The News Gap,

Wartime Duties

excerpted from the book

Bad News

The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to All of Us

by Tom Fenton

ReganBooks, 2005, hardcover

p4
The content of the evening news is influenced, sometimes directly and always indirectly, by network executives. And these executives, who decide what the nation wants to know, believe that tabloid news sells. Stories that seek to explain the relevance of incremental developments in far-off countries rarely see the light of day. They get spiked by evening news producers preoccupied by ratings, because most people in our business are convinced-wrongly, I believe-that the public couldn't care less about foreign news.

p8
... polls show television is still where most Americans turn for their news. In 2003, 83 percent of the American public said that they got most of their news about national and international issues from television-and that figure has remained remarkably constant for more than a decade. Only 42 percent said they got their news from newspapers, 19 percent from the Internet. (The survey questions usually allow more than one answer.) But here's the reality check: only 23 percent gave NBC, ABC, or CBS news the highest mark for believability. The independent media study that quoted these figures reported that the public's opinion of the media has been declining for nearly twenty years. It found that "Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s." Coming from the people we are supposed to serve, that is a damning indictment.

Yet the public's verdict has had little impact on the mindset of media executives. You won't see any media heads roll for neglecting to give the public enough news, or better and timelier information on the state of the world. Heads roll for other reasons, of course-on television, for low ratings; on network news, for not garnering maximal advertising revenue, not eking out the fullest profit for the parent corporation.

p9
In mid-2004, the New York Times and the Washington Post announced publicly that they had failed to scrutinize the Bush administration's given reasons for invading Iraq sufficiently in advance of the war. The Times printed an apology on May 26, admitting that it had misled its readers on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," the extraordinary statement read. "Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all." Even leaving aside whatever political agenda such an admission may imply, Times readers could be forgiven for wondering: Was this confessed oversight a unique situation? What else ad the paper missed, and for how long?

Almost simultaneous to the admission, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared smugly at a news conference that it was the military, not the media, who had uncovered the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. After the story became a global scandal, the Columbia Journalism Review took up the matter, asking, "Why did it take so long for the media to break the story of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib?" The Review pointed out that the watchdog organizations Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had been complaining of persistent prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay for two years. The U.S. military in Iraq had itself released information of an ongoing internal investigation months before, in January 2004. At the time, some papers had run short items reporting the press release-once again, in their inside pages. The story would have died there if the CBS News program 60 Minutes II, more than three months later, had not broadcast the infamous pictures that set off a firestorm of protest around the world.

p11
In the decade leading up to 9/11, I had been beaten down by the corporate bean counters. I had seen so many of my stories rejected, so many proposed trips in search of news turned down by executives more interested in furthering their careers by coming in under budget than in breaking real news, that I had almost given up. You can be rejected only so many times before you stop trying, before you stop informing the public fully. In my view, corporate greed and indifference have all but killed the kind of newsgathering ethos that produces results.

And there is another problem, more insidious because the public isn't aware of it. The London Bureau of CBS News, where I have spent more than a quarter century, doesn't do much reporting any more. What it does is called packaging. We take in pictures shot by people we do not know, and wrap them in facts gathered by anonymous employees in news agencies owned by others. Call it the news media's version of outsourcing. All the television networks now do most of their "reporting" this way, to save money on old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting by full-time correspondents. And as a result, the networks can no longer vouch for much of the foreign news they put on the air.

p14
Martin Baron, the editor of the Boston Globe, admitted post-9/11 that "we [journalists] do bear some responsibility for American ignorance" on world affairs.

p15
Loren Jenkins, foreign editor for National Public Radio, has been among those lamenting the Bush administration's skill at news management. "I have never seen greater news management in thirty-plus years in this business," he says. But he admits that such stonewalling isn't supposed to stop the inquisitive journalist: "That's what the Fourth Estate is all about-poking holes in news management."'

p17
Talk radio and television shows may be popular, exciting, and sometimes wickedly funny. But they shouldn't be confused with news.

In the two decades before September 11, American newspaper editors and television executives reduced their coverage of foreign news by 70 to 80 percent.

p18
Americans can sense that they're underinformed. They know that they don't know enough. A pervasive feeling has haunted many Americans since the attacks of September 11a fear that all manner of shadowy forces and strategies are at play beyond their ken, and that we the people are powerless to shape or even react to them-in large part because our access to information is so flawed. If their news media could ignore or miss so big a story as the coming attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what else have they missed Ld what are they missing today?

p18
Most of the world gets international news that differs significantly from American news or from the American point of view. Much of this is dismissed stateside as mere antiAmericanism, but it is also true that America's actual role in the world is more visible the further one gets from America's shores. Foreigners are regularly exposed to some of the more awkward facts about U.S. policy-facts that simply don't surface in our mainstream news media.

Most Americans, for example, had no idea that during the 1990s U.S. agents were working with the Taliban in Afghanistan with a view to establishing a "friendly" regime that would allow western oil companies to build a pipeline across their country. I first stumbled on that story in neighboring Turkmenistan in 1995, but could never get it on the air; CBS didn't think it was news. Perhaps it wasn't front-page material at the time, but a proper investigative operation would have grabbed at the chance to show the American government cozying up to wild-eyed fundamentalists, because of the potentially unpredictable consequences. Like America's earlier clandestine support for bin Laden and his anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan, it was another case of America's chickens coming home to roost. Although the story eventually became widely known in the Middle East, it wasn't until Michael Moore's film that most of the American public knew anything of these inconvenient facts. Facts like these may each only represent small parts of the total picture, but they add up. Eventually, they may or may not mean anything important in the larger picture, but how can Americans judge if they don't know in the first place? Any foreign correspondent with a modicum of experience will tell you of such facts by the dozen floating around that never reach the American public.

p19
Donatella Lorch, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Newsweek, and NBC News

"It is terribly frustrating when you can't persuade your executive producers that what's happening in Afghanistan is more worthy of airtime than Laci Peterson or Michael Jackson."

p20
The gatekeepers of the news-the executives, editors, and producers who decide what information will make it to the public-will tell you that the average reader simply cannot absorb that much hard news, especially about events abroad. On one level, they're merely restating the problem: Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world. Yet whose fault is that, and whose responsibility is it to correct? Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations.

p21
Clearly, the media executives who control the new do not believe it falls to them to undertake such complex longterm investigations as these authors did. That kind of work is expensive, after all, and it can lead to complex stories that may be hard for the public to follow. Much easier to feed them brain candy.

p37
... complicated stories - especially ones that tail place within foreign cultures-have to be explained and given context before the public can be counted on to understand and take interest in them. Too few executives have been ready to take on the challenge of making Americans understand context and relevance-a grievous omission. This is particularly true in a country such as ours, where the education system seems unable to teach history and geography effectively. Foreign news, by its very nature, requires the kind of cumulative context that only comes with long-term attention-in other words, more than just spot reporting. Why? Because world events have complex historical causes.

But long-term attention requires effort. And American news bosses simply don't have faith in the American public's attention span.

The ABC News program Nightline, which still does penetrating, intelligent journalism in a commercial television environment littered with trashy magazine shows, is proof that Americans will listen to well-prepared, well-explained, foreign news. Time and again, Nightline's success disproves the lazy axiom of our business that stories from abroad-especially from Africa-spell death to ratings. Ted Koppel, the program's anchor, introduced one weeklong series called "The Heart of Darkness" from Goma, Congo, on September 7, 2001:

At the heart of the continent, genocide in a tiny country; a genocide that horrified the world, brought chaos to a country almost 100 times its size. And you probably haven't heard a word .... It has claimed more lives than all the other current wars around the world combined. But outside of Africa, no one seems to have noticed. Three years, two and a half million dead. We thought someone should tell you. Koppel was talking about Rwanda and the Congo, and the public listened. Tom Bettag, the show's executive producer, found to his own surprise that the show got a "terrific response": the ratings went way up. Bettag points out that no reliable data exist to prove that foreign news bores the viewing public-despite all the advice from consultants, and the self-serving protests from broadcast executives that paying for foreign news coverage is a costly extravagance that the public doesn't want anyway. Quoting his late mentor Fred Friendly, who resigned from the CBS News presidency on a matter of principle, Bettag reminds us: "When they say it isn't about the money, it's about the money."'

Depth of knowledge serves us in many ways: it helps to prevent our leaders from allying with special interests abroad without our knowledge, as the Clinton administration did with the Taliban in years prior to 9/11, and to prevent our newsmen from brainwashing us in favor of one side or another in foreign conflicts. Nobody mentions this last problem too loudly in the news business, but we need only recall how the American media (myself included) demonized the Serbs during the civil wars in former Yugoslavia. We left out the context that the ethnic Albanians, who were the victims in the 1990s, had themselves routinely slaughtered Serbs in World War II. And now that America has come to the Albanians' rescue, the Albanians are busy trying to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of all Serbs.

p41
Central Asia was and still is a black hole for American news. Few reporters are sent there. In the mid-1990s, when the formerly Soviet central Asian republics were struggling to keep both Moscow and fundamentalism at bay, my late CBS News colleague Bill McClure was approached by a freelance journalist who was well versed in the region. Over the course of several decades, Bill had done scores of stories for 60 Minutes; now, in his seventies, he pitched only the stories he found genuinely important. Together, Bill and his freelance colleague decided that this was a crucial story about a region that would play a determining role in the world's future.

Hemmed in by their borders with China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Russia, these now independent republics-Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan-held large amounts of oil and gas. The Russians wanted to reassert control over their old possessions by denying them access to world markets for their raw materials, except through Russia. And how did the United States attempt to block that Russian strategy? By quietly cozying up to the Taliban, so that pipelines could be built from Central Asia through Afghanistan, free of Russian influence.

As the Daily Telegraph correspondent Ahmad Rashid detailed in his book Jihad in Central Asia, the Russians responded by fomenting their own Islamic fundamentalists against their previous colonies. That allowed Moscow to restation troops to "protect" the republics against what they called "destabilization." In short, they created an excuse for reoccupying these republics, which had been independent since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia and the United States played a lethal backstairs game in that area during the 1990s-Russia forcefully, the United States rather drowsily-but the affair backfired for both countries. And most Americans remained ignorant of the entire episode.

p42
What exactly are the responsibilities of the news media in a time of war? Predictably, as with so much else, the news industry has missed this all-important topic, perhaps the most critical issue for public debate for our profession. What exactly should we do differently from before? Here's a list, with the clear understanding that it's hardly exhaustive or definitive-and, in my view, represents only things that we should have been doing all along.

1. Act as the public's early warning system, to danger from within our borders and without.

2. Monitor the government's performance in the service of our safety.

3. Make sure that the public knows what the government does abroad in our name.

4. Do not reveal information endangering the public or its defenders.

5. At the same time, do not be intimidated by censorship disguised as patriotism.

6. Do not shy away from educating the public in the historical and geographical contexts behind the news.

1. Train and select professionals competent in these tasks.

8. Make sure government does not abuse its powers at home.

9. Never allow the parent corporation's interests to prevail over the public's.

10. Help the country focus on the task at hand without trivial distractions.

p44
Surely we can find a more balanced approach? J Wartime puts special pressures on the media as they monitor the government's performance. Journalists who pursue their rightful role to probe, investigate, and criticize the government are too easily, and often unfairly, accused of a lack of patriotism, as Peter Jennings knows firsthand. In the months preceding the Iraq war, Jennings says, he felt the heat from conservatives who did not like his coverage of Iraq: "World News Tonight was regarded as the most critical [of the networks], and it made people in the shop-some people in the shop-a little bit nervous, because the vocalness of the conservatives in the country is very considerable, and it spooks some people a little bit. When the war began to turn out less like the conventional wisdom thought it was going to turn out, and our pre-war analysis looked a little more intelligent, there was a little less criticism."

p45
On some nights prior to 9/11, the network news shows featured no foreign news at all. The was a major shift from the heyday of network news in the 1970s, when the networks dominated the airwaves-and almost half the content of most network evening news broadcasts was devoted to foreign news. The same phenomenon occurred in the newspaper business: foreign news fell from 10 percent of the average daily's news content in 1971 to roughly 2 percent [by 9/11]. The major news magazines cut back their foreign news from 22 percent in 1985 to 13 percent in 1995. And yet the popularity of news broadcasts fell consistently throughout those years. The more they dumbed down in the race for ratings, the more viewers they lost.

And no wonder: When skimpier news resources chase an ever more unstable world, the outcome is a kind of herd reporting where all reporters and news channels chase after the same Big Story, or Big Scandal, and neglect the rest. Such a strategy may help a network to cut costs, but in the end it can only alienate the public, which will not be fooled for ever

p46
... the industry's structural fundamentals have not changed. Indeed, the networks have almost gone out of the foreign news gathering business. The foreign bureaus they had closed before 9/11 have not been re-opened; the networks remain complacently content to "package" a lot of canned news in London, with all the compromises that process entails. No one batted an eye when CBS News followed ABC's example in 2004 and decided it no longer needed a resident correspondent in Russia-a country with a rusting nuclear arsenal, an acute terrorism problem, and an increasingly authoritarian leader. U.S. News and World Report has closed all its foreign bureaus-making one wonder how its editors can justify calling their magazine a "world report" at all. The news purveyors still serve their pockets before the public.

Bad News

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