Without Newspapers, Less Happens

By Thomas Griffith

New Yorkers may or may not be the most discerning newspaper readers in the country, but they are certainly the most critical. During the long newspaper strike, which now seems to be winding to an end, they've had to relax their critical standards and make do with a passel of skimpy strike-born newspapers. "New Yorkers are now getting. Clay Felker, the editor of Esquire, remarked the otter day, "the level of newspapers the rest of the country gets. This remark is unfair to a number of newspapers in other American cities, but not to all.

Who could imagine that two Popes in a row could be installed and Camp David take place without benefit of coverage and comment from the New York Times? Those who have had to get their daily news mostly from TV missed a lot of valuable insights, but were spared much of the repetitious babble and striving for novelty that accompany big events They also missed some zero-sum punditry--someone must win, someone must lose--of the kind that refuses to believe Sadat and Begin could both intelligently weigh their advantages and conclude that agreement was in their mutual interest. (Or, as a Joseph Kraft column demanded right after Camp David, "Who caved?")

Times readers, beneft of its acres of information and its sober ruminations, haven't got much help from the return to publication of Rupert Murdoch's go-it-alone New York Post, which is crammed with ads, some news, and a lot of sell-promotion. Murdoch is too commercially astute to try to fill the gap left by the Times (he couldn't anyway). Instead, while he has the spotlight he has been trying to start up a new Sunday paper and a salty new morning tabloid to compete against the New York Daily News.

The city's retail stores have done unexpectedly well. Of more concern to New York's cultural role is the strike's damage to first novels, unheralded plays, art openings and musical debuts, all dependent on favorable attention.

Other forms of journalism have proved ineffectual substitutes for newspapers. Local television stations lengthen their news broadcasts without improving them. Critics from the papers, reading their reviews on the air, soon found themselves simplifying their judgments--more fervently denouncing or plugging a book--having discovered television's inpatience with verbal nuances. Reporters and columnists working for the strike-born papers seem less impressive than usual. Can it be that the role of editors in making news judgments is more crucial than writers like to admit? Or perhaps, on interim papers, reporters are like football players in a postseason Hula Bowl.

As the long strike wears on, the public seems to feel less of a need for news. It has found other things to do, other things to read. Michael O'Neill, the wryly cheerful editor of the Daily News, acknowledges a cultural shock in himself: he feels uncomfortably out of touch with the city. The mayor greets him and says, "Is anything happening? and asks nervously, "How am I doing?"

Literally, less is going on now," O'Neill acknowledges. one reason, he thinks, is that local television depends on the basic newspaper reporting it no longer gets for its awareness of what's going on in town. And without newspapers adds O'Neill, "people trying to get action have no place to turn to. You no longer hear people reacting to news generated by others." This would seem to bear out those critics who think that newspapers stir up news, and in doing so stir up trouble. You can call that made news if you wish, and in a way it is, but Mike O'Neill thinks that "in a big urban society people need stimuli to function." By providing such linkages and reactions, newspapers give a community a sense of itself. There does seem to have been something basic missing in the Big Apple all these weeks, in a peace and quiet that to a degree has been based on ignorance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.