How About the Good News?

By Thomas Griffith

When he took charge of Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express empire in June, a wealthy English businessman named Victor Matthews said that his only injunctions to his staff were that they believe in Britain and seek to publish good news. These two demands he thought so commonsensical that he anticipated no trouble. Matthews may be competent at running the Cunard Line and London's Ritz Hotel--two of his company's many properties--but he just doesn't understand reporters and editors. They may believe in their country but recoil at the suggestion that they should play Goody Two-shoes.

That response is an ancient tic of the trade. At Central Casting, the tough, cynical reporter is as familiar a cardboard cutout as the prostitute with a heart of gold. This is the skeptical spirit that gave us Watergate, and though it has had no comparable success since (how could it?), the attitude persists. Without that spirit, he would insist, politicians would cheat and lie and always get away with it; government snoopery and police brutality would go undetected and unchecked; products would never be shown up for being less than advertised; wretched conditions, unreported and uncorrected, might bring on civic disorder--in a thousand ways, both trivial and important, the world would be a different place. Warming to his case, a reporter might take his stand with Bertrand Russell, who said that it was no more the duty of a philosopher than of an accountant to return a favorable balance sheet on mankind.

But as a result, it often seems as if, to the press, good news is no news. When criticized on this ground, the press becomes fervently self-righteous about its right and duty to print the unpleasant. The more basic question, given the press's attitude, is how well its total coverage reflects reality: Does it seem to harp on the bad because it does not sufficiently record the good? This is the argument frequently made by businessmen, who are the folks who added boosterism to the English language. David J. Mahoney, board chairman of the

Norton Simon conglomerate, argued on the Op Ed page of the New York Times that the press may need to have an adversary relationship toward government, but should not toward business. It's hard to see why business should be entitled to special exemption--of all groups that think they have a grievance against press coverage, business is hardly the most helpless at getting its own point of view across. But Mahoney does have a point about business coverage.

Watch any nightly television news: the economic coverage is mostly of labor strife or angry wives complaining about high prices. On those rare nights when the commercials are not all about constipation and nagging backs, giant companies like Union Carbide or Honeywell, in their commercials, sometimes show fascinating glimpses of technology at work, such as new wonders of miniaturization. The voice-over may too unctuously insist that all this is being done just to serve you better, but the evidence itself is often visually engaging. Why aren't such business developments --more neutrally filmed by the network news department--part of television's economic coverage too? Perhaps networks fear that they might have to give equal time to business rivals, as they do to politicians. But their pragmatic response is that if a company has something to brag about, let it buy an ad. Fair enough. But then, with part of the news missing, is Walter Cronkite really entitled to sign off his news report proclaiming, "And that's how it is"?

Magazines and newspapers are now printing more good news than they once did, in the new and profitable acreage devoted to "living." Through these consumer guides (how to spend Sundays in the city, etc.), newspapers become not only watchdogs of their community but celebrators of it too. It can't all be Goody Two-shoes. In this era of consumerism, publishers can no longer blatantly mete out favorable references to stores and products in return for ads. The new guides contain some puff and a tiresome lot of fluff, but discriminatory judgments and a few consumer warnings are essential to the form.

Combining such soft service features with the usual hard pursuit of disaster and wrongdoing is having a split-personality effect on newsgathering staffs, as well as producing a subtle redefinition of news. Once news was what happened. Now news also embraces whatever information a sufficient number of people want to be told.

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