The No-News Media

"Media to Government: Drop Dead" by Stephen Hess, in Brookings Review (Winter 2000), 1775 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Asked to define "real news," a veteran journalist once said it is "the news you and I need to keep our freedom"—meaning, mainly governmental and political news. By that standard, most Americans now get much less real news than they did a few decades ago, contends Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time observer of Washington journalism.

In 1997, according to one study, only onefifth of all the stories on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the network TV nightly news programs, and in Time and Newsweek were about government. Twenty years earlier, the proportion had been one-third.

Washington no longer gets the lion’s share of the news media’s attention, Hess points out. Newspapers he examined in 1978 averaged 12 Washington stories a day, and 45 percent of their lead front-page stories had a Washington dateline. Twenty years later, the newspapers averaged only six stories a day from the nation’s capital, and took only 36 percent of their lead stories from there.

"As the ’90s evolved, our papers showed less and less interest in any news from Washington," says Robert Rankin of the Knight-Ridder chain’s Washington bureau. In response, his bureau added national "theme specialties" such as science, religion, and consumer affairs to its traditional White House and congressional beats. Other Washington bureaus did the same.

Network TV news shows also have paid less attention to Washington in recent decades. And while local TV news operations started paying more attention in the early 1980s, capitalizing on the new availability of commercial satellites and lightweight video cameras, the novelty eventually wore off, Hess says, and station managers concluded that Washington stories simply "didn’t excite viewers."

Local TV news programs have become Americans’ "most popular source of information," says Hess, but their diet of crime, fires, and fluff leaves "little room for stories about municipal government or elections." A survey of 13 top-market cities during the month before the 1996 elections showed that only seven percent of the stories were about politics (compared with 22 percent about crime).

Hess doesn’t think the shift is merely a reaction to political change. Political power may have shifted from Washington to the states, but coverage of the statehouses has also declined. (See WQ, Autumn 1998, pp. 127–129.) Rather, he says, the shift emerged from within the news business itself. An influential 1980 report by focus group researcher Ruth Clark for the American Newspaper Publishers Association and work by TV consultants pointed the way toward "consumer-driven" journalism. "Self-help information was in. Celebrity features were in. Hard news about government was out."