Beware ideologues bearing ‘centrist’ news
One dog barking: an occasional column by John Dineen
When someone tries to sell you on the idea of a “centrist” news broadcast, rest assured the bridge they have to sell you is not far behind.
This thought comes to mind because media critic Margaret Sullivan gave us the news last week that the two most conspicuous cases of self-proclaimed “centrist” news — CNN and CBS News under the decidedly not centrist Bari Weiss — are performing poorly in the ratings.
Sullivan wrote:
Many media owners seem to think there’s a huge swath of America that is desperately seeking “middle ground” journalism. My Guardian colleague Jeremy Barr (whom I also worked with at the Washington Post) wrote a good piece about how this theory doesn’t line up with reality. This idea failed at CNN under Chris Licht and seems to be tanking at CBS News, whose evening newscast has sunk deeper into last place among the three major broadcasters under the guidance of the Ellisons and editor Bari Weiss.
But, wait. What’s wrong with “centrist” news?
Today’s purveyors of “centrist” news are the latest in a long line of partisans who have hammered away at mainstream newscasts as products of the “liberal media.” The goal has been twofold: to undermine the credibility of mainstream journalists and to introduce ideology as a legitimate operational measure of news.
It’s a good moment to quote comedian Stephen Colbert from his performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Association dinner: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
As any marginalized community would tell you, mainstream media has been traditionally and resolutely middle of the road. By definition, the goal is economic: content that will draw the largest possible audience.
Over the decades I‘ve spent in newsrooms and the hundreds of journalists with whom I’ve worked, I probably knew something about the political leanings of no more than a half-dozen. In those newsrooms, almost all of which were focused on Congress, personal politics were off-limits as a topic — because they were irrelevant to our daily news decisions.
News organizations have plenty of biases, but most of them are structural, not ideological. Those structural considerations have a profound impact on what readers and viewers see.
First and foremost, newsrooms have to get you to read or view their content. News needs your attention. And it competes for your attention with, well, everything else in the world. That fact alone drives what news looks like, what we decide is news. It’s why, in local television news, “if it bleeds it leads.”
People are drawn to stories; they absorb information more effectively when it’s presented as a narrative. That means citizens don’t see a great deal of information they might find invaluable because it doesn’t make a compelling story.
Story-telling is the driving culture of every newsroom: Reporters are sometimes sure they have a great story, a story that everyone will want to read, at great length … when they don’t, and readers wouldn’t. Sometimes the facts cannot be stitched into a compelling enough narrative to justify the reporter’s excitement.
It’s a routine part of the push and pull between reporters and editors. It’s topic one when reporters and editors are complaining about each other. Which, you know, they do.
And to be sure, culture matters. For years, news in the United States was produced by white men, with few exceptions, for a world with which they were familiar. Even as newsrooms slowly diversified, the mechanics of news decisions didn’t change.
Ultimately, technology and economics changed the shape of news. The front pages of the New York Times in the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by factual accounts of government. As television news emerged and won the speed race, newspapers shifted away from official government announcements and toward human interest to hold readers’ attention.
Every technological and economic wave — in newspapers, radio, television, cable, the web — buffeted the news industry, which changed its product to meet business needs. Partisanship was not a significant factor in those changes … until the “centrists” arrived: first at Fox (“We report. You decide.”), most recently at CBS.
News should be better than it is. It should be better at supporting democracy because it is a vital strand of democracy — not a thing apart.
But news — and therefore democracy — is still subject to the whims of the market. The drivers are economic — not ideological.
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