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Published on 12/14/1998 All articles from this issue

Morning Forum speaker Richard Reeves decries direction of today's journalists

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By Laura Brown

Special to the Town Crier

The role of journalists is to monitor power, particularly government power, on behalf of the public, political writer Richard Reeves told the Los Altos Morning Forum on Dec. 8.

Speaking about his new book, "What the People Know: Freedom and the Press," Reeves said that for most of its history the American press has been made up of a "tribe" of journalists who regarded themselves as outsiders. They believed their job was to expose wrongs and bring justice.

However, Reeves said, beginning with the dramatic stories of the Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Vietnam War and Watergate, journalists became more famous, better paid and part of the establishment.

"Celebritization of the news began," Reeves said. With that, journalists lost some of their independence, sometimes becoming part of the story, or even the story itself. Between the mid-1970s and 1980, he said, enrollment in journalism schools increased eight-fold.

Along with this transformation, the news media was changing from locally-owned newspapers and television stations to divisions of large, national corporations, Reeves observed. Journalism became big business, with profit the overriding motive, he said.

Two other catalysts for change, Reeves said, were the advent of direct-dial long distance and computers, which made it possible to take and tabulate a national poll in a matter of days, rather than weeks. Polls became a driving force in politics and in business.

News became entertainment, and the techniques of fiction were adapted to non-fiction - the story line was superimposed on the facts, Reeves said.

Exposé journalism from "60 Minutes" to The National Enquirer became the successful news model. Real news was forced to compete, unsuccessfully, with news as entertainment, Reeves said.

He said that the Internet has put additional pressure on journalists to publish information quickly, without fact-checking or analysis, since vast amounts of information can now be "dumped" online before it can be checked, analyzed and printed in newspapers or magazines.

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series. To get on a waiting list for membership, write: Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94O23.