A cure for fluff-in-mouth disease
It's time to fight back against the happy-talk degeneracy of the American media
By MARK HERTSGAARD
Back in the 1960s, my father was the anchorman at WBAL-TV, the NBC affiliate station in Baltimore. He did a seven and 11 o'clock broadcast five nights a week, which meant that he left for the station before we kids got home from school, and didn't return until long after we'd gone to bed. My brothers and sisters and I saw him in the flesh between Saturday noon and Sunday bedtime. The other five days, we watched him on the tube.
For most of his 15 years at WBAL, my father was the most popular and trusted anchorman in the city, a sort of Walter Cronkite of Baltimore. He never got rich, however, because he was fired in 1973, just before the big money began pouring into local TV news. What got him axed was his disdain for the "happy talk" format that was bringing in the new revenues. Baltimore was one of the first cities to be introduced to happy talk, a market-driven innovation that aimed to make viewers believe that screen personalities were friends and family. This required the anchor and his colleagues to exchange much cheerful banter on the air, as well as tilt the newscast towards lighter fare in general. My father's objections, I suspect, stemmed less from journalistic principle than personal temperament; he found the exercise silly and demeaning, to him and the audience.
I relate my father's story now because his firing illustrates in microcosm one of the great civic tragedies of our time: how the American media has degenerated over the last quarter-century into a profit-obsessed colossus, a peddler of pseudo-news that entrances the citizens of this democracy even as it insults their intelligence. Happy talk has now spread to all branches of the news business, marginalizing serious journalism and -- no small accomplishment -- further diminishing the public's already minuscule knowledge of current affairs.
When I returned home last fall from living overseas for five years, this epidemic of fluff-in-mouth-disease was the single most striking change I noticed in the American media. As I scanned the magazine rack at Kennedy airport, it seemed that virutally every cover sported a celebrity and every story a fame or lifestyle hook. On TV, anchors and correspondents didn't report the news so much as recite pre-scripted questions and answers -- such "cross talk" being the latest device for making viewers feel part of the family, along with the relentless use of first names. Bryant Gumbel was spending more time in the kitchen than Martha Stewart, "Nightline" was devoting nearly half of its shows to the O. J. Simpson trial, and public broadcasting stalwarts Charlie Rose and Terry Gross were abandoning the quirky unknowns upon whom they had built their reputations in favor of guests with celebrity sizzle.
As recently as the late 1980s, what made a journalist radical (and rare) was a willingness to challenge the basic assumptions of the political and economic elites whose doings dominate most news coverage. Now, simple intelligence is a radical thing. This trend stems from the sharply intensified corporate monopolization that has swept through the media in recent years, and the consequently increased pressure for rising profits. Pseudo-news not only gets bigger audiences, it costs less to produce and provokes fewer political repercussions, making it the product of choice among the business types who increasingly set the parameters within which today's journalists labor.
A recent example comes in the person of Mark H. Willes, chairman of Times Mirror Company. Times Mirror owns the nation's fourth largest newspaper chain, and boasts such quality outlets as the flagship Los Angeles Times. Willes had no experience in journalism before joining Times Mirror from General Mills last year. He followed the usual regimen of new managers, slashing thousands of jobs and imposing lofty profit targets. He terminated New York Newsday, a fine but insufficiently profitable alternative voice to the city's three daily papers. All this provoked "euphoria" on Wall Street, in the words of one analyst, and Times Mirror was rewarded with a nearly doubled stock price (putting millions into the pocket of Willes, who had cleverly tied his compensation to the company's stock price).
Therein lies the essence of the problem. What is good for Wall Street is often not good for the rest of us. The stock market plummets when unemployment falls to its lowest rate in six years and rejoices when journalistic quality is sacrificed. This capitalist barbarism, plainly contrary to the public interest, goes undiscussed within the news media for the simple reason that journalists will not criticize their own bosses, particularly when it concerns such a structural facet of America's political economy. Thus it falls to independent voices to broach the issue, as The Nation did in a recent issue anatomizing the vast holdings of General Electric, Time-Warner, Disney-Cap Cities and Westinghouse and urging their dismantling on anti-trust grounds.
To crack the marketplace dictatorship over the gathering and dissemination of news, media critic Mark Crispin Miller has advocated local organizing to bust the media trusts. In addition, I would propose something more dramatic and expansive: a very public gesture announcing that the battle has been joined and fighting back is possible. Today's corporate giants are acutely sensitive to bad publicity that threatens customer relations: witness the victories over Royal Dutch Shell during the Brent Spar oil rig affair last summer and against clothing retailers during the Kathie Lee Gifford flap this spring. Might not this vulnerability be exploited to attack the pending merger of Time-Warner and Turner Broadcasting? (The merger is by no means a done deal, judging from a recent Wall Street Journal's report that the Federal Trade Commission staff will advise rejecting the merger on anti-competitive grounds.) The cast of characters is glitzy enough that -- sweet irony -- the media probably couldn't resist providing high profile coverage if self-described "do-gooder" Ted Turner and his wife Jane Fonda were put on the spot about squaring their principles with this manifestly anti-democratic business deal -- one constructed with help from convicted billionaire swindler Michael Milken, who collected a reported $50 million for his labors.
Now that would be some real happy talk.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency" and, most recently, "A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of The Beatles. He is a regular contributor to Salon.