Trusting the Deliveryman Most
By Thomas Griffith
A Gallup poll shows that more people (71%) believe that network television does a better job of providing accurate, unbiased news than anyone else. More shocking is the finding that local television rates next in public trust, at 69%, especially considering how schlocky many local news programs are. Then come newsmagazines at 66%, and newspapers at a mere 57%. Gallup took the poll for Newsweek right after the magazine's corporate sister, the Washington Post, got caught with Janet Cooke's phony dope-addict story. That timing may have skewed the public's attitude toward newspapers. Newspapers deserve better.
After all, newspapers are everyone else's data base. They man the courtrooms, roam government's many corridors, endure hours of legislative watch, hover around police stations, pursue nature's floods and disasters. A latticework of such reporting all around the world is gathered by a jointly owned collective, the Associated Press, and its rival United Press International. At a relentless high-speed rate of 1,200 words a minute, 24 hours a day, the wire services supply the printed press, give radio disc jockeys their "rip and read" news, and alert television producers where to dispatch their camera crews.
From 9 a.m. until NBC's Nightly News goes on the air, John Chancellor keeps his own close watch on the A.P., U.P.I, and Reuters wires, and believes that network news owes much of its credibility to the fact that they (the A.P. in particular) are "so quick in catching their own errors." It wouldn't be fair to call network news parasitic (it pays for the wire services, and spots its own people at a few conspicuous places to film stories and to personalize the news), but the dependency is deep. If so much of the daily news conies from the same source, why should it be trusted more on television than in print?
Two explanations are heard. One is the reassuring personality of whoever is the viewer's favorite anchorman. The second is the visual appearance of actuality--even when what is shown on television is an edited, or staged, reality. Reuven Frank, the crusty, capable veteran news producer at NBC, regrets that nowadays "what television does uniquely, the transmission of experience--what was it like?--is a rare and accidental accomplishment. Television has become something to listen to from the next room. So has television news." Frank scorns "split screens and zooms and star bursts and insets and flip-overs" to give pedestrian words a visual interest, or the trite use of canned "truck shots down the aisles of supermarkets, wheat pouring into a boxcar, a slow zoom into the Capitol dome." He sighs for a past day when the camera was not so much the servant of the word.
As for content, Richard Nixon believes that "television is to news what bumper stickers are to philosophy." Nixon is a bruised witness, but he does have a point. Trying to compact a day's debate into 47 seconds and give it drama, a television reporter will pit the loudest advocate of a cause against its most outraged opponent. Onscreen, each will be shown talking away, but the words you hear are the reporter's, explaining what the story is really about. At last, the sound picks up a snippet of the speaker's own words. This irritating parody of on-the-scene coverage is being overused by the networks. Coverage as confrontation has another effect, says a greatly troubled Senator Adlai Stevenson III: "It excludes the third or fourth choice." Stevenson gave up his Senate seat, disenchanted, among other reasons, because "the media makes and breaks the politicians . . . It is the nation's most powerful and least accountable institution . . . It establishes the issues, and then reduces them to simple and sometimes meaningless formulations." Stevenson includes the entire press in his indictment, not just television news.
But television news bears a special burden when it oversimplifies. Michael J. Robinson, professor of politics at Catholic University, has found that a sizable portion of the television-news audience reads no newspapers or magazines and learns whatever it knows of events from television alone. Some estimate this group at 20% to 30% of all television-news watchers. These are people at the lower end of the scale, economically and educationally. Before the advent of television news, this group was not much interested in news at all and was both stable in its opinions and passive in its political behavior. Robinson calls such people an "inadvertent audience" for news. Pollster Daniel Yankelovich thinks that an audience of that kind, forming attitudes about subjects on which it is dimly informed, helps produce the strong swings and gusts in current public opinion that he regards as one of the most disquieting signs of the times.
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