction and how is that line set, how is it breached, particularly by the entertainment business.

"As the President said, 'Perhaps an editor might divide his paper into four chapters: truth, probabilities, possibilities, and lies.' The President who said that was not William Jefferson Clinton, it was Thomas Jefferson.

I think we have to find that line and stand on it, stand guard...

"In 1978, ABC started a program called 20/20... The first show was an absolute disaster... They had made plans to fold the show, but they went to a vice president of ABC News named Av Weston and said can you do anything with this? Weston [asked the research department] what people want in prime time. . . They gave him a one-word answer -- entertainment.

"Weston then went back and decided that they would continue exactly what they were doing person-oriented stories of the tragedy and triumph of the human condition. What they did change, however, was the only humans they were interested in were rock stars and movie stars...

"That probably was inevitable. Television is an entertainment medium and it's always been shaky and unsure about how to present news; and newspapers are the news medium, and they have always been extremely clunky about entertaining. A newspaper is not the first entertainment people would turn to.

"Last year Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, wrote the introduction for a new MIT edition of Marshall McLuan's "Understanding Media". This is part of what he said in that introduction:

"The world that McLuan describes has taken shape during my lifetime and within the span of my own experience. I can remember that as recently as 1960 it was possible to make distinctions between the several forums of what were then known as the lively arts. The audiences recognize the difference between journalism, literature, politics, and the movies. But then the lines between fact and fiction blurred ... The lively arts fused into the amalgam of forms known as 'the media'. News was entertainment, and entertainment was news.

"We are becoming a smaller and smaller part of bigger and bigger things, particularly in communications and in entertainment. We are a tiny little business... Intel has 41,000 employees and has annual revenues of more than $16 billion a year. Bell Atlantic has 62,000 employees and $13 billion. The New York Times companies and the Washington Post company combined have 19,000 employees and combined revenues of less than $4 billion. If you understand capitalism, you can get a pretty good idea how that will end.

"There was a story in the Los Angeles Times, a series actually, three weeks ago which reported that entertainment had displaced the aerospace business in southern California. Two of the numbers they used were that in Los Angeles County alone ... 312,000 men and women worked in the entertainment industry, and the average earnings of those people is $62,000 a year.

"In the entire country, depending on how you count it, there are 60,000 to 100,000 people in journalism... Their average pay is $31,000 a year. The starting pay is $21,000 a year. ... The starting salary for a toll taker on the New Jersey Turnpike is $27,500 a year. The top pay is $52,000 a year. All of this before overtime...

"In an effort to combine the new and the old, Av Weston was one of the old pros who came in to play a part in that. Jim Bellows, who had been the editor of the New York Herald Tribune and later the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, was hired as a consultant to Entertainment Tonight, which did not do well early on in the game. What Jim taught them was if you make it look like news, people will think it's news, even if it is only publicity. So expanding on stories of celebrities, now you had interviews with celebrities that looked like news. Disney even went so far as to put a program like that on the air which only dealt with their own movies and didn't have a hell of a lot of bad things to say about them.

"With that knowledge, the new generation packaged news as a mix of entertainment and old journalism elements. It's blood, fire, sports, sex, feel good about yourself, and bad about your government.

"There was a response to that in New York a couple of weeks ago with the new Disney cast member, Ted Koppel, speaking at the Committee to Protect Journalists. . . . What Ted said that night was, 'We celebrate tonight the men and women whose dedication to the collection and distribution of facts threatens their very existence. When they antagonize those with money, political power, and guns, they risk their lives. We, on the other hand, tremble at nothing quite so much as the thoughts of boring our audiences. The preferred weapons of the rich and powerful here in America are the pollster and the public relations council, but they are no threat to the physical safety of journalists. Our enemies are more insidious than they are. Our enemies are declining advertising revenues, the rising costs of newsprint, lower ratings diversification, the vertical integration of communications empires, breezier chattier styles are insinuating themselves onto the front pages of our more distinguished newspapers. They are the fading lines between television news and entertainment. It is not death or torture or imprisonment that threatens us as American journalists, it is the trivialization of our industry,' which I would say is well apace. . . .

"Entertainment has become extraordinarily skilled at things like putting people in film when they didn't appear in the original--Forrest Gump meeting with John Kennedy. The Newspaper Association of America put together commercials with famous people reading newspapers. One of them filmed in the Rocky Mountains by New York Advertising man Jerry Delafamina featured Norman Schwarzkopf sitting in front of this beautiful vista....Delafamina thought it looked too phony; the Rockies were too beautiful. To make it look real, they put a bird flying across. But the bird didn't come from an egg. It came from a computer.

"Seeing may have been believing but not any more. Better stick to believe nothing you hear and half of what you see. The problem is, which half? The Oliver Stoning of America proceeds apace.

"So we now move into this challenging technological environment and with our new owners... Harry Evans, the British newspaper editor who has pretty much worked for everybody there is to work for with some distinction, when he came to America said this after hanging around a little bit. "The challenge of the American newspaper is not to stay in business, it's to stay in journalism." I agree that that is the challenge.

"I think we still have many resources. I think that we work much better as outsiders than we do as insiders. Being liked is not part of the job description of a journalist. After all, our job at its most sensational -- I favor sensationalism -- is being the first one to yell that "The Emperor has no clothes." We must still have a bit of cache left with the public, because they haven't had the guts yet to rename them "The Westinghouse Evening News", "The GE Nightly News", or "Disney world News". Not yet. Not yet. Stay tuned, and we'll be back after these messages from some of the most talented and caring journalists in the country."

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