In his speech at the Republican National Convention last week, President Bush garnered laughter and applause by taking a shot at the New York Times — and the New York Times, circa 1946, to boot. (One imagines a hapless Bush campaign researcher who’s been told, “I don’t care if you have to go back to 1946, Figby — find something on the Times!”)
It’s well-established that Bush and his team consider the media just one more special interest with one more special agenda, but last week’s attack, little-commented-upon though it has been, marked a line drawn in the sand in front of a national audience. For a sitting president to go so directly after the Times — and, by extension, the mainstream media for which it serves as a standard bearer — would have been unthinkable in the 1950s and ’60s, when the concept of “media bias” was confined to the conversations of academics, and didn’t refer to political leanings. The dominant magazines of the time, the Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look, were read by millions, coast to coast, and generally thought to be institutions beyond reproach. Network news anchors, led by Walter Cronkite, arguably “the most trusted man in America,” radiated fatherly reassurance, even as they delivered disturbing news to an attentive public. It seems hard to believe in this age, but those media standard bearers were by and large seen as benevolent gatekeepers of the truth, with an allegiance to the facts and nothing more.
That reputation took some hits in the late ’60s and ’70s, when aggressive coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, even as it inspired a generation of journalists, led many to conclude that the press had an agenda beyond just truth. But it was during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush that public regard for daily journalism and its practitioners took its long slide to today’s low levels. Between 1985 and 1999, according to an updated edition of Walter Lippman’s book Public Opinion, the percentage of Americans who said “news organizations get the facts straight” fell from 55 to 37 percent. (At the Harvard School of Business, that kind of relentless year-after-year decline is known as a “going-out-of-business trendline.”)
There are many reasons for the long march to low credibility, but chief among them is the rise of cable news, with its ratings-driven adherence to fluff over news, its bias towards conflict, and, perhaps most importantly, its reliance on what we’ve called carnival barkers, the talking heads who righteously parrot spin and invective without much regard for either fairness or truth.
It is that trend — more than the perceived arrogance of the present administration — that opened the door to President Bush’s shot. It is, after all, in the interest of any politician to go after unpopular institutions. But President Bush’s decision to try to exploit public resentment towards the fourth estate should be a wake-up call to a press corps that has too easily sacrificed its long-term credibility for shortsighted ratings grabs. There is a double-edged sword at work here, and it’s now resulting in self-inflicted wounds. Media splintering and proliferation has given news consumers more voices than ever from which to choose — but the concomitant pressures for grabbing and keeping a slice of the dwindling audience pie have driven one outlet after another to lowest common denominator coverage.
The major institutions of the mainstream press have been nothing if not inventive in their unflagging, and largely unsuccessful, efforts to reignite consumer loyalty. But, in the end, if they can’t reverse the gradual mortgaging of their own credibility, they will eventually die, buried under the detritus of their own failed gimmicks.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.