The line between entertainment and information on TV has always been a little fuzzy. TV news programs are sometimes called infotainment. But now some respected TV newspeople are saying that TV news is in dire danger of losing its credibility because the line has been breached.
A week ago I heard Roger Mudd, who has had a long career in print and then broadcasting, now as congressional correspondent for the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, sound off on this point. He spoke at a journalism education conference in Washington, D.C.He was especially outspoken on why television news is now leaping into once forbidden terrains, like those story re-enactments.
ABC's "World News Tonight" has been much-criticized even by its own staff for a report that used staged images to suggest that diplomat Felix Bloch had handed a briefcase to a Soviet agent. But that re-enactment was followed by another on NBC's "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" and intimations that CBS would follow suit.
Together with the show-biz style of ABC's "Prime Time Live," with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer pledging to be daring, the developments add up to what Mudd called one of TV news' most disheartening weeks.
Mudd's gloomy analysis: The shingles began to fly off network news with the rise of intense competition from cable TV and VCR. "The documentary went, then anchormen as journalists and now finally news values - it's no longer enough to be more accurate, perceptive and informative; you have to deliver a large audience. That is particularly true since deregulation, when TV stations began to change hands like pork bellies."
-RE-ENACTMENTS have a parallel in print journalism, the so-called "New Journalism." It has never really caught on in newspapers but has in some magazines. Since Truman Capote's seminal "In Cold Blood" a generation ago, it is the method of many biographies and book-length treatments of news events.
The "new journalists" say traditional impersonal journalistic writing is really hackneyed journalese so stilted it fails to offer real insights. But their proposition is arguable; the methods are dangerous. These include a dramatic story line, the "interior monologue," in which the "thoughts" of news figures are recreated, the manufacturing of plausible dialogue, the use of composite characters, or even the alteration of some minor details as a
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-IN DISCUSSING ETHICS in their profession, newspeople are often tougher on themselves than are the critics.
At the same conference session, Georgie Anne Geyer, the globe-trotting syndicated columnist, had even harsher criticisms than Mudd. She indicted what she called the "ethics frenzy" among reporters in our nation's capital.
"You pick up the front page to ask who has been devoured by the press today. . . . A new kind of journalism has arrived, one that aims at the general destruction of individuals."
Geyer's argument was overstated but has had considerable merit since Watergate. You don't have to look far for supporting examples, particularly in coverage of House Speaker Jim Wright's woes.
The Bloch case is a particularly intriguing one in its own way. Since late July, after the story broke that the FBI suspected him of espionage, he has been followed by hordes of reporters. USA Today reported that reporters even trailed him on a 22-mile trek to the supermarket, where an elderly woman was knocked down by a television cameraman. Bloch said he has learned to live with the reporters but asked one, "Why do you do this day in and day out?" What conceivable public purpose is served by reporters following a suspect who has not even been charged (though he has been convicted in the media) as he goes to the movies or reads a book?
One development that worried Geyer was the casual way sources are sometimes cited. "The idea of destroying the opposition has permeated everything. Opponents call the press and never cite sources, saying everybody knows it."
-LEONARD DOWNIE, the aggressive young managing editor of the Washington Post, agreed that some newsgatherers are irresponsible in citing sources, but pulled Geyer's comments into balance by commenting most do not print rumors. He agreed that some tightening up is in order. Downie was particularly offended by the use of the phrase, "CBS (or the Times or whatever) has learned that. . . ."
Downie said the phrase reflects a notion that getting the news is more important than the news itself. He said the Post does not use this device.
And the phrase usually covers up the absence of a stated source and sometimes indicates that a pressure group is doing the reporter's work. The three newspeople agreed that a reporter can avoid being used only by being fully conversant with all sides of the issues and using more than one source. Getting the other side should always be standard practice in news work.
-ALL THREE came down strong on reporter and editor conflicts of interest. Whether a pro-life reporter should have taken part in a march, for example, came up in a discussion. A journalism professor argued that a writer might be no less a pro-choice person because she doesn't march in demonstrations and that reporters cannot divorce themselves from all causes and interests. Geyer responded that opponents would have a legitimate complaint of presumed bias if a reporter marched.
Downie even argued that a reporter should try to divorce himself from all biases - even to the point of refusing to vote. He said he himself does not vote because he doesn't want to force a choice that might influence news judgment.
That's far out, but it does indicate the extent to which many newspeople nowadays worry about the ethical dimension.