Countervailing Trends

Culture change tops the list of concerns for many journalists. The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) launched "The Journalism Values Institute" "to prompt newspapers and journalists to reinvigorate their core values." Thirty journalists met to convene the institute in 1995 and 1996 and the project is ongoing.

The "Project for Excellence in Journalism" is an initiative to clarify and raise the standards of American journalists. Created by a wide range of journalism practitioners with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts,

"The project pursues the aim of clarifying standards by bringing journalists together to decide for themselves what their purpose and aims are."

With the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, this project sponsors The Committee of Concerned Journalists, a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners, and academics worried about the future of the profession. According to the committee's "Statement of Concern,"

"This is a critical moment for journalism in America. While the craft in many respects has never been better — consider the supply of information or the skill of reporters — there is a paradox to our communications age. Revolutionary changes in technology, in our economic structure, and in our relationship with the public, are pulling journalism from its traditional moorings."

The group has already held a number of forums to create a "national conversation" among journalists about principles. The committee's web page (www.journalism.org/concern.htm) outlines the goals of the conversations:

• to clarify and renew journalists' faith in the core principles and function of journalism
• to create a better understanding of those principles by the public
• to engage and inform ownership and management of these principles and their financial as well as social values

Another focus of the project and the committee is the recently released "Local TV News Project." The study examined evening news at stations in 20 markets ranging in size from Albuquerque to New York. Stations received a letter grade which included ratings with a quality score that considered: topic range, focus, source expertise, local relevance, enterprise, number of sources, and viewpoints. In Seattle, KING-TV got a "C," KOMO-TV a "D," and KIRO-TV and "F+." It is noteworthy, if not conclusive, that the highest scoring station in the study was WEHT-TV in Evansville, Indiana, a privately owned stand-alone. The lowest score went to WTAE-TV, a Hearst media conglomerate property in Pittsburgh.

Local relevance in political coverage is part of what this report considers "supporting citizen effectiveness." But in most news media, that support is limited to coverage of elections. Citizens do need to know about the issues being considered and the positions of candidates standing for election. The problem has been that through the 1980s, coverage was mostly of the "contests," the personalities, and the intrigues. The issues behind the races and the real qualifications of the candidates are often utterly ignored. This shortcoming was so clear in the 1988 presidential elections that extensive reform of election coverage was apparent by 1992, nation-wide. The move toward civic journalism — journalism intended to engage its public — was partly born of this.