Journalism Culture

In a speech to the World Editors Forum in 1998, Jan Schaffer, Executive Director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, outlined what she saw as some "worrisome trends."

• The number of stories about government has dropped 38 percent since 1977: to one in five stories on the front pages of our papers — from one in three.
• The number of stories about celebrities or entertainment has tripled: to one in every 14 stories. It used to be one out of every 50 stories 20 years ago.
• Scandal coverage has skyrocketed. Front-page scandal stories increased to one in eight — from one in 25 in 1977.
• Violent crime coverage has grown far out proportion to actual levels of crime. For example, U.S. murders declined by 20 percent form 1993-96, yet network television coverage of murders increased in that time by 721 percent over the previous three years.
• The number of stories about foreign affairs on our front pages has dropped by 25 percent to one in every six — from one in four 20 years ago.
• Straight news has given way to features. Fewer than one in three stories are now straightforward news accounts — down from more than half of all stories in 1977.
• Political or international figures now front only one in 10 covers of Time and Newsweek magazines. In 1977, they anchored one in three covers. In large part, they have been displaced by celebrities.
  
  

These trends are worrisome not only for what they present, but for what they pre-empt. More complicated, more research-intensive reporting is critical for covering public affairs. The time and space it once occupied is being squeezed by the changes outlined here. And Schaffer can also quote chapter and book on the public's increasing skepticism about news media reliability.

The research conducted for this report indicates that the decline in public affairs reporting is the result, for the most part, of the cultural shifts in media and journalism over recent years and of the failure of the community sector to assess and respond strategically to that change. One could argue whether the culture of journalism/media shifts with the broader culture or whether journalism/media causes the broader culture to shift. In either case, culture does shift and in journalism the catalyst is usually a big story.

It's not that a pristine past has given way to an intemperate present. The culture of journalism has manifested news that could be described as alternately frank and florid since the news business was defined. Writing in an early 1960s text, when he was professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota, Edwin Emery said it was with the invention of the printing press that "News thereupon became a commodity, like food or merchandise, produced for profit to meet a demand."1 To encourage reading in those very early days, Emery goes on, "the first appeal had to be through the emotions, rather than through reason." The necessity of the appeal, of course, was based on the fundamental need of the press to make money — to operate profitably in order to continue to publish.

Even at journalism's beginning in the 16th century, business and profits were significant drivers in the formation of its culture. The initial emotional focus created an undeclared war between the powerful elite and the brash young press. Emery reports that arrests were made as early as 1540 for "unfitting worddes" [sic] published about political matters. Great Britain's Queen Mary made a dramatic cultural shift in the press when she brought it inside her government in 1557 and established the Stationers Company so she could hold its directors responsible for perceived "government abuse."2 Such shifts have been going on, then, for at least 400 years. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were catalysts for the most dramatic recent change. Their huge story on the Watergate scandal shifted the journalistic culture of the United States form Kennedy-era access — where proximity to the president gave journalists the impression of being administration insiders — to Nixon-era attack, where the lack of trust between journalist and source was institutionalized. That lack of trust is the dominant characteristic of journalism culture today. It is the attitude that tempers relationships between reporters and the community sector.