Journalism as a profession seems to suffer from a rare form of split-personality disorder. On the one hand, it professes to hold public officials accountable and inform citizens. On the other hand, it seeks also to entertain, create community and, well, stay in business.
It’s not surprising, then, that these two personalities clash from time to time. The profession seems to swing like a pendulum, and every few years, one of these personalities starts to dominate the other. The same is true for individual news organizations within the profession.
Most interesting to me are the factors that contribute to any given pendulum swing. In the 1970s, print journalists relished in their responsibility to hold public officials’ feet to the fire and welcomed era of “adversarial journalism.” With the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, the journalistic pendulum swung far to the “accountability” side.
For television news, the pendulum began to swing far to the “entertainment” side during the exact same time period. Media scholar Craig Allen traces the move back to a group of sociologists-turned-consultants from Chicago. As they descended on local television stations beginning in the 1960s and 70s, these consultants convinced news producers that they weren’t fulfilling their public service obligation with “serious” nightly newscasts that focused primarily on government and politics and only appealed to the college educated. By tailoring their programs to appeal to the largest viewing audience, those in the “lower-middle” and “upper-lower” classes, stations could both increase their profits and truly fulfill their public service mission.
Thus dawned the era of what Allen and other scholars call “Eyewitness news” or “news you can use.” After polling focus groups from the social classes that made up the largest percent of the population, local TV news broadcasts decreased their coverage of government and politics in favor of stories focused on weather and crime. With little variation, this is still the local TV landscape we see today.
We’re left with a kind of specialization by medium, with newspapers responsible for covering politics and government and local television still focused primarily on “news you can use” like weather, crime and traffic. A Pew Center report shows that individual citizens have internalized the content divide. The report’s authors found that local TV “draws a mass audience largely around a few popular subjects, while local newspapers attract a smaller cohort for citizens but for a wider range of civically oriented subjects.”
I find myself unsure whether to decry this specialization or simply accept it and move on. I don’t believe that every news organization, particularly those small local outfits struggling to stay financially afloat, should try to do everything. Rather, they should pick a few things and do them well.
But do them well, I think, is the key. My fear with local television’s focus on crime in particular is its failure to put it in context, which other scholars have shown leads to stereotyping on the part of viewers. Perhaps a new generation of civic-minded consultants can usher in a new pendulum swing for local TV news, one that provides the same information with a bit more context.
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