News Media

Several of the media’s prize awarding ceremonies provide much of America with some of the most watched entertainment during the year. As winter fades into spring half the world lies in bed anxious to learn who will win an Oscar for best lighting in a movie about chain saws, or which mediocre musical will grab a Tony for choreography for more than one dancer, or who will win an Emmy for best acting in a situation comedy that is not half as funny as Seinfeld, or who will win an Obie for off-Broadway excellence (but not good enough, mind you, to make it to Broadway to compete for a Tony), or who will win a Clio for the most ridiculous -- but funny, commercial shown during the Super Bowl. Lest we forget, we want to know who will win a Pulitzer Prize for being the best damned (and luckiest) newspaper or reporter or editorial writer in America or a Peabody for the best quasi- serious televised program or commentator of the year. The list seems endless. The main beneficiaries of this focus on giving awards happen to be a couple of the recipients and reporters of these events: newspapers, magazines and television, all of which make certain that the proceedings and award results receive maximum publicity which helps to bring in buckets full of advertising revenue.

A network willing to cough up a fortune to televise the Academy Awards stands to make more than a modest profit when its sales team fans out across the land touting the size of the expected viewing audience for that year’s Oscars. Various newspapers and magazines will ballyhoo the Oscars as resembling the second coming, with lots of features on who is nominated and who can be expected to win. This will help boost circulation for a few days.

Publications fortunate enough to garner a Pulitzer for themselves or one or more of their writers will give the awards front page treatment. Runners-up or never-wases will report the news, but don’t count on a headline larger than 12 point Baden. Joan Rivers has made a late career move of interviewing celebs about their fashion designer dresses pre,during and post Academy Awards. She’s like that energized bunny.

This is all part of providing NEWS, but is actually a severe case of shameful narcissism. The awards fall into the same category as media-sponsored polls, polls which, by the way, helped to keep a disgraced president in office. This is how it works: The network or newspaper or magazine conducts a poll. The network or newspaper or magazine or any combination thereof, then reports the results of that poll. This provides the media involved with a "news" story. The steady increase in media polling over the years has provided media outlets with seemingly exciting news when there really isn’t much exciting news to be had. It helps to fill time and space. Poll reporting has become as regular as weather reporting by television and radio and astrology columns in the print media.

Don’t forget that the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and other news gathering and disseminating services were created to provide news fodder for publications and broadcast media which, alone, would be incapable of providing enough staff created stories to fill a newspaper bloated with the necessary portion of advertising lineage. For some publications with modest budgets and, therefore, limited staffs, wire service stories are absolutely necessary if they are to continue in business. Without this outside help, many couldn’t fill their products with enough material to complement the pages of advertising lineage.

More polling there will be, even though there is evidence that the public is growing increasingly cranky about being polled. Recent reports on the subject indicate that about half of those folk called by pollsters hang up on the caller. This should come as no surprise. It is difficult to find anyone who has anything positive to say about telemarketing representatives who call when a family has just sat down to dinner, or made a rendezvous with the bathroom or even when the light has just been turned off in preparation for a good night’s sleep. Yet polling goes on and will continue as long as someone can be found who won’t hang up. Many political observers have agreed that Bill Clinton’s high polling favorability numbers saved him from being forced to resign. During the Lewinski matter many persons noted that the polling being reported was somehow tainted. It wasn’t unusual to hear complaints about polling at social gatherings or on the omni-present political talk shows. As recently as late November 1999, the New York Times carried a long article on Sunday that finally recognized what average citizens had been talking about for months. The article stated that pollsters were being hung up on by the persons they called. The reason was obvious: People have grown tired of telemarketing calls and often think a pollster’s call is actually someone trying to sell something. The Times article revealed that poll takers are very much aware of the growing problem of finding enough people who don’t slam down the phone. Yet, polling continues apace. It’s the ability to report a poll’s findings that makes news for print and broadcast, not the validity of the poll itself.

We have been told for years that most people receive almost all of their news via television. As a result, newspapers have been fighting a losing battle to retain circulation. An editor of the prestigious Chicago Tribune confessed on one of those omni-present media panel programs on cable television that his paper puts damned near anything on the front page in an effort to woo people to buy the paper and read what is inside. Hype seems to be an adequate operative word for this practice. This practice rivals those signs in gift shops that line New York streets that shout, "Going Out of Business. Prices Slashed! Everything Must Go!" Many of these stores have had such signs in their windows for several years. They, like the newspapers that hype their front page news stories and television stations that get downright giddy about non-news stories, are simply fighting for survival.

There is increasing evidence that there is less to news than meets the eye. There is also increasing evidence that the narcissistic news media, while devoting much of its time to self back patting, is the target of almost unending criticism, much of it from within their own tent.

Sydney Schanberg is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his work in Cambodia. He stirred things up at the New York Times and Newsday before landing with an online news service which covers crime and the justice system. In an Outlook piece in the Washington Post he laid into his profession of journalism.

"It’s no secret that journalism in America," he wrote, "has become more slipshod and reckless, at times promiscuous -- and as a result less credible."