Television News Without Blinkers

By Thomas Griffith

The scramble of corporate raiders to take over television networks is, but for one fact, much like those other power grabs taking place daily on Wall Street--the pursuit of big profits by audacious men. Television is also big money, but, in this case, some of the raiders acknowledge that their real aim is to get control of the news. What would news coverage be like if they got their way?

NBC's Today show startled and angered a lot of journalists several weeks ago when it let Terry Dolan, the right-wing fund raiser, use NBC's facilities, cameras and crews to put on his version of a news story. Dolan heads the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Had NBC capitulated to right-wing pressure? No, insists Steve Friedman, Today's executive producer, the idea was all his own. Dolan considers all network news liberal, bad and alike. So Today staged a match-off: his version vs. NBC's of the same story. The verdict has to be that both were flawed.

Viewers were first shown NBC's original 2 1/2-minute profile of Mikhail Gorbachev, based largely on the new Soviet leader's euphoric reception in Britain last December: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saying she could do business with him; former Defense Minister Denis Healey finding Gorbachev like a "Western intellectual, a poet." Then came Dolan's version: ominous shots of Soviet troops parading and an overlong interview with Republican Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, who believes that so long as there is fighting in Afghanistan, there should be no talking at Geneva. (Secretary of State George Shultz, who in committee hearings can listen stonily to most congressional critics, recently admonished Humphrey, "Come off it, Senator.") As NBC Correspondent John Cochran explained on Today (but had not made clear in his profile), he had confined his reporting to people who had actually met Gorbachev. His profile was thus unrounded, not from liberal bias but from something more endemic to television, a visual preference for personalities rather than analysis.

After Healey's picture was shown, Dolan called him "a longtime apologist for the Soviet Union, who himself was a member of the Communist Party. I think that would have been significant to point out in the story." This nasty McCarthyite innuendo went unchallenged on Today. The "significant" thing that Dolan did not say about Healey is that as Defense Minister from 1964 to 1970 he earned the enmity of the British Left as a wholehearted supporter of the Western alliance. This is a foretaste of what unbalanced journalism might be like.

Today did not offer the far left equal time, though Friedman says he might consider it. Actually, as the American political spectrum has moved rightward, the far left is without enough numbers, money or influence to be an effective pressure group. The influential spectrum now moves from liberals to Establishment conservatives ("moderates") to right-wingers, who have the most money, the most articulate and aggressive spokesmen and the most effective computerized mailing lists, like Dolan's.

Their constant indictment of television as liberal only confuses the subject. Sometimes they mean nothing more than television's addiction to sex and violence. At other times they mean a liberal slant in news coverage. This charge beclouds any real discussion of TV news coverage for its superficiality, its choppy brevity for fear of dial turners, its preoccupation with visual excitement (fires, hurricanes, riots). Television journalists resent the accusation of leftism, which has been repeated so often as to give a loose charge some credibility. Whatever their political views (many on TV have only a patronizing disdain for all politicians), as professionals they constantly cross-check one another, responding much as does a jury instructed by a judge to lay aside personal prejudices in arriving at a fair verdict.

The charge of liberal bias in network news has been effectively refuted in the April Washington Journalism Review by Michael J. Robinson, an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. His Media Analysis Project at George Washington University analyzed network news coverage from Labor Day to Election Day 1984, and in studying 800 exam-pies looked not only for biased judgments but for "bias by agenda" in stories chosen to be covered. He reached two firm conclusions: "television news has no meaningful partisan ideology"; in the slight distinctions to be drawn between networks, CBS proved a touch more conservative than NBC or ABC, and Dan Rather (Senator Jesse Helms' favorite target) in his own comments was even more conservative than the rest of CBS.

If professional detachment makes the three network evening news programs essentially alike except for anchor personalities, what would happen if one network decided to be different, be openly conservative? The usual reaction among journalists is that none would dare. In the enormously expensive world of television reporting, even the wealthiest ideologues would hesitate to bear the losses of a partisanship that narrowed that network's audience and lowered its ratings. Could this be too complacent an attitude?

Dolan's efforts on the Today show were clumsy, but it is possible to imagine deliberate bias more skillfully executed. Such a program might even become as popular as Paul Harvey's conservatively tinged, sharply phrased, crisply delivered news broadcasts on ABC radio.

Until now, network television has been considered off limits to declared partisanship (sometimes a correspondent or a commentator goes astray, but networks jealously guard a reputation for neutral professionalism and acknowledge this is how they should be judged). The argument is that television is both a powerful medium and the place where most people get their news. Television news should reflect, and quote, the many diverse opinions in a pluralistic society, not just the point of view of one side, excluding or misrepresenting all others. This would put blinkers on any viewer's understanding of the world and limit his sensible participation in the public debate.