Published 2 December 2023 updated: 7 Dec 2023

RE: Disparate Treatment on Matters of Discrimination.  It's not Us against them, it's authoritarianism against All of our Freedoms and All Life on Earth. My Letter to the LA Times. Do NOT Censor Truth. 

To the Attention of: 

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong / Owner LA Times, billionaire inventor, philanthropist

Kevin Merida /  Executive Editor, Los Angeles Times

CC:

• 
  

• Kevin Merida /  Executive Editor, Los Angeles Times

• Journalists who signed this Letter calling for media organizations to uphold Journalistic Integrity and Protection from Israeli Censors, Libelous Accusers, & bombardment

• Lior Hailat, Israel's Deputy Tariq Aziz (Regime Liar, Fraud & Public Threat to Americans and Life on Earth)

• David Mccraw, General Counsel, respondent to Liar Lior's Libel and Threats

• U.S.  Zionist Organizations & Leaders complicit in Genocide, War Crimes & Wrecking Israel's democratic Institutions (aka racist Anti-Semites)

• Ms. Mathu Joyini, Ambassador & Permanent Representative of South Africa to the U.N.

What I am observing is seemingly a pattern of disparate treatment of both journalists and coverage on issues related to discrimination against members of the minority-majority of Angelenos. But we must talk business or there will be no one remaining in the newsroom to report about discrimination at the Los Angeles Times, which is why I discuss this issue in Attachment#1 below. The concern here is that the death spiral of the LA Times is killing journalism and serving interests of Hebrew Hucksters on the Westside who are nothing but Jew-Haters and Anti-Israel sponsors of global terrorism and destruction of democratic institutions in Israel, the United States, and worldwide. Note the following examples of troubling patterns of discrimination and bias at the LA Times:

Example#1: Muslim Ban / Palestinian Ban in the name of “fairness”

The present ‘Muslim Ban’ and Palestinian Ban implemented by management of the Los Angeles Times resulted in reassignment of most Muslims and all Palestinians covering the genocide perpetrated against Palestinians by Israel’s unlawful “Siege on Gaza.” The grounds for this decision is reported to be a fallacious claim about the affected journalists having inappropriately and unprofessionally publicly reveal their “bias” on the subject matter of Gaza because of their audacity to demanded enforcement of their entitled legal protections for themselves and their colleagues worldwide, there is probable cause that important for both workers’ rights. What are these basic rights now being called into question as not “fair-minded” by management?

“Specifically, the National Labor Relations Board protects the rights of employees to engage in “concerted activity”, which is when two or more employees take action for their mutual aid or protection regarding terms and conditions of employment.” - NLRB.

Example#2: Disparate impact in hiring/firing decisons

The June layoff announcement reported in this attached article from the LA Times.  Another recent example about coverage, inclusiveness, and discrimination  disparate outcomes is the disproportionate gutting of Asians and Mexicans during t

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, “Both disparate impact and disparate treatment refer to discriminatory practices. Disparate impact is often referred to as unintentional discrimination, whereas disparate treatment is intentional. The terms adverse impact and adverse treatment are sometimes used as an alternative.”A third example is the lack of thoroughness and follow-up in an egregiously negligent indictment and prosecution by our so-called progressive LA County DA of American patriot, entrepreneur, and Konnech election solutions CEO-founder Mr. Eugene Yu. Due to the national and constitutional significance of this case of alleged fraud or irregularities in the 2020 election, I will explain the context, which should raise alarm bells about the failure of the LA Times to cover this local story at least as well as the faraway New York times, and certainly less thoroughly than the research I have conducted on my own.

The tax-payer funded assault on Mr. Yu’s humanity, personal safety, constitutional rights, family, employees, and business was nothing but political theater–nothing but a blatant partisan political hatchet job orchestrated by one or more reactionary neo-Confederate prosecutors whoa had total contempt for individual constitutional rights and rule of law. The racist “People” indicted, prosecuted, and attempted to hold without bail Mr. Yu without a shred of evidence. In a glaring example of the breakdown of rule of law and due process in the Grand Jury system, Mr. Yu was indicted based on nothing more than bogus claims given as testimony by one of two conspiracy peddlers calling themselves True the Vote. In an act of libel and perhaps profiling, the duo conspiracy peddlers alleged Konnech had provided the personal information of about 1.8 million poll workers to the Chinese government. 

How did this happen? One might imagine that the Berkeley Law grad who targeted, libeled, and prosecuted Mr. Yu had a patina of imminence in the DA Office as someone anointed with every privilege that money could buy: New England boarding School; elite private Emory University; Berkeley Law! Unlike your typical prosecutor who attends a tier-two or tier-three law school, Mr. Yu was targeted by Eric Neff, who has an elite academic pedigree and is the scion of Newport Beach royalty Douglas Neff, who is an ultra-reactionary advocating Un-American Jesus in Jurisprudence. 

There is ZERO excuse for baseless charges. Rich kid of real estate investor, Eric Neff appears to have intentionally and maliciously targeted an Asian-American for no other purpose than distinguishing himself as the single prosecutor who–by contemptuously trampling over an Asian-American’s rights–might have been able to validate at least on of Donald Trump’s absurd allegations of election fraud, conspiracy or rigging of the 2016 election.

Usurping the Fourth Estate

Again, the primary purpose of this letter is to condemn unequivocally your reported decision to sacrifice journalistic standards for apparent political expediency and possible pressure from powerful factions representing a foreign government, with the end result that roughly three dozen LA Times journalists who had covered Gaza have been banned from doing so. According to this article in The Wrap about internal discussions, your staff claims you have reasigned almost every Muslim journalist and All Palestinian journalists who had been covering the war in Gaza. This is at minimum an abuse of discretion contrary to public interest;  and quite likely a violation of the labor rights of the affected journalist, and at worst an alarming indication about extremes–including possible violations of law–that management deems necessary to appease powerful narrow factions seeking to suppress facts, censor coverage, and undermine the fourth estate–a free press necessary for an informed citizenry and a functioning democracy.

In 1841, Thomas Carlyle wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” (On Heroes and Hero Worship).

About the fourth estate, Claud Cockburn said, “Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.” No more appropriate phrase can be spoken about habitually lying Mini-Soviet-styled Israeli official spokespersons. 

I call on you, the LA Times executive leadership team, and owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to correct the situation immediately because LA does NOT deserve a hometown newspaper complicit in genocide.

Did Zionist ‘Cancel Culture’ Censors aligned with Santa Monica’s Stephen Miller convince you and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong to implement a ‘soft’ Muslim Ban again? 

If the LA Times is now a state media propaganda outlet for the State of Israel and Zionist Peddlers of Anti-Semitic Propaganda like Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Board Member Sam Yerbre who made libelous counterfeit claims about crimes akin to cranking flames in crematoria over Thanksgiving,  I am confident about Honorable Ambassador of South Africa to the United Nations, Ms. Mathu Joyini, being concerned regarding extraordinary reports I am sharing below:

Presentation: tinyurl.com/isr23pptWarCrimes  on TULPPP.com

Censoring the LA Times. 

I am concerned about political pressure and censorship dictating the quality, accuracy, and integrity of my primary local news source, the LA Times. It is a well known fact that the Zionist Cancel Culture factionalists are waging war against America, and Americans' Right to Know the Truth. They have censored social media platforms, ChatGPT, College Campuses, and much more. I stand with the Journalists from the LA Times who signed the letter and believe they are the most equipped to cover Gaza because they are in fact fair-minded and their opinions do not blind them to reality, which is the case for some American Zionists who wish not to be exposed to Facts or Reality when the Real World conflicts with their imagined Disney Magic kingdom for God’s chosen people.

Specifically, this article published in Semafor entitled “LA Times blocks reporters who signed open letter criticizing Israel from covering Gaza” quotes you as having said:

 “A fair-minded reader of the Times news coverage should not be able to discern the private opinions of those who contributed to that coverage, or to infer that the organization is promoting any agenda...But we must maintain the integrity of that journalism, which is core to our reputation. Journalism itself is an agent for change. Having a compass to guide that work ensures that we don’t imperil it, or inadvertently cause harm to our colleagues’ ability to do their jobs.”

Your policy of denying those who are fair-minded and who are grounded in reality the opportunity to write about Gaza tells me that the LA Times has a bias to serve magical thinking, fraud, big lies, and the naked self-interest of war criminals, especially here in Los Angeles where the Anti-Defamation League

Your sense of “fair-minded” is akin to asking your employees to renounce their federally-mandated Occupational, Health, and Safety (OSHA) rights NOT to be Bombed on the Job, Not to be subjected to workplace violence by being targeted by Israeli Snipers; Not to be complicit in their Boss’s expectation of violating professional and ethical responsibilities for journalism, and NOT having freedom to engage in concerted action for mutual protection and common interests of both their union and non-union members in their office and around the world.  YOu are violating your employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act. Unlike Israel, we have rule of law, and your subscribers suggest you abide by the law and get guidance about Conflict of Interests and Bias from this New York Times case study 

The majority of Angelenos expect you to cease and desist repeating talking points provided by Ted Deutch’s AJC, or Ron Lauder’s WJC, or Greenblatt’s ADL. What’s the point of a subscription to the LA Times if I can get ADL’s fake anti-Semitism report for free? 

 It seems to me that those journalists with moral compasses have been sanctioned, sidelined, and placed in peril for their jobs given newsroom layoff announcements made in June. Either admit you have no compass, and concede the point you have already made by implicitly stating

 “Israeli spokesperson Lying Lior Hailat is my master and censor. I will repeat the Liar’s slogan about all Palestinians being terrorists.” 

Let’s be blunt. You Mr. Merida know what the Israelis are demanding of you. They ask you to repeat Bill Atwater’s line—Nig*ger, Nig*ger, Nig*ger—and that is enough to scare and exploit bigotry to win people to the Israeli position on non-people Palestinians.”

Twenty years ago, I covered country risk issues for Egypt and Israel as an analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But let me first suggest that your reporters confirm Israel’s plans for completing genocide in Gaza that are published by former Chief of Israel's National Security Council, Meir Bin-Shabbat. 

While Bibi has kept his lips sealed about “the day after,” Meir Ben Shabbat and others have spoken plainly, clearly, and in detail about Israel's plans to commit genocide. Misgav—Bin-Shabbat’s Think Tank published a plan for expelling all Gazans to Cairo. Shabbat wrote in October:

“The military goals of war are easy to define, even if they are not simple to achieve.

1. In the final image, the post-war Gaza Strip will be a city of ruins.

2. Everything related to Hamas - was destroyed, tens of thousands of Hamas and Jihad activists - dead, without a central government, and

3. Without hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who evacuated from the fighting zones.”

–Meir Bin-Shabbat, fmr Chief of Israel’s National Security Council and head of Jerusalem-based Institution for Zionist and Security Studies (Misgav)

Israel’s Laundry List of Atrocities–A terrorist pariah state deserving MAXIMUM Sanctions and Reparations

Based on press reports, Meir Bin-Shabbat’s plans appear to be well underway, particularly turning the Gaza Strip into ruins. 

As reference material for your reporters, I include Full Text of Meir Bin-Shabbats statements indicating plans for genocide which are consistent with statements by other officials and Israeli actions to date, and this Proposal for Expelling Gazans (Nakba 2.0) prepared by Bin-Shabbat’s highly influential Think Tank. Finally, I share my presentation listing almost-definite examples of war crimes by both sides, although Israel's is crimes are far more severe, disproportional by orders of magnitude, and undertaken without regard for self-defense because Hamas poses no imminent threat that cannot be neutralized by means other than war, and Iron Dome continues to provide highly effective protection from rockets, which has produced the problem of no longer having any excuse for high Palestinian civilian casualties as noted in a 2017 RAND report. Israel has refused to make peace, because Bibi wants to stay in power—and war is the way he stays in power and avoids protests and prosecution. 

Nothing has changed for Anti-American Israelis. The ADL and Zionist groups continue to attack the rights of racial minorities and other vulnerable groups. The Zionists goose-stepped together in support of the nomination of Ken Marcus for a federal civil rights job—and gleefully embraced his support for dismantling civil rights and, subsequently, underming affirmative action with his Amicus Brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court.

And now the Israel Lobby demands we deny reality by accepting the  ADL Definition of Anti-Semitism where being Anti-Apartheid = Anti-Semitic. Being Against Illegal Occupation = Anti-Zionist = Anti-Semitic. These equations don’t are anti-American and absurd. The Zionists are Un-American, Anti-Western, Ant-Semitic, and Anti-human.

Extreme Zionism is Censorship, Suppression, and Dangerous for Israel, for America, and for World Peace, Stability, and Security. 

The Zionist ideology and their self-serving Un-American equations do not Stand for South Africa, or China, or Japan, or anyplace except the Apartheid state that literally walls its people up, and shoots children who dare place flags on security fences. Are you with Madiba or with Reagan who deemed Nig’gas to be terrorists by definition, just like Sam Yebri and the ADL anti-American New Ku Klux Klan.

We hold it to be self-evident that every man and woman are equal under the law and in the eye’s of God. 

Does the LA Times support a Jewish Supremacist worldview where Palestinians are Nig*ers? Does the LA Times concur with the Israeli extreme Zionist opinion that  Nig*ers do NOT exist except in prison, or in ghetto-prisons created by 4-meter high walls surrounding Bethlehem? Does the LA Times endorse the layers of security fences surrounding the world’s largest open-air death in  camp–Gaza? Does evacuation sound feasible for the Gaza Strip, which has twice the land area of your Washington DC, but over 3-times DC’s  population?

The “evacuation” is a Big Lie. You can’t move half of DC’s 700k residents from one side to the other anymore than you can move over 1.5 million residents into an area the size of DC. The notion that this is possible anywhere is preposterous, cruel, and genocidal.  

The big question is whether you Stand with America or Stand with a Crypto-Nazi Terrorist Regime and some of their misguided or possibly anti-Semitic Jewish allies living on the Westside or San Marino. Do you support Putin’s Mini Bibi who is gas-lighting his own people, jeopardizing innocent lives of Israeli hostages and military personnel, and committing grave crimes against humanity while--as described in this unclassified Top Secret memo--engaging in classic Soviet propaganda techniques of "what-aboutism," "doublespeak," "scapegoating," "sloganeering"---"we'll stop genocide when we get our hostages” (but we won't really), "scapegoating" Hamas for Israel's targeting of civilians--civilians ARE civilians even if used as involuntary human shields, and "Big Lies" that are "boldly asserted" such as claims about NOT targeting hospitals, U.N. facilities, and having an ulterior motive, namely Nakba 2.0--the pland to expel the Gazans from Israel to Cairo (translated from Hebrew). Here is a presentation including Israel’s list of War Crime.. The Law of Armed Conflict, is fairly straightforward except for many lawyers who refuse to acknowledge Facts.

“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not.” Jeremiah 5:21

           Let me close with pertinent words from George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, which I have marked up here in full, and excerpt below:

"Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.

    It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions;
---
    by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

    And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation."

---Washington's Farewell Address, 1796 (markup on TULPPP)

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Bryan Gobin,
Chief Instigator and Asymmetric Warfare Strategist, TULPPP.com

Connect with me on LinkedIn 

 Link to GOOGLE DOC with letter and attachments -  tinyurl.com/isr23-BCG-LetterLATimesCensor 

Attachments:

• Business Problems at the LA Times

• 2023nov17 LA Times blocks reporters who signed open letter criticizing Israel from covering Gaza | Semafor

• 2023Jun08 LATimes Executive Editor Kevin Merida is grilled by staff over 73 layoffs| LATimes

• Bio: Kevin Merida

• 2023nov12 NYT The NYT Responds to an Open Letter from Israel’s Foreign Ministry & Press Office | NYT

• Bio: Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lior Haiat to Head of the Public Diplomacy Directorate

Dear Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Mr. Kevin Merida,

Opinion BRET STEPHENS 2024apr23 | To Be (Visibly-A FUCKING JACKASS) Jewish in the Ivy League [yale]

Bret Stephens nytimes.com

Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”

It hasn’t worked out that way.

On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.

[AH, SO YOU WALKED IN THE FUCKING MIDDLE OF A PROTEST AND GAVE THE BIRD TO EVERYONE--YOU FUCKING ENTITLED LITTLE BITCH]

“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said she was hit in the left eye by a Palestinian flag held by a demonstrator. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.

[THAT'S FINE, AS LONG AS I AM THE ZIONIST OVERLORD IN CHARGE OF SECURITY]

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing.  The latest news about the conflict.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator [YEAH, LET'S PUT THE SWASTIKA IN FRONT OF THE SYNAGOGUE AND SEE WHAT THE FUCK YOU THINK ABOUT THAT], her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

What do such acts mean for Jews on campus?

[YOU ARE A FUCKING ZIONIST BASTARD---ANTI-ISRAEL---SO WHAT! i'M ANTI-JOE-FCKING BIDEN TOO!]

There’s a certain eagerness in some media stories to highlight Jewish students who have joined the protests as a way of acquitting anti-Israel groups of charges of antisemitism. But as Jonathan Chait astutely noted in New York magazine, “this does not settle the question of their relation to antisemitism any more than ‘Blacks for Trump’ puts to rest concerns about Republican racism.”

[what's your fucking definition of anti-semitism, schmuck?]

Others have suggested that some of the more aggressive expressions of antisemitism have come from outside agitators rather than from students themselves. Maybe, though there’s plenty of evidence of atrocious student behavior. But that still leaves open the question of why these students regularly chant slogans like “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” which (if they didn’t know it before) they know now is an incendiary call to violent action against Jews.

The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

[by all means, support the holocaust in the holy land brett]

What goes for the student demonstrators is true of faculties, too. At Columbia, nearly 170 professors put their names on a statement suggesting that “one could regard” Oct. 7 as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation.” Leaving aside the lawyerly language, there’s little question as to where the sympathies of the signatories lie. What are Jewish students — including the Israelis enrolled at Columbia — supposed to do when faced with such militant hostility not only from their peers but also from their professors?

I asked Crispe and Tartak if they had given thought to leaving Yale. “I have to stay,” Tartak told me. Crispe felt similarly. “I’m going to stay around Yale to support my peers as long as I need to,” he said. But he also had regrets.

“I entered Yale extremely proud to be one of the first Hasidic Jews to go as an undergraduate,” Crispe said. “I looked forward to sharing experiences with students from diverse backgrounds while living proudly in my own skin. What I find now, walking around campus, is people flipping me off, yelling at me. There’s no escaping it.”

Crispe’s and Tartak’s defiance commends them. As for the student bigots who have put them through these ordeals — and the university administrators who have dallied and equivocated in the face of that bigotry — history will eventually render a verdict. Donors, alumni and prospective students should reach their own verdicts sooner.

A correction was made on

April 24, 2024

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to an injury Sahar Tartak said she received. A video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.

Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 2024, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: To Be (Visibly) Jewish in the Ivy League. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/16/opinion/thepoint#antisemitism-usa-statistics

 Newswatch: How Television Decides the News Hardcover – December 6, 1982 

by Av westin (Author)

From <https://www.amazon.com/Newswatch-Av-westin/dp/0671421794>

MEDIA UNBOUND: The Impact of Television Journalism on the Public. By Stephan Lesher. Houghton Mifflin. 253 pp. $13.95 NEWSWATCH: How TV Decides the News. By Av Westin. Simon and Schuster. 267 pp. $15.95

By CHRISTOPHER LYDON; CHRISTOPHER LYDON, formerly a politcal reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau, anchors the Ten O'Clock News for WGBH, public television in Boston.

January 1, 1983 at 7:00 p.m. EST

THE TWO BOOKS at hand represent opposite views

on the overwhelming power of television news. Newswatch by ABC executive producer Av Westin is a professional's attempt to provide an even-handed guide through the history, technology, personalities and daily grind of big-time broadcasting; yet I found it less than reassuring. Stephan Lesher's Media Unbound is a curiously light-hearted diatribe against the distinctive excesses in the electronic medium. Lesher charges television with compounding all the sins of his old trade, the "intrinsically capricious" business of journalism. There may be some healthy warnings here, but all in all Lesher's tocsin is not alarming.

We are accustomed now to thinking of television as the main source of popular news, and still the 1980 presidential campaign marked a sharp and worrisome turn, in the virtual disappearance of print influence. Remember 1980? No scoops. No hot columnists. No running story to be savored in the detailed narrative of daily papers. No Woodward and Bernstein. No Hunter Thompson either. No text that mattered. No "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD" headline in the Daily News. Not even a Playboy interview. No memorable endorsements--except, where I live, the Boston Globe's blessing on the two candidates (Anderson and Carter) who lost both Massachusetts and the nation.

The 1980 campaign unfolded entirely onthe TV screen, from Roger Mudd's interview with Ted Kennedy to Ronald Reagan's "there you go again" rebuff in debate with Jimmy Carter. Notably, in between were the John Anderson campaign (TV imagery for print-minded voters) and Henry Kissinger's drive to nominate Gerald Ford to a "co-presidency"--launched and very nearly consummated, it seemed at the time, in Walter Cronkite's convention booth in Detroit.

This, then, is the opinion-making marvel that Westin and Lesher would explain to us, in such different tones of voice.

Westin's authority is that of a network executive who grew up with the business. He is the producer of the ABC news magazine 20/20. Along the way he was in on the first Telstar satellite broadcasts to and from Europe. He put Mike Wallace on the CBS Morning News and produced CBS Reports with Fred Friendly. He refereed on-air battles between Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner on ABC Evening News, and he helped Roone Arledge conceive ABC's three-headed successor, World News Tonight. Westin's manner, alas, is that of an aging boy wonder, delighted to report that the early promise of his medium and his career has been confirmed.

Westin is expert and interesting on many details of television technology--including Don Hewitt's "double chain" method of film editing and Fred Friendly's theory of studio lighting.

The trouble is it often sounds as if he is chronicling the development of a hardware industry--aviation, perhaps. Westin treats the broad matter of TV's political impact by observing narrowly that TV prosecutes corrupt politicians more effectively than print does. "The rascals were turned out more frequently," he writes, "because their inadequacies or criminality was on display."

The book is full of such smug, simple claims--about the networks' openness to women and blacks, for example, about the virtue of "popular" news ("even one more interested viewer means one more informed citizen").

Westin's book is designed in part as a practical course for would-be professionals, but he reveals standards here that the industry should not be advertising.

"Good television writing comes first from a decent vocabulary," he instructs.

Ten pages later he writes of the need for good pictures: "Minimumly, (sic) the correspondent and the cameraman must have a clear understanding of what the opening shot should be. . . ."

He is rightly critical of local news on commercial television--the happy talk and the hairdos, the look-alike news anchors who don't know the local politics or local pronunciations in the "markets" where they happen to be working. Yet Westin, to my surprise, is just as ready to insult the intelligence of his viewers. In building up the entertainment value of 20/20, he writes, "we assume that most of the people we are reaching have 'zero knowledge and zero interest' in the sub        jects we intend to cover. More than likely, many people who tuned in . . . do not want to work to understand what we are talking about." Did ever a newspaper or magazine editor think such a thought, much less confess it? I cannot believe Don Hewitt of CBS's 60 Minutes would say such a thing either. In the end Westin voices a feeble faith in television's miracle: "People do not read as much as they should," he concludes, "and they are dependent on the crutch of television, which has rendered them passive. There is no doubt that television news is the lazy person's way of keeping informed."

Stephan Lesher's book is an exuberant assault on most of Westin's pious assumptions. Lesher does not see much objectivity or fairness in TV news; he surely does not believe in the "wisdom" ascribed to the likes of Walter Cronkite, whom Lesher charges with political usurpation for his anti-Vietnam "Special" early in 1968. "The chutzpah of a Walter Cronkite or a Frank McGee, without portfolio, telling millions of people that, to quote Oscar Hammerstein II's King of Siam, 'what they do not know is so,' is certainly unsettling; the awesome size of the medium through which they tell it is downright scary."

Lesher, formerly a Newsweek correspondent and now a public relations consultant in Washington, believes that journalism has always been an "inherently imprecise, subjective, seat-of-the-pants business, relying entirely on personal judgment and opinion." Electronics has made it much worse: "the difference is that the boys and girls in the proverbial bus really are riding a rocket ship."

Lesher's tone is that of a bright and garrulous reporter at the back of the bus, or rocketship, mocking his competitors' stories. His favorite target is 60 Minutes, which he both loves and hates. He takes apart and re- edits any number of famous 60 Minutes scripts: he argues that Mike Wallace asked the wrong questons of Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert; that Harry Reasoner stretched the evidence of mismanagement against Illinios Power. But his criticism, all told, is not much more than irreverent copy-editing. Lesher does not see either corporate or reportorial ideology at work in the general mischief of journalism; the problem with news is just that competitive pressure forces sloppy work into print and onto the air before it is finished.

Lesher's own technique comes to seem a lot like 60 Minutes itself. There is a lot of direct-quote "actuality" in his book, a lot of loud bullying and some good phrase- making. But there is not much originality here, or systematic attack. Lesher acknowledges that he has applied more than once to do promotional work for 60 Minutes.

His manifesto wants real anger and real humor, too. Thre is no hint of an insight as pithy as the line attributed to Philip Schlesinger that somehow found its way to my office wall. "News is the exercise of power over the interpretation of reality." Nowhere does Lesher nail down the charge that abuses in TV news are essentially different from, or worse than, those of print journalism. When it comes to belaboring the modern American media, I prefer Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, written after Dickens' tour of 1842. In the novel young Martin's first impression of our country, as his steamboat docked in New York, was delivered by the newsboys.

"'Here's this morning's 2 New York Sewer!' cried one. 'Here's this morning's New York Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the New York Private Listener! Here's the New York Peeper! Here's the New York Plunderer! Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here's the New York Rowdy Journal! Here's all the New York papers! Here's full particulars of the patriotic loco foco movement yesterday in which the Whigs was so chawed up, and the last Alabama gouging case, and the interesting Arkansas dooel with bowie-knives, and all the political, commercial and fashionable news. Here they are! Here they are! Here's the papers, here's the papers!' "

Moments later Martin Chuzzlewit is accosted by the grandiloquent Colonel Diver, editor of the New York Rowdy Journal. "It is in such enlightened means," Colonel Diver explains, "that the bubbling passions of my country find a vent."

From <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1983/01/02/the-news-on-television-news/1eff91ba-efe0-409c-b946-1385d5d3fae5/

SMILE MORE:

A SUBCULTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE ANCHOR/CONSULTANT RELATIONSHIP IN LOCAL TELEVISION NEWS OPERATIONS

A Thesis Presented to The School of Graduate Studies Drake University

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46924565.pdf

anchor/consultant relationship in local television news operations

An Abstract of a Thesis by Mary Angela  Bock

May, 1986

Drake UnivSITY

Adviser: Michael Cheney

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46924565.pdf

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1486735029379696&disposition=inline

A STUDY OF GOVERNMENTAL INQUIRIES INTO ALLEGED STAGED NEWS PRACTICES OF TWO TELEVISION NEWS DOCUMENTARIES.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1972 Journalism,

University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

72-27,058

LUNSFORD, Paul C., 1916-

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

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CHAPTER SUMMARY

This chapter has examined the meaning of objectivity with its many ramifications, diversities and problems, with special emphasis on the process of human perception as one of the key factors in the reporting and interpreting of reality. It becomes clear that object ivity is not a simple, linear process of the newsman reporting what he apprehends with his own senses, but rather a complex interrelation between his sensory system, his experiential frame of reference, the event or object perceived and the circumstances and situation surround ing the perceptive act. Tracing the origin and development of the concept in journal istic history, the chapter shows that the concept, although present in earliest American journalism, has suffered numerous regressions and interregnums during its span, as in the rise of sensationalism, yellow journalism and the jazz journalism of the tabloids. Despite frequent setbacks, though, the concept has remained one of the enduring virtues of American newspapers. Although this chapter has demonstrated that each excursion into sensationalism was followed by a return to objectivity, the validity of the concept faced another challenge from the concept of interpretation. The following chapter will examine the complexities of the controversy of objectivity versus interpretation.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

The Era Of Yellow Journalism

Despite a host of voices raised against the practice, sensationalism continued to manifest itself in the American press. Joseph Pulitzer and the World raised it to a new high (or low).

Almost directly, his sensationalistlc techniques ushered in the era of yellow journalism, although it was William Randolph Rearst who pushed it to its outermost limits.

Emery and Smith have described the era with graphic clarity:

Yellow journalism, at its worst was the new journalism without a soul. True, the yellow journalists trumpeted their concern for 'the people', and championed the rights of the common man; but at the same time they choked up the news channels upon which the common man depended, with a callous disregard for journal istic ethics and responsibility. Theirs was a shrieking, gaudy, sensation-loving, devil-may- care kind of journalism which lured the reader by any means. It seized upon the techniques of writing, illustrating and printing which were the prides of the new journalism and turned them to perverted uses. It made the high drama of life a cheap melodrama, and it twisted the facts of each day into whatever form seemed best suited for the howling newsboy. Worst of all, instead of giving its readers effective leadership, it offered a palliative of sin, sex and violence.

 In essence, yellow journalism was sensationalism personified, deified and epitomized, at least in the New York press, and what 105 57 Breed has termed the ’'dendritic process" assured its spread to many smaller papers. Never had the concept of objectivity fallen into such low estate.

Pulitzer had opened Pandora’s box with his sensationalism in the early years of the World, and his success was eyed enviously by many circulation conscious publishers throughout the country including Hearst who was enjoying considerable success of his own with the San Francisco Examiner. Anxious to get into the highly competitive New York field* Rearst bided his time until there was a paper for sale, and he bought it--the New York Evening Journal. And the battle was joined between Hearst and Pulitzer.

The result was a journalistic Roman Circus whose effects are still discernible in contemporary newspapers. It was journalism of daring stunts and blatant promotion of these journalistic "achieve ments; of exploitation of crime, sex and sin; of gaudy* emblazoned headlines; of faked pictures and brazen impersonations."

Journalistic ethics, objectivity, good taste, balance, fair ness— the entire congery of journalistic virtues--were spun off in the frantic scramble for circulation and sensational stories that would provide that circulation.

The approaching Spanish-American War provided an ideal vehicle on which to mount this pyrotechnical journalism. It is doubtful that Hearst, pulitzer and other yellow publishers were the primary cause of the war, as some critics have claimed. There were underlying economic, political and nationalistic conditions which played an equally import ant role in the conflict. It is equally doubtful that Hearst alone fur nished the war, as he is reported to have promised in his famous tele gram to Artist Frederick Remington. However, the jingoistic, war mongering journalism of the yellows helped fan conditions into open flame.

For example, the Cisneros incident is often cited as typical of the yellow journal era. Evangelina Cisneros, niece of the president of the insurrectionist Cuban government, accompanied her father to the Isle of Fines prison where he was banished for sedition. Miss Cis neros was accused of having lured Colonel Berriz, military governor of the island, to her home, where hidden partisans attempted to assas sinate him. She was returned to Havana for trial. Hearst realized the potential propaganda value of the situation and he decided to apply his own type of sensational treatment to the story.

The girl*8 story— which differed completely from the Spanish commander1s--provided a perfect foundation for such a treatment. She said that the Spanish commander attempted to rape her and that friends, hearing her cries for help, drove him away. Miss Cisneros was sentenced to prison and the Journal unleashed one of the most sensational campaigns in journalistic history to free her. nMi8s Cisneros," said the Journal, "is, according to all who have seen her, the most beautiful girl on the island of Cuba. ...She was reared in seclusion and, almost a child in years, is as ignorant of the

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https://www.congress.gov/96/crecb/1979/03/28/GPO-CRECB-1979-pt5-7-1.pdf

=============

ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

THE MEDIA

• Mr. TOWER. Mr. President, we are

all very much aware of the media in

this country, with varying opinions of

its power and influence. It is often that

more such power is attributed than is

due. However, there are examples of

the media's ability to influence the

perception of reality, enough examples,

in fact, to raise the very real question

of how widespread the practice may

have become.

An outstanding discussion of this

issue is contained in an address pre-

sented recently by Mr. Maurice Rosen-

blatt of Washington, D.C. although I

do not agree in every specific with Mr.

Rosenblatt in his dissertation, it cer-

tainly contains many valid and thought-

ful observations. I commend it to the

Congress, the public, and the mass

media.

Mr. President, I ask that the text of

Mr. Rosenblatt's remarks before the St.

Regis Conference in Luxembourg in

February of this year, be printed in the

RECORD.

The material follows:

THE FABRICATION OF REALITY: MEDIA IN

AMERICA TODAY

THE FIRST ESTATE

Today's America, its mind, economy and

politics, is dominated by the media, both

print and electronic.

We should examine the vital statistics

concerning the power, wealth and privileges

of media in the United States. Measured

in these terms, one suddenly discovers that

the Fourth Estate has become the First

Estate. To some of its critics it exhibits

the characteristics of the Bourbon autocracy.

The press , and that has come to include

broadcasting , has, by court precedents and

constant usage, succeeded ln winning im-

munities and dispensation that are denied

other enterprises. The cornerstone of this

exceptional status is the First Amendment

to the Constitution: "Congress shall make

no law .. . abridging the freedom of speech,

or of the press . . .". Originally this was

applied only to Federal law, but in a series

of milestone decisions the immunity of the

press has been extended to cover the states,

so tha.t the press m.a.y not be curbed by

local or state statutes either. Also, the press

enjoys special treatment in other ways: there

are reduced postal rates for mailing news-

papers a.nd magazines; copyright la.ws shield

the press from the piracy of its product;

the normal prohibitions against monopol

=============

=============

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Wall Street Journal stands apart from

the rest of the media. It is unorthodox in its

fidelity to classic journalistic traditions, and

unique, because it has emerged as America's

only national newspaper. Its singularity of-

fers a counterpoint to other publications, a

standard against which to measure the mass

product of flack journalism that engulfs the

national scene.

People read the Journal whereas they scan

other newspapers. It is thoughtful, non-dog-

matic and non-ideological, despite its con-

E"ervative heritage and editorial policy. In

contrast to the majority of other newspapers

whose non-advertising copy (local, wire and

syndicate) is over 80% public relations

material or purely the output of the news

source itself, the columns of the Journal are

.........

=============

Jones, which also owns the new service, Bar-

rons Magazine, a chain of small newspapers,

the Monthly Book Digest, and some Asian

economic services. All elements are in the

information business, "repackaging" in-

formation, mainly through the overseas Dow

Jones-AP ticket. It is a diversified news

organization, with 90 % of income derived

from the Journal. It ls noteworthy that the

president of Dow Jones is chosen from the

news gathering side of the business. The

Journal does not at present have broadcast

afllllates. It has been reluctant to acquire

them because of the accompanying govern-

ment regulation, though some involvement ls

being considered.

How do you feel about advocacy journal-

ism? M1ller replied, "Journalism is the proc-

ess of imposing order on events that are

chaotic, resulting in their coherent presenta-

tion. We aren't tied to yesterday; we seek

an amalgam of insights. There is no law that

requires that you print everything. We are

committed to the test that events be slgnitl-

cant. We avoid being soothsayers and ex-

cathedra judgments. We try to give informa-

tion as fully as possible and let the readers

make up their own minds."

How to keep the press honest? Mlller, Uke

most sophisticated students of the media,

recognizes that there 1s no simple, iron-

clad procedure to insure that the whole truth

and nothing but the truth will be printed,

but agrees that there are certain steps that

can be taken to insure a rellable press.

There are newspapers in the United States

that turn their backs on responsible journal-

ism. In New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, and

Arizona we know certain pubUcatlons steeped

in bias. But we must recognize that the

cred1b111ty of the press is constantly being

reviewed, and tested by events; it is an em-

pirical process.

One of the main safeguards for the in-

tegrity of the press, is for owners to avoid

conflicts of interest such as develop from

being engaged in non-related business enter-

prises. The press has a. privileged position,

and with it go obllga.tions.

The Journal rotates reporters, to a.void

the kind of cozy relationships that develop

from covering the same beat for years,

though, admittedly, this is a. mechanical

gesture. A more useful change ma.y be to

tighten the Ubel laws. Presently, it 1s very

difficult for a. citizen to make a. case against

the press.

To correct the other faults of the press,

mentioned elsewhere in this paper, such as

the blotting out of certain persons and

stories, and "handicapping" candidate~. we

cannot rely on laws and formal codes. We

must look toward rigorous training for re-

porters and editors, stressing responslbUlty

to their craft and to society. We must rely

on the ethics of the journalist, who, if he

ls conscientious, seeks the esteem of his

peers within the profession. To keep the press

free under the First Amendment, and stm

insure its quality and veracity, self-discipllne

remains the best safeguard.

BROADCASTING

Never have so few controlled so many with

so little. Contemporary American Ufe 1s

more dominated by the media, particularly

television, than any society in human his-

tory. Walter Lippmann wrote of this awesome

power:

"The news of the day as it reaches the

newspaper office is an incredible medly of

facts, propaganda., rumor, suspicion, clues,

hopes and fears .... The power to determine

ea.ch day what shall seem important and

what shall be neglected 1s a power unlike

any that has been exercised since the Pope

lost his hold on the secular mind."

That was written sixty years ago, before

the saturation of people's lives by broad-

casting. Today 98 percent of American house-

holds have at least one television. The aver-

age viewing time 1s 6 to 7 hours per day. So

what we have is a society whose awareness

of events, whose sense of reality through

sight and sound, is conditioned by a selec-

tive interpretation of the universe. All

stimuli a.re filtered through the prism of the

media.

In the United States mass communica-

tions, broadcasting and press, are business

for profit, protected under the First Amend-

ment. Radio and television a.re licensed by

the Federal Communications Commission.

They pay no rental for the airwaves on which

they hold a. monopoly. They are supported

by advertisers who pay varying fees, depend-

ing on the time of the broadcast and the

popularity of the program. The most lucra-

tive advertising sells beer, cosmetics, cars,

patent medicines and similar consumer prod-

ucts. Advertising rates range from a. few dol-

lars for a. couple of minutes on a small radio

station to $120,000 for a 30-second TV spot

during the "Super Bowl" la.st month. Sta-

tions a.re require.d to offer 5 to 10 percent of

opera.ting time for "public service announce-

ments."

A new frontier has been opened in the

ether over America.. There is a parallel be-

tween the way air rights a.re distributed

today and the way public lands were pa.r-

eeled out in the West. In the 19th Century,

the railroads, through political influence,

secured rights-of-way and township sites, all

of which produced high speculative profits

on practically no investment; thus the

fortunes of Vanderbilt, Gould, HUI and Ryan

were accumulated.

The diversion of public a.tr space to private

exploitSltion has produced a. slmllar disregard

for the community's interests. Today's broad-

casting buccaneers pose as proprietors of the

airwaves and not as licensees entrusted with

a public resource. An example of this pre-

sumption has been their cavalier attitude

toward providing time for election cam-

paigns. The escalating cost of campaigning,

the biggest bite being for air time, has be-

come the central problem and a. threat to

honest elections. When it was audaciously

proposed that free media. time be allocated

among contending candidates, the broad-

casters walled that this would reduce prime

time revenue.

Reminders that the airwaves, the equiva-

lent of the Greek a.gora or Roman forum,

should be reserved for the transaction of pub-

lic business, met with the ir.dustry's fury.

Congressmen were pressed by friendly sta-

tions from home dlstricts--also many held

partnerships in local radio/TV enterprises-

so the proposal was killed. As a sop a. b111 was

passed that provided that candidate-time can

no longer be priced higher than regular com-

mercial rates. Another consolation was con-

sldqred, to offer campaigners cheap time in

slack periods. Perhaps, someone suggested,

the Athenians should have held Socrates'

trial at three in the morning so as not to

disturb the olive vendors, feather merchants,

fish mongers and other traders who were per-

mitted in the agora during the day.

In the 1978 campaign each of the 68 Sen -

ate candidates spent an average of more than

$900,000. In some campaigns the figure

climbed to $2 milllon. About % went to pay

broadcasters for the use of air time.

In January 1979, there were 999 television

stations operating, 725 commercial and 274

non-commercial; in radio there were a total

of 8,888 licensed operators, of which 7,811

were commercial and 1,055 were non-com-

mercial.

When it comes to the number of persons

equipped to receive broadcasting, there is an

overwhelming disparity between the United

States and the rest of the world. In 1976, the

total number of television sets worldwide

was 364 m1111on, or 108 per thousand people.

North America had 506 sets per thousand and

Africa had 1.3 sets per thousand. The aver-

age for developed countries was 200 per thou-

sand and for underdeveloped countries ran 15

per thousand.

The total number of radio sets worldwide

was 881 million, or 288 per thousand. Again,

North America had the highest percentage

with 1,667 sets per thousand-almost two per

person. Noteworthy ls the strong showing of

the USSR in radios, with 441 sets per thou-

sand compared with 313 for the rest of

Europe; Latin America. had 170; Asia and the

Arab states both had 110 and Africa. ha.d

42 per thousand people.

The same disparity exists in telephones,

where the U.S. ho.s 64 telephones per 100 peo-

ple (1975) while Brazll has 3.3, Argentina 8

and Spa.in 19 per hundred people.

When it comes to electronic media. and

telecommunications, the U.S. is in another

century, virtually light years ahead of the

rest of the planet. ·

So much for quantity. When it comes to

quality of content, the imbalance may be

somewhat rectified . In the United States

broadcasting is directed at entertainment

and advertising. The "bottom line", not taste

or truth, governs programming. Many Amer-

icans look to British broadcasting as supe-

rior, both in entertainment and news.

Anthony Smith, the British media expert,

went to the heart of the problem of Amer-

ican television when he noted that the as-

sumption that the public has the right to be

informed was converted by television into the

notion that the public has the right to be

entertained. In his essay on The Politics of

Information, he writes that it ls "in the na-

ture of the medium that all programs must

be directed at a medium audience, hour by

hour. The program-maker, in the very process

by which he is professionalized and trained,

ls made to •believe that his audience must be

'held', that it must be 'grab.bed', that it must

be addressed within an area of common allu-

sion created by the medium of television

itself. The program maker, the audience and

the medium are assumed to be locked to-

gether within the same plane of meaning;

all other meaning ls excluded as lying out-

side the nexus."

PUBLIC BROADCASTING IN THE UNITED STATES

There a.re three commercial networks: ABC,

CBS and NBC, and then there is a public

broadcasting network that services 280 non-

commercial stations via satellite. They offer

entirely different programs, featuring educa-

tional materials, news and entertainment un-

interrupted bv commercials-the bane of

television continuity. These public outlets

are owned by communities. universities,

sohool districts and states. More than 40%

of all American famllles now watch public

TV at least once a week. The budget for pub-

lic broadcasting, $347 mill1on. comes from

the federal government, foundations, corpo-

rations and volunteer contributions.

The Carnegie Commission on the Future of

Publk Broadcasting recently recommended

that $1 billion be made available for non-

<:ommercial ·broadcasting. The new money

would come from a fee charged commercial

broadcasters for thelr use of the airwaves

plus a. susbtantial federal government con-

tribution.

This proposal comes at a time when Pres-

ident Carter has also suggested more federal

funding " ... to create high quality domes-

tic productions . . . public broadcasting can

provide complete coverage of news events

such as important Congressional hearings,

that commerdal broadcasting rarely offers.

====================

THE MYTH MAKERS

"The news is what I say it is."-NBC's

David Brinkley. The media's power to in-

vent and eclipse public figures, particularly

in the political theater, is awesome to the

point of being sinister. There appears to be

a self-orchestration among the press, the

instinct of the pack, shared by most journal-

ists. It is based not upon any unanimity of

perception of what is going on but rather

upon shared insecurity that makes them

look to . each other, reinforcing their waver-

ing vision by closely reading yesterday's

headlines. One day they are tame and in-

gratiating a.s they fawn for a.ny newsy tid-

bit from the public figures whom they them-

selves have contrived. The next day they

are wolves, bent on savaging the same per-

son. They have been described as black-

birds on a telephone line; when one flies

off they all fiy off, and when one files back

they all fiy back, as if on cue.

THE PRESS FALLS FOR ITS OWN VXLLAIN-

JOE M'CARTHY

Joe McCarthy, the demagogic Wisconsin

Senator was a creature almost entirely out

of whole cloth woven on the looms of type-

writers. His rise can be attributed largely to

the gullib111ty of the press who covered him

with fulsome fascination as no Senator has

ever been covered, before or since.

Mccarthy rose on the twin myths of

conspiracy and 1nvincib111ty. The press did

much to inflate both. The conspiracy myth

was sustained by the anxieties of the Cold

War. McCarthy had absolutely no shred of

evidence to support his wild charges that

210 Communists had infiltrated the State

Department, that President Truman was in

league with Canadian atomic spies, that

the Pentagon was "soft on Reds", et cetera.

He ran a press circus with himself as ring-

master. He shrewdly exploited the illusion

of power, converting it into real power as

the Secretary of State and the Secretary of

the Army catered to his whim. Even Dwight

Eisenhower allowed himself to be boxed in,

and cravenly refused to counter McCarthy's

charge of "treason" against General George

Marshall.

As to his political potency, McCarthy was

credited with the election of 10 Senators of

his ilk and the defeat of 10 who had resisted

him. This fable of omnipotence exploded

upon examination but the press failed to

examine it. Actually, candidates who ran

with McCarthy's blessing were often de-

feated, and those whom he was credited

with defeating, Tydings, Lucas, Benton, and

others, either won at the time of McCarthy's

attacks or were brought down by factors

totally unconnected with his efforts. Sober

examination showed that both the man and

his "ism" profited from an Alice in Wonder-

land multiplication, through the mirrors of

the press.

The press was in a real dilemma.. They

had helped create him and now the geni

was out of the bottle, the noisiest voice in

the land, a direct or subjective force in-

volved in every political decision. Most

newspapers denounced him editorially, while

the Chica.go Tribune and its satellites, the

Hearst Press and the newspapers of similar

stripe extolled him.

For the established liberal press, McCarthy

cast a. lurid spell. They could not leave him

a.Ione, over-reporting him with horror,

prompting the coining of the term "foebo-

phile"-those who are morbidly fascinated by

their enemies.

The central lesson of the McCarthy experi-

ence is the importance of conceptualizing

reality. Here was the cardinal principle, the

key to unlocking the mystery of McCarthy's

rise and fall.

His press image was that of a. reactionary

bent on destroying liberals. It was necessary

to correct this image, which required an un-

orthodox rhetoric. A new term was invented

a rubric now part of the political lexicon,

"radical right". In the new dialectic, Mc-

Carthy wa.s recast a.s a reviler of the Prot-

estant Church, befouler of West Point, a

vandal subverting his own Republican Party,

a slanderer of the bankers and financiers of

Wall Street, a wrecker bent on bringing down

the temple of the establishment. Finally, he

was pitted against the Senate itself, making

his attack on that institution the crime

which resulted in his condemnation, not by

the liberals but by the establishment.

He was a reckless hooligan who violated

the truth twice a day on time for the after-

noon and morning editions of the press. It

was fascinating to observe that when the

press ignored McCarthy he became sullen

and morose. They had contrived him and

when there ceased to be a fantasy figure, the

real flesh and blood man crumbled. He had

identified himself with his image and when

the image died, he died.

If there was one other casualty it was the

print media, led by the Associated Press. T'ne

televising of the Army-McCarthy hearings

gave the public a first hand, and entirely dif-

ferent view of this man whom they read

about as the Sir Lancelot of Americanism.

People saw him as a bully boy, snarling and

mephistic, the prototype of the "bad guy"

of TV westerns. More important, wire edi-

tors of newspapers all over the country saw

that this was no one-sided contest; they saw

witnesses stand their ground, they heard ra-

tional voices discrediting the Senator's lies.

McCarthy was dismayed when pressed with

hard evidence; he looked like a fool as well as

a villa.in. Newspapers in the hinterland de-

manded more balanced reporting, and from

that point the press had to modify their

lopsided coverage and deal with a public

whose opinion had been formed by another

medium. On this occasion, at least, the press

had to halt stampeding opinion, that had

been made possible by a lack of competition.

mAN, THE EMPEROR'S NEW CLOTHES

On January 16th the Washington Post car-

ried an editorial "Who is Khomeini?"

raising more important questions than the

identity of the exiled lraniwn religious leader.

The editorial was marked by n.9.ive astonish-

ment, .as if an O'bscure apparition had sud-

denly pulled the Persian rug from under the

Emperor. The real question is where has the

American press 'been for the past 25 yea.rs,

during iwhich time adulatory coverage pre-

sented the Shah as ia.n enlightened, progres-

sive reformer striving to drag a backward

Iran into the modern technological age.

Americ.an coverage of Iran stands as a prime

example o.f media myopia, sloth and incom-

petence eJ.ded and a.betted by official policy

ma.kers.

Why was the press ta.ken by surprise by the

current strife? Instead of investigation and

analysis, the press took its cue from the State

Department-CIA propaga,nda mill ;which

proved to be an unreliable source because as

the Post notes, "to avoid offending the Shah,

Americ.an officials long accepted the demand

to sihun contact with all opposition ele-

ments." According to the Post, the insulaition

of Americans on the issue was so complete

that "until just the other day the CIA could

not even Ui.y its hands on some of Mr. Kho-

meini's vol uminous--.a.nd revealing--writ-

1ngs. It is hard to imagine a more painful in-

stance of willful self-blinding." More perva-

sive a.nd possibly more ds.ma.ging were the

assumptions formulated ,by policymakers and

propagated by the press, such as:

T!he Iranian military represents a bulwark

against the Soviets;

==============

I1he Shah's reforms were transforming the

feudal Society into a stable modern country;

The financial transactions (in m111tary

hardware and oil) are meaningful to the

Iranian masses;

Having Iran as a friend would somehow

stabilize the Mideast situation; and

The Shalh. had correctly chariaoterized his

opposition .as "Islamic Marxists." Who else

would resist such a popular, beneficelllt ruler?

One need only sUlbstitute the names of

other countries •and other puppets to see this

pattern repeated iaround the world; in Viet-

nam, Korea, Chile, Nicaragua, wherever the

United States security agencies have in-

jected themselves to manipulate foreign pol-

icy and public opinion.

This approach, ending in upheaval and

collapse, has generally been abetted by a

long misrepresentation or obscuring of the

facts by the American press. The media have

taken their cue from the official insiders

who then tend to believe their own prop~

aganda. One cannot tell which oomes first

the ostrich or the egg. In the case of Iran:

competent observers have never believed

there was any serious possibility of stopping

or even slowing down a Soviet aggression. As

to the validity of the Shah's "reforms", there

was a complete misreading of the social and

political realities, that resulted in a super-

ficial optimism, ignoring the volcano under-

neath.

Reporters missed the boat. They failed to

understand the opposition to the Shah's

modernization plan because of their overall

failure to explain what is going on in Iran.

According to the Columbia Journalism Re-

view's current study (Reporting Iran

Through the Shah's Eyes), "This failure to

comprehend why reasonable people who are

neither religious zealots nor Marxists might

object to the Shah's brand of modernization

has, in turn, been caused by the reporters'

cultural nearsightedness and ideological

estrangement from the values of Iran

society."

The journalists' lack of depth made them

repeat incantations about "land reforms."

Had they dug beneath official rhetoric they

would have discovered that the Shah was

engaged in a ploy to widen his political base

by diminishing the influence of large land-

holders, the Shah's once and future political

rivals. About 10 percent of the peasants

benefitted from the redistribution and

roughly ten million more were left with less

acreage than is required for family sub-

sistence. A forced migration to the cities

caused a drastic reduction in agricultural

production, so Iran must now import 50 per-

cent of its staples because of the chaos that

ensued.

Likewise, the press is only beginning to

realize that the anti-Government demon-

strators are not merely religious fanatics

with Marxist overtones. The complaint is not

so much with modernization as it is against

corruption, ostentation, autocracv and the

imposition of Western notions and practices.

It is no wonder that coverage and policy

collapsed under the weight of false assump-

tions, ethnocentrism and naivete. The press,

by accepting the official line and apparently

believing it, did the public a great disservice.

Jn the words of Richard A. Falk, the Prince-

ton international law professor: "the media

. . . has denied the Iranian opposition legit-

imacy in American eyes, thereby truncating

oublic debate on one of the most important

foreiErn policy developments since the end of

U.S. involvement in Indochina. Unless the

press 'helns open up debate, the American

pnblic will be making up its mind under

much the same conditions that prevailed

during the Vietnam War."

The list of distortions is inherent in the press methodology in case after case, given

the basic cohesiveness of the entire informa-

tion apparatus. America. has just received. the

full treatment again in coverage of the visit

of Teng Hsia.o-p'ing. Overnight the Red Chi-

nese devil has been given a. complete face-

lift and presented uncritically, with thou-

sands of words and hours of television

depicting him as a benign, witty, engaging

personality, America's friend and ally. Scant

coverage was given to the thousands of pro-

testers who clogged the streets of Washing-

ton or to the concern by members of Con-

gress who urged some reserve and caution

before we lose our ha.la.nee a.gain.

NOMINATION BY THE PRESS

The media. have now ta.ken over in candi-

date selection. It ls in the primaries that

press interpretations have been found to su-

persede the actual expression by the voters,

and it is the media's imposed judgment that

often settles the outcome. Professor M. J.

Robinson, in his study "TV's Newest Pro-

gram: The Presidential Nomination Ga.me"

formulates what he terms the "dismal"

theory that "the key to winning the nomina-

tion is merely to be declared the winner by

the networks in the New Hampshire pri-

mary." It is often forgotten that President

Johnson received a. majority of the New

Hampshire votes In the 1968 primary, but

Sena.tor Eugene McCarthy, with 42 percent

was "declared" the real winner by the press.

A few weeks later in the Wisconsin primary,

McCarthy garnered 56 percent of the votes

against the Johnson slate, but now he was

"declared" to have "lost" because he had

failed to reach 60 percent, the magic level

arbitrarily set by the press.

An even greater distortion comes from the

amount of coverage given. Robinson points

out that prior to the 1976 New Hampshire

primary, U states had held caucuses that

accounted for 587 delegates compared to New

Hampshire's 38. Yet the news stories on those

11 states represented less than 10 percent of

network political coverage compared to 23

percent for New Hampshire alone. A New

Hampshire delegate received 80 times the

coverage as those from the earlier states.

Most people ca.me to know only one of the

candidates, the New Hampshire "winner",

Jimmy Carter. Public recognition of Carter

quadrupled. The influence of the media

raised Carter from obscurity to the position

of declared. "frontrunner". Yet Carter re-

ceived only 30 percent of the New Hampshire

vote while 70 percent voted for other candi-

dates; but according to Walter Cronkite the

results "gave Carter a commanding head

start" and CBS's Roger Mudd declared that

"Oarter's victory was suf>stantiail". NBC

hailed him as the "unqualified winner".

All this built to the ultimate ap theosls

of politics, cover stories on Time and News-

week. By actual count, Carter received 2,630

lines of coverage in these magazines while

all of Carter's opponents received only 300

lines. The week after New Hampshire, the

Georgian received three times the television

and four times the front page coverage as

all his rivals together. The New Yorlt Times

pointed. out that reporters did not like

Senator Henry Jackson and that television

therefore dismissed his substantial victories

as "special cases." In Massachusetts, Carter's

23,000 votes merited respectful talk about

his momentum while Jackson's 163,000 votes

elicited little more than a shrug. When Jack-

son went on to win New York, Roger Mudd

said this was because of "New York pecu-

liarities" and Leslie Stahl (CBS) declared

that his victory did not give him momentum.

A study by Professor Thomas Patterson

showed that "Carter simply dominated elec-

tion reporting. The coverage became more

lopsided with each primary until, Professor

Patterson found, "Carter was receiving five 

=============

times as much exposure as his major rivals."

By the time of the De~o.cratlc convention

Carter had only to harvest the victory so

uncritically planted by th~ media.

The 1976 presidential election saw the low

ebb of the print medi~ as tr.1-qmpha.nt tele-

vision took over the political arena.. TV was

the name of the game; coverage b,Y the news-

papers was reduced to reviewing the candi-

dates' performance on the rival medium. The

Ford-Carter debates were llve if not lively,

and the scribes sat on the sidelines with the

rest of the public. They had become voyeurs,

much as the sportscasters keep up a running

comment while the actual game 1.s played for

all to see. The written press, long one of the

most lnfiuentia.l factors in the American poli-

tical process, has lost out to a. new technol-

ogy that both overwhelms and numbs the

public.

The media power to influence the selection

process determines the type of candidate

who enters politics today, based upon tele-

vision appeal. What matter if a. candidate

ls knowledgeable about economics, ls a fine

lawyer or sklllful parlla.menta.rian? The ques-

tion is, how does he come across on the tube;

is the smile engaging, is he smart on "talk

shows", does he have an effective television

image? Forget the depth of his mind, how

deep are his dimples? Suddenly we have a

crop of candidates who are actors, astro-

nauts, and athletes. Instead of political par-

ties we have groupies. American polltlcs has

become show business.

=========================

LITERACY OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

=============

March 28, 1979 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE 6583

https://www.congress.gov/96/crecb/1979/03/28/GPO-CRECB-1979-pt5-7-1.pdf

LITERACY OF THE AMERICAN PUBLIC

In ·his Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksandr Sol-

zhenitsyn declared that a nation that loses

its memory loses its spiritual unity.

One of the most disturbing characteristics

of post-World War Il Americans, those too

young to remember the war, ls their abysmal

ignorance of the past. A whole generation of

Americans view history as divided. into B.W.

and A.W.: Before Walter Cl'onkite and After

Walter. For this generation, the War means

the Vietnam War. Their knowledge of the

Twentieth Century, the two world wars, the

Great Depression, the New Deal, ts practically

nonexistent. When network television showed

"The Holocaust" la.st year, the reaction of

many Amerioans was one of bewilderment

rather than disbelief. They could not under-

stand how such an event could have hap-

pened in our time. Yes, they had heard vague

rumors, but it remained a myth until a tele-

vision fiction authenticated it.

Another anecdote: recently a young friend

of mine remarked that she wanted to read

"War and Remembrance," Herman Wouk's

new novel about the Second World War. She

understood that it contained a superb de-

scription of the Battle of Midway. To this,

one of her contemporaries replied, "What's

Midway?" A third member of the group said,

in horror, "Do you mean to say you've never

watched any John Wayne war movies on

TV?"

Recent polls have shown that two-thirds

of the American people now gett most of their

news from television. The percentage among

young viewers ls even higher. In an inter-

view conducted in 1974, Av Westin, executive

producer of ABC evening news, frankly con-

ceded the shortcomings of TV news. He said:

"I know what we have to leave out; if people

do not read newspapers, news magazines and

books they are desperately uninformed."

Not only are Amerloans today uninformed;

mUllons of them have managed to pass

through our secondary and higher education

institutions and emerge as functional llliter-

ates. The 1nab111ty to read and write bask

English 1s one of the great scandals of mod-

ern Amerioan education. Consider the follow-

ing:

"Some 12 mlllion American adults 14 years

of age and older cannot read as well as the average fourth-grader, yet seventh-grade

reading ab111ty ls required to perform such

skilled or semi-skilled jobs as machinist or

cook. An estimated 18 million adults cannot

read well enough to file applications for Med-

icaid, Social Security, bank loans, or drivers'

licenses." (American Education, May 1974)

The majority of Americans of all ages tend

to use only the simplest sentence structure

and the most elementary vocabulary when

they write. The writing performance of teen-

agers seems to be deteriorating at the most

alarming rate of all. Essays of 13- and 17-

year olds tested in 1975 were far more awk-

ward, incoherent and disorganized. than

those of the same age group tested ln 1969.

Why the decline? Educators differ on the

reasons, citing poor famlly environment, lack

of discipline, faulty teaching, inadequate fa-

cilities. Most agree, however, that time spent

watching television is time not spent practic-

ing reading and writing. U.S. Commissioner

of Education Ernest L. Boyer remarked last

April that "Young children-two to five yea.rs

old-now watch television over four hours

every day, nearly 30 hours a week. . . . By

the time a youngster enters first grade he or

she has had 6,000 hours of television view-

ing. . . ." By the time American students

graduate from high oohool they have spent

50 percent more time watching TV than

they've spent in school. Some sources esti-

mate that, at the present rate, Americans will

end their lives having spent more time watch-

ing television than doing anything else ex-

cept sleeping.

So what ls so wrong with so many hours

spent in front of the tube? What ls so wrong

is that watching television ts entirely a pas-

sive exercise. Television demands nothing of

.the imagination. Unlike the reader, the TV

viewer ls not forced to deal with abstractions

and complexities, to follow another's train of

thought, to visualize characters and situa-

tions for himself. Although television in-

forms, it does not demand that the viewer

take an active part in learning. It diminishes

and atrophies the critical faculties. And be-

cause it ls so desperately anxious never to

bore (thereby losing Its audience and pre-

cious advertising revenue), it ls forced to

present subjects in as sprightly and super-

ficial ·a fashion as possible. The moguls of

American commercial television cater to a

very brief attention span. Recently, for ex-

ample, one of the major networks, ABC,

changed the format of its evening news pro-

gram to include, as the news is being broad-

cast, captions for upcoming stories. The im-

plication is that, lf you don't like what you're

seeing now, just wait. You'll be seeing some-

thing entirely different 30 seconds from now.

The new scheme does wonders for the con-

centration.

What is also so wrong with so much TV is

that it may influence some antisocial indi-

viduals, particularly among the young, to

violent behavior. Since the early fifties. when

television became part of everyday life in

America, there has been a noticeable increase

in juvenile crime and street viola.nee. It has

been over 20 years since the United States

Senate first held hearings to investigate the

effects of media violence on children and

youth. Congressional hearings on the same

subject have been held many times since.

What is so dangerous a.bout so much tele-

vision ls that we have allowed 1t to take over

as the chief means of communication. c. P.

Snow (Lord Snow), in a speech at the Na-

tional Book Awards in 1977, put it this

way:

"The spread of TV ls the greatest revolu-

tion in human interchange since the inven-

tion of printing. Far more than radio, since

most people, though not all, are more deeply

atrected by what they hear, and most of all

by what they see-and-hear ... Sometimes

it seems that the range of stimuli which hit

us takes away from any desire to thinkThinking has gone out of fashion ... We

can become punch-drunk with mindless pic-

tures and mindless sound. We needn't re-

member anything.

"The week is a long time in politics, said

one of our recent Prime Ministers. The week

ls a long time in today's culture. The printed

word-including those obsolescent objects,

books-is the collective memory of the hu-

man race. Books don't fade with last night's

memory. Maybe that is why they are ceas-

ing to be read."

That is the pessimistic view, perhaps too

pessimistic. There is a brighter side to this

story. The American television industry was

dismayed a.bout six months a.go. when its

surveys told it that viewing time among the

prime market 18- to 34-yea.r-olds was ac-

tually on the decline. At first, naturally, the

networks blamed the survey methodology

rather than themselves. A decline in tele-

vision viewing. Heresy. Better to kill the

messenger than heed the sad tidings.

Reasons !or the decline in viewing a.re not

yet clear. It probably has something to do

with the fa.ct that so many American women

a.re now working outside the home. That

has meant fewer hours spent in daytime

viewing as well as in the evening. Many

working couples simply haven't the time to

watch. It ts even conceivable that television

bores them. It ls also true that the per

ca.pita sale of books ts today three times

what it was 25 yea.rs a.go. This figure comes

from Dan Lacy. senior vice president of one

of America's largest publishing conglomer-

ates, McGra.w-H111, Inc.

NEEDED: A COMMUNICATIONS MAGNA CARTA

What the railroads were to the economic

development of the United States in the 19th

Century and the automobile was to the first

half of the 20th Century, the communica-

tion industry has become for the balance of

this century, into the 21st.

The problems that a.rise today concerning

the press and broadcasting a.re not new in

essence-they echo the eternal conflict be-

tween liberty and license, freedom and au-

thority-but they certainly are new in mag-

nitude. The media. ls no longer the aloof ob-

server chronicling the passing scene. It ls

engaged as an active participant, making

markets, picking candidates, arbitrating

taste and morality, exaggerating or ignoring

developments. It does all this while holding

shares and partnerships; it controls or finds

itself controlled by businesses unrelated to

its communication purpose. No other in-

dustry has access to so many varied levers

of power.

Perched on its rock of constitutional im-

munity, to whom ls the press responsible and

accountable? What if it exploits its freedom,

rendering the news in a biased way, acting

capriciously or viciously? When Stanley

Baldwin was Prime Minister, he was the tar-

get of two press magnates, Lord Rothermore

and Lord Bea.verbrook, whose papers attacked

him intemperately. Baldwin replied, "What

the proprietorship of these papers a.re aim-

ing at ls power, and power without responsl-

bllity-the prerogative of the harlot through-

out the ages."

When this question of press responsibllity

is raised in America, we are offered unac-

ceptable options, either a.bridge the Consti-

tution's protections or risk the dangers of

unbridled power and abuse. The rapid con-

centration of newspaper ownership and the

growth of communications conglomerates,

compel that we immediately seek ways to

escape this dilemma. Presently, committees

of Congress are rewriting the Federal Com-

munlca tions Act, a heroic task approached by

politicians with timidity, since this ls a

subject so compllca.ted and obscure to the

public that only interested parties and their

hired mercenaries bother to follow the in-

tricacies. Unless a new communications

Magna Carta ls drawn, we will be left at

the mercy of the media's intentions, good or

bad.

The unacceptable answer, offered by the

press. ls to leave the ·matter completely to

voluntarism, to the ethics and self-restraint

of ~he media. The Wall ~treet Journal is

cited as an example of responsible journal-

tsm, where integrity ls respected. But there

are also the horrible examples: the Man-

chester, New Hampshire Union Leader, a

paper steeped in bias, and once a Fierce

Goldwater supporter, delivered an astonish-

ing rebuke for Goldwater's criticism of Jimmy

Hoffa, the head of the Tea.xnsters Union. It

was later learned that the Teamsters had

2 million invested in the paper. Joseph Ken-

nedy put $500,000 into the a111ng Boston Post

at the time the paper switched its support

to John Kennedy. Look at papers in Ohio,

Indiana, Arizona for other examples of press

bias and wanton distortion.

In the present situation, the voluntary

approach, trusting the good wm of the media,

is not protection for the publlc, and it was

the public, not the publisher that the First

Amendment was intended to protect. Safe-

guards can be drawn that wlll not do vio-

lence to the First Amendment, that would

provide for a reasonable balance in com-

munications. Competition must be the un-

derlying principle if there ts to be independ-

ence and respons1b111ty at a time when tech-

nology ls making concentration a profitable

but dangerous practice. We submit this pro-

gram: ,

Broadcasting and publishing should not

be permitted to conglomerate. Such attempts

as the current drive by American Express to

take over McGraw-Hill (publishers of 30

magazines and 26 newsletters) can be pro-

hibited under existing law; in telecommunl-

ca tions, the licensee should be restricted to

communications, for the license ts a privi-

lege, not a right, and the holder should be

obllged to observe boundaries in the public

interest.

Anti-trust exemptions !or the press should

be removed; present law prohibits a news-

paper from monopolizing the broadcasting in

a given market; this should be extended to

Umit the control of other newspapers in the

same community; the anti-trust laws can be

amended to break up combines. National

banks, !or instance, are prohibited from do-

ing business in more than a single state.

Government can, as a principle, foster new

entrants into the media; satelllte fac111t1es

and similar regulated technologies should be

made available to new applicants before

they are preempted by AT&T, IBM and sim-

ilar giants. Administrative vision, rather than

new legislation, would be required.

The Department of Justice (Anti-~ust

Division) should be armed by legislation to

deal aggressively with the trend toward

glantism in communications.

Publlc broadcasting, which has been suc-

cessful in other countries needs strong gov-

ernment support. In the U.S. it has a promis-

ing beginning in an atmosphere of indus-

try hostllity and government indifference.

The Carnegie Institute's proposal, to assess

private broadcasters a b1llion dollars annually

to be applled to Public Broadcasting, ls a

reasonable proposal. It should be looked upon

as a user tax on licensees who derive enor-

mous revenues from the public's airwaves.

A serious professional effort should be

made for self-reformation. As suggested by

Max Kampelman, "The recruitment and

training of editors and reporters require

change. News stories would have to be writ-

ten less hastily; they would probably be

longer and in greater depth, possibly at the

risk of not being as llvely." An independent

press council ls de,sirable to resolve disputes

arising out of unfair press treatment. The

broadcasting "Fairness Doctrine" must be

revised so that dissenting views and minority opinion can be heard and not legally

strangled. ·

Unless believers in democracy address the

rapidly changing realities of modern com-

munication, they wlll find that the revolu-

tionary developments in technology have im-

posed an invisible tyranny on our minds and

society.

https://www.congress.gov/96/crecb/1979/03/28/GPO-CRECB-1979-pt5-7-1.pdf

Editorial: An examination of The Times’ failures on race, our apology and a path forward

ByThe Times Editorial Board

Sept. 27, 2020 3 AM PT

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The headline was stripped across the top of the front page, “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs.” The story, published by The Times on July 12, 1981, described a “permanent underclass” in the city’s “ghettos and barrios,” fueling a crime wave that was spilling over from South Los Angeles into prosperous — and largely white — communities in Pasadena, Palos Verdes, Beverly Hills and elsewhere.

The article, the first of a two-part series, purported to be an ambitious look at a major social problem, and it cited a lack of education and jobs as underlying causes of inner-city distress. But it also reinforced pernicious stereotypes that Black and Latino Angelenos were thieves, rapists and killers. It sensationalized and pathologized the struggles of poor families and painted residents of South L.A. with a broad brush. It quoted police and prosecutors unskeptically and implied that more aggressive policing and harsher judicial sentencing were the only effective responses to crime.

For the record:

10:18 a.m. Sept. 28, 2020An earlier version of this story identified Dean Takahashi as a Metro reporter in 1992. He was a business reporter.

The story lacked nuance and context, neglecting decades of government policies that had led to housing and school segregation and to the creation of ghettos and barrios, which were then provided with inferior public services. And it failed to give any real sense that the vast majority of the area’s residents were ordinary, law-abiding citizens, just trying to raise families and get by.

The series drew prompt and deserved criticism that highlighted an insidious problem that has marred the work of the Los Angeles Times for much of its history: While the paper has done groundbreaking and important work highlighting the issues faced by communities of color, it has also often displayed at best a blind spot, at worst an outright hostility, for the city’s nonwhite population, one both rooted and reflected in a shortage of Indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian and other people of color in its newsroom.

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Our reckoning with racism

As the country grapples with the role of systemic racism, The Times has committed to examining its past. This project looks at our treatment of people of color — outside and inside the newsroom — throughout our nearly 139-year history.

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Prompted by a pandemic, an economic crisis and a national debate over policing — all of which have spotlighted racial disparities in the United States — our nation now faces a long-delayed reckoning with systemic racism. We would be remiss, in the autumn of 2020, a season of grief and introspection, if we did not take part in that self-examination. This editorial is one part of that process.

•••

A comprehensive and balanced history of Los Angeles journalism — a people’s history that tells the story of The Times from the perspective of its employees and its readers — has yet to be written. But a deep look at the paper’s pages over time tells part of that story.

Under Harrison Gray Otis, who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917, the newspaper stood for the raw exercise of industrialists’ and landowners’ power over Los Angeles.

For at least its first 80 years, the Los Angeles Times was an institution deeply rooted in white supremacy and committed to promoting the interests of the city’s industrialists and landowners. No one embodied this aggressive, conservative ideology more than Harrison Gray Otis, the walrus-mustachioed Civil War veteran who controlled The Times from 1882 until his death in 1917.

The modern notion that journalism’s core precepts include uncovering hard truths and exposing inequity would have been foreign to Otis and other press barons of the last Gilded Age. Far from a mission of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,” his newspaper stood for the raw exercise of power, and he used it to further a naked agenda of score settling, regional boosterism, economic aggrandizement and union busting.

Otis was a Lincoln Republican who had fought on the side of the Union and opposed slavery. But his Times was a newspaper aimed at the mostly Protestant white settlers who migrated to California from the Midwest and the Plains in the decades after it was seized from Mexico in 1848 and admitted to the Union in 1850.

Again and again, The Times sought to shape and dominate the region instead of merely chronicling it. Using a trade group known as the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Assn., Otis spearheaded a campaign to prevent and impede unionization. He weighed in on the side of San Pedro over Santa Monica in an epic 1890s battle over where to locate a federally funded deepwater port. His family meddled in the politics of Mexico, where they owned a huge ranch, in an attempt to preserve their land rights. He was part of a powerful syndicate that pushed for the acquisition of water rights from farmers in the Owens Valley in 1913 — a decision fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film “Chinatown” — and the annexation of the San Fernando Valley in 1915.

And in all of his crusades, he enlisted the powerful voice of his newspaper.

During the early 20th century, as control passed from Otis to his son-in-law Harry Chandler and his heirs, The Times promoted the city’s explosive growth. But even as Dust Bowl migration, the World War II arms industry and a vast movement of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow segregation transformed the city, the newspaper remained nearly entirely white in its staff, its readership and its outlook.

A tragic example of why that was a problem was the newspaper’s support for wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in our nation’s history. (The Times apologized in 2017 for that editorial position.)

Here’s another example: In 1943, sailors on leave from wartime service rampaged lawlessly in downtown Los Angeles, attacking young Mexican Americans fitted in so-called zoot suits — long coats and wide trousers pegged at the ankle. The Times largely ignored the context — the social and economic upheaval brought about by wartime mobilization and the racist trope of threatened white womanhood — and blamed the victims instead of their assailants. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that the rioting might have grown out of racial discrimination toward Mexican Americans, The Times vehemently denied that was possible, asserting in an editorial, “We like Mexicans and we think they like us.”

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After the war ended, The Times became an uncritical mouthpiece for Washington as it covered the Eisenhower administration’s Operation Wetback, which used military-style tactics to deport Mexican migrants — some of them U.S. citizens — who had been invited north to perform agricultural labor during the war.

Coverage of the so-called Zoot Suit Riots and a congressional investigation into Japanese Americans appear in the June 7, 1943, edition of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper blamed the zoot suit-wearing Mexican American victims of attacks by servicemen and supported the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

(Los Angeles Times)

The most enlightened of the Chandlers was Otis, fourth and last of the patriarchs who controlled The Times for its first century. The Times’ standards and reputation improved under his tenure as publisher, from 1960 to 1980. He plowed what were then vast profits into the hiring of hundreds of journalists and reoriented the paper in a more politically neutral direction. Famously, Chandler authorized the publication, in 1961, of an investigation into the anti-communist John Birch Society, whose members included far-right white supremacists — and members of Chandler’s extended family (though he also presided over the paper’s 1964 presidential endorsement of Barry Goldwater, who strongly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act).

By the standards of his time, Chandler was a moderate, if not always consistent. He endorsed most goals of the civil rights movement and in 1965, during the Watts uprising, served as an informal mediator between Black protesters and the Police Department. In 1969, The Times endorsed the historic mayoral candidacy of Councilman Tom Bradley, a grandson of slaves who in 1973 would go on to defeat Mayor Sam Yorty, the divisive white incumbent.

But even as The Times moved in a more progressive direction, its newsroom did not come close to representing the city’s demographics. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the August 1965 civil unrest in Watts, yet the reporters and editors on the story were nearly all white. A 24-year-old Black advertising messenger, Robert Richardson, covered the disturbances, driving to the scene and phoning in his reports. Named a reporter trainee after the riots, he was given next to no support and left the paper the next year.

“The View From Watts,” an in-depth series The Times published in October 1965, chronicled pent-up frustrations in the Black community, and an accompanying editorial recommended summer jobs, improved police-community relations, stronger school nutrition programs and similar reforms. But the project too often took a patronizing view of Black Angelenos, most egregiously in a piece called “Police Brutality: State of Mind?” that used selective examples and unexamined quotes from police officers to heavily imply that police brutality was a thing of the past.

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The Kerner Commission, impaneled to study the root causes of 1967 uprisings in Detroit, Newark, N.J., and other cities, was prophetic in calling for the hiring of Black journalists. “The scarcity of Negroes in responsible news jobs intensifies the difficulties of communicating the reality of the contemporary American city to white newspaper and television audiences,” the panel found. That was certainly true at The Times.

It was not just that The Times saw fit to hire white men almost exclusively for its newsroom; the stories it told were largely for and about white people, which meant Angelenos weren’t getting an accurate account of their city, region and state at a time of rapid change.

Typical of the paper’s attitude was a 1978 interview in which Otis Chandler airily dismissed Black and Latino readers: “It’s not their kind of newspaper. It’s too big, it’s too stuffy. If you will, it’s too complicated.”

Chandler later stepped back from that, saying the paper was looking for readers in the “broad middle class” and “upper classes” regardless of race or ethnicity. “We are not a paper that’s sought after in the lower-class areas,” he said.

Around that time, in 1979, The Times was slow to cover the shooting of Eula Love, a 39-year-old Black homemaker who was shot to death by Los Angeles police officers in her South L.A. frontyard in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. L.A.’s afternoon daily, the Herald Examiner, played the story big, and Black residents were outraged at what they saw as an egregious example of police abuse. After being hammered by other media outlets for underplaying the story, including in an Esquire article headlined “Mr. Otis Regrets,” The Times ran a long story by media writer David Shaw about how it had “muffed” the story, and top editors began rethinking how the paper covered the LAPD.

Eula Love was shot and killed Jan. 3, 1979, by Los Angeles police officers in her frontyard. The Times’ coverage of the killing was lacking.

As has often been the case in history, progress came from the bottom up. After the “marauders” series, Black reporters met with Editor William F. Thomas to register their objections. And in February 1982, a pioneering group of Latino journalists, gathering for pizza and beer in Downey, began conceiving of a staff-led effort to tell a rich and deep narrative of their growing community. “We keep seeing the same damn stories in the paper: about crime, gangs, illegal immigration,” Frank O. Sotomayor, one of the editors on the series, recalls his co-editor, George Ramos, saying. “We want to tell our stories.”

The result was a landmark series, published in 1983, about Latinos and how they were reshaping Southern California. Latino journalists initiated and carried out the project, and presented the Latino community in all its complexity, featuring gang members and wealthy entrepreneurs, priests, police officers, university students and politicians. It examined issues that impeded Latino progress and celebrated improvements. The project was recognized with the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in American journalism. The same year, The Times’ parent company, Times-Mirror, established a Minority Editorial Training Program, or MetPro, which continues to this day.

Yet The Times remained a lonely place for journalists of color. In December 1990, Shaw, The Times’ media critic, wrote a series lamenting the dearth of diversity in journalism. He wrote of his own newspaper: “The Times is widely regarded — particularly by blacks, inside the paper and out — as having one of the poorest records for minority advancement of any major paper in the country.”

The police beating of Rodney G. King in 1991, and the unrest that followed the subsequent acquittal of the four LAPD officers charged with assaulting him, exposed once again why that mattered. With 63 people dead, the 1992 uprising was far deadlier than the earlier Watts riots, in which 34 people died.

The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the disturbances, just as it was after Watts. But in later years academics argued that The Times overemphasized the role of Black Angelenos in the riots (half of those arrested by the LAPD were Latino) and sensationalized Black-Korean conflict (a Korean-born shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, had killed a Black teenager, Latasha Harlins, the previous year inside her family’s grocery store).

Within The Times, newsroom tensions burst into the open. “When the riot spread and it became apparent that a number of white reporters could not gain access to the scene, minority reporters from the suburbs were shipped into the danger zone,” Dean Takahashi, then a young business reporter and one of few Asian Americans on staff, wrote in a May 1992 article for Editor & Publisher that drew national attention. “A black colleague of mine mockingly called it the ‘Los Angeles Times busing program.’”

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As it had a decade earlier, The Times made some commitments to improvements. It hired several journalists of color and established a zoned section known as City Times to cover neighborhoods of South Los Angeles and East Los Angeles that had long been neglected — “the hole in the doughnut,” as editors said at the time. The effort lasted for only three years, folding in 1995.

But even as the editorial staff pushed for broader and better coverage of the city’s diverse communities, the newspaper was being torn by political divisions within the extended Chandler family that still owned the paper, some of whom felt The Times had leaned too far leftward. In 1994, the top business executive, Publisher Richard T. Schlosberg III, directed the editorial board to endorse Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, in his bid for reelection.

Wilson was the chief proponent of Proposition 187, an initiative on the same ballot that would decide his reelection. The measure sought to bar undocumented immigrants from access to state-funded healthcare and education. Staff members, especially Latinos, were disgusted. “Under normal circumstances, I would quietly accept that decision and move on. This time I cannot,” Deputy Editorial Page Editor Frank del Olmo wrote in a dissent that ran in the paper. “Because this is not just another political campaign. And the Wilson endorsement is not — as a senior colleague whom I respect tried to convince me — just another endorsement.”

He continued: “For me, a Mexican American born and reared in California and a journalist here for more than 20 years, this campaign is unprecedented in the harm it does — permanent damage, I fear — to an ethnic community I care deeply about and a state I love.”

Frank del Olmo was the first Latino editor on the masthead of the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper’s 1994 endorsement of Gov. Pete Wilson, who was pushing Proposition 187, drew his vehement dissent in the pages of The Times.

(Los Angeles Times)

The summer after voters adopted Proposition 187 (it was later struck down by the courts), Janet Clayton was named editorial page editor, a Black woman and the first person of color to occupy that role. During her nine-year tenure, the opinion pages of The Times evolved to reflect an optimistic, progressive and inclusive political vision. The section won two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 2002 for a series on mentally ill people living on the streets, and the other in 2004 for a series on entrenched problems in California state government.

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Halfway through Clayton’s tenure, The Times and its sister papers were sold to the Chicago-based Tribune Co. The new owners brought in two nationally esteemed journalists — John S. Carroll, who had overseen newspapers in Baltimore and Lexington, Ky., as editor, and Dean Baquet, the national editor at the New York Times, as managing editor.

With Baquet overseeing the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, Clayton overseeing the opinion pages (before moving to the Metro section) and art director Joseph Hutchinson serving as deputy managing editor for design, the newspaper for a time had three Black editors on its masthead. Del Olmo was the first Latino on the masthead, and the Mexican-born writer Andrés Martinez was later the second, as editorial page editor.

That diversity — a high point — proved short-lived. Del Olmo, 55, died of cardiac arrest after collapsing in his office at The Times in 2004; Baquet, who succeeded Carroll as top editor, was fired in 2006 after refusing to make more cuts; Clayton, Hutchinson and Martinez all left in 2007.

Since Baquet’s departure, The Times has seen a flurry of top editors and business executives come and go. One of them — Davan Maharaj, who joined The Times in 1989 as an intern and oversaw the newsroom from 2011 to 2017 — was of Indian ancestry and an immigrant from Trinidad.

Maharaj, the first Asian American to lead The Times, presided over a depleted newsroom that had spent four years in federal bankruptcy protection, ending in 2012. Newsroom diversity improved, but the staff was shaken by multiple rounds of buyouts. Nonetheless, it continued to do outstanding work, including a Pulitzer-winning expose of corruption in the city of Bell, a story co-written and uncovered by a Guatemalan-born journalist, Ruben Vives.

By the time The Times was sold in 2018, to the physician and pharmaceutical inventor Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper was down to about 400 journalists, less than half of the 940 when Baquet left.

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•••

Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, left, addresses staffers in 2018 shortly after his purchase of the paper.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Where does The Times go from here?

An organization should not be defined by its failures, but it must acknowledge them if it is to hope for a better future.

The brutal death of a Black man, George Floyd, on May 25 while in the custody of police in Minneapolis shocked the world. It also prompted news organizations like The Times to reflect on how they cover, frame and promote stories at a time when the 24/7 news cycle moves faster than ever. Amid nationwide demonstrations over racial injustice, members of the Los Angeles Times Guild established caucuses for Black and Latino employees. The caucuses have called for improvements in coverage, hiring and career development, a public apology for The Times’ poor record on race, and equal pay. They have insisted, rightly, on reframing and recentering our coverage of communities of color.

The Times in 2020 has new owners, new leaders, a new labor union representing its journalists and a new headquarters in El Segundo. But the shadows of the past loom over our institution.

Newspapers are described as a first rough draft of history. But in truth, the first rough draft written by this newspaper — and those across the country — has been woefully incomplete.

On behalf of this institution, we apologize for The Times’ history of racism. We owe it to our readers to do better, and we vow to do so. A region as diverse and complex and fascinating as Southern California deserves a newspaper that reflects its communities. Today, 38% of the journalists on our staff are people of color. We know that is not nearly good enough, in a county that is 48% Latino and in a state where Latinos are the largest ethnic group. We know that this acknowledgment must be accompanied by a real commitment to change, a humility of spirit and an openness of mind and heart.

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The Times will redouble and refocus its efforts to become an inclusive and inspiring voice of California — a sentinel that employs investigative and accountability reporting to help protect our fragile democracy and chronicles the stories of the Golden State, including stories that historically were neglected by the mainstream press. Being careful stewards of this new company, privately owned but operated for the benefit of the public, is our first obligation. But that stewardship will also require bold and decisive change. If we are to survive as a business, it will be by tapping into a digital, multicultural, multigenerational audience in a way The Times has never fully done.

We make this pledge in recognition of the many journalists who battled over the decades to make The Times a more inclusive workplace and a newspaper that reflected the real Los Angeles in its pages. As we reorient this institution firmly and fully around the multiethnic, interfaith and dazzlingly complex tapestry that is Southern California, we honor their contributions.

From <https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-09-27/los-angeles-times-apology-racism>

latimes.com

Focusing on a Hot Spot

By DALONDO MOULTRIE

Feb. 28, 2001 12 AM PT

From <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-feb-28-me-31336-story.html>

When politics heats up in the Middle East, courses like Middle East Government and Politics at Pierce College in Woodland Hills get hot too.

Enrollment in such classes jumps because students hear of unrest and seek further insight into the brewing conflicts.

“Hopefully I will . . . see why people are fighting over there,” said David Aguilar, a student in the Pierce community college course.

“The only thing I want to get out of it is, what would drive people to kill? Is it that a culture, a love for religion, would drive you to kill, or is it politics?”

Courses like these bring together people who might otherwise never meet, let alone talk politics in measured tones.

“I was very excited to see it in the catalog,” said Kenneth Scalir, a political science major who has attended Pierce on and off for six years. “This is very good to learn why people disagree.”

At times, potentially volatile questions come up. In a recent session, the class discussed American media’s portrayal of conflicts in the Mideast, using a news article to initiate the debate.

Two students voiced opposing viewpoints.

“CNN doesn’t show the violence against Israelis, just Israelis against Palestinians,” said Dorit Zohar, a 30-year-old Israeli.

Afghani Muslim student Marshal Nasiri, 18, countered, “What about the scene when the two Palestinian soldiers killed the Israeli man and threw him out the window?” The two were joined by other students airing views on each side until the emotions died down.

The two women later said they enjoy voicing their differences and hearing the other side. The class allows them to do both.

“I’m curious about people’s culture, people’s background, the way they think,” Zohar said. “I’m friends with the professor. He’s one example of an Israeli Arab I can talk to.”

Nasiri said the debates--though sometimes tense--will engender understanding.

“You try to argue with [classmates] but in no way do you feel threatened,” she said. “You can see how they feel about the subject.”

With the recent Israeli-Palestinian clashes, enrollment in the Pierce course grew from 25 in the first class to 38 a week later, instructor Kassem Nabulsi said.

Students in the class--some from as far away as Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel--are intrigued by recent developments in the West Bank.

Since September, the region has been plagued by sporadic violence that has claimed more than 350 lives and disrupted peace talks.

Also stoking students’ interest was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s landslide victory in January over former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said UCLA instructor Steven Spiegel, who has taught courses on the Middle East for more than 30 years.

“I think there is some revival of interest,” he said. “Students often react to current events. Arab-Israeli issues have been getting a lot of coverage.”

By Spiegel’s estimate, interest in the Middle East is the highest it has been in 15 to 20 years.

At the time the course was started, about 20 years ago, many colleges and universities saw an increase in enrollment in courses on the Middle East. That was because of flare-ups in the region, including the war in Lebanon and the Iranian revolution.

Levon Marashlian, who teaches a course titled Modern Middle East at Glendale Community College, said many students were forced from their Middle Eastern homelands and later enrolled in Middle East studies courses in the United States.

Attendance in Marashlian’s course reached 51 in 1981--his first year of teaching it--compared with an average of 30 students in later years, he said.

About 15 years ago, the Pierce course was suspended for several years because of a lack of funding and interest. Then it was revived at the 16,400-student college for one semester in 1991 during the Persian Gulf War.

Teaching such courses, instructors say, requires a measure of self-restraint.

“Obviously, I have my own opinions on a lot of issues,” Marashlian said. “What I stress is, what you need to do is know both sides. What I emphasize is for them to get both sides from those sides, not from me.”

Marashlian said he uses video footage of current events to teach the bulk of his class. If he cannot find news or television footage to support each side, he uses newspaper and magazine articles.

An Arab Israeli, Nabulsi said his background gives him a unique perspective from which to lead discussions.

“I try to be as objective as possible in giving the political overview,” Nabulsi said. “I have lived among both [Israelis and Palestinians]. I have been able to connect to the source of suffering for both.”

Nabulsi uses writing exercises to challenge students’ core beliefs and preconceptions. Standing before the ethnically diverse class on a recent Monday night, he assigned a brief exercise: Write what you view as your most important “collective identity.”

Then he asked students to identify the group that most posed a threat to their collective identities. He told them they would learn to identify with the struggles on both sides of the conflict.

“As political scientists, it doesn’t matter what you teach,” said Norm Levy, political science department chairman at Pierce. “Conflict is at the heart of our discipline.”

To some students, however, the Pierce course is simply a chance to broaden their horizons. “Maybe it will give me a better perspective on how to focus on the whole world,” said Gina Lin, a student of Chinese heritage.

Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2009

Hollywood Counterterrorism: Violence,

Protest and the Middle East in U.S. Action

Feature Films

Jason Grant McKahan

https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu%3A180818/datastream/PDF/download

This study examines how popular U.S. representations of terrorism were

assimilated through the circuit of culture from state, military and corporate public

relations to Hollywood action motion pictures. Critical terrorism analysis suggests that

state and corporate institutions, the management of classified information (in the name of

a national security equated with national economic interests), and the political economy

of news media can structure conflict from Western institutional perspectives and reify the

terms and limits of terror discourse and representations of terrorism.9 The “imagination

of disaster” and “civilizational narrative” have been key frameworks for both narrative

and visualization during the production process of Hollywood action filmmaking. They

were informed by the ideological project of U.S. global security in the Middle East, with

U.S. corporate, state and military collaboration on such policies and films in the making.

Truth is the first casualty of war and since 9/11, the media have been highly,

sometimes entirely, dependent on ties with official government for sources and the

release of information. In the assimilation of mediated terrorism through the circuit of

culture from state and corporate public relations to the media and film, the traditional

model has been one of elitist news media sourcing, which tends to rely on, and therefore,

privileges institutional and state officials, corporate leaders and terrorism experts. In

instances of military actions against terrorism, the media hang on every turn of political

On Target or Off the Mark:

A Content Analysis of Air Force News Release Usage

In Prestige and Air Force-Related Newspapers

During Operation Northern Watch

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA379893.pdf

Abstract

This study evaluated the use of information contained in U.S. Air Force news

releases about Operation Northern Watch by three national newspapers — the Washington

Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Air Force Times from January 1, 1997 to December

31,1999. The purpose of the study was posed as a research question: To what degree did

the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Air Force Times use information

provided in U.S. Air Force news releases regarding Operation Northern Watch?

The research involved a content analysis in the context of a case study, examining

news articles from "Section A" of the two prestige newspapers and all news articles

filling the news hole in the Air Force-related newspaper. News releases and articles were

compared to determine whether certain releases could have generated particular articles.

If a match was found, the release and article were paired and coded.

All of the releases examined contained a "positive" tone. Nearly 60% of the

articles examined contained a "positive" tone, 21% were "balanced," and less than 15%

were "negative." All releases were "hard news," and all but one was "past-oriented."

Most of the articles were "hard news" and "past-oriented."

Most articles in the prestige newspapers used "minimal" information from the

news releases, while the Air Force Times used "minimal" and "significant" information

equally. Nearly half of the articles examined used sources outside the Air Force, but

inside the Department of Defense. Less than 60% of all articles examined were found to

contain "very high accuracy," meaning all of the five W's (who, what, where, when, and

why) provided in the release were present and correct in the arti

https://latino.ucla.edu/research/latinos-latimes-2022followup/

Policy Report

Diversity & Inclusion

Still Unseen and Unheard? A Follow-Up Evaluation of Latino Representation in the Los Angeles Times Opinion and Editorials Section

Published

June 15, 2023

From <https://latino.ucla.edu/research/latinos-latimes-2022followup/>

By:

• Denise Ramos-Vega,

• Mariah Bonilla,

• Hector De Leon,

• Alan B. Rivera,

• Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas

From <https://latino.ucla.edu/research/latinos-latimes-2022followup/>

ecutive Summary

In 2021, the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) published a report that sought to determine whether the Los Angeles Times — L.A.’s’ flagship newspaper situated in a county where Latinos make up almost 50% of the population — was giving adequate representation to its plurality community. The report found that from January 2020 to May 2021— a period that included a presidential election in which the Latino vote was critical and a burgeoning COVID-19 crisis that devastated the Latino community — just 4% of op-eds published by the L.A. Times featured Latino authors and only 1.4% were authored by Latinas. Additionally, 95% of L.A. Times op-eds published during the 17-month period made no explicit mention of Latinos or Latino communities.

To address the underrepresentation of Latinos in the L.A. Times identified by the 2021 report, LPPI reached out to the executive editor of the paper and the editor of the editorial page to initiate discussions about the report’s major findings. As a result of several discussions with the leadership of the L.A. Times, LPPI assembled a group of cross-sectoral, multi-generational Latina/o leaders to accelerate Latino representation across the newsroom, opinion, and editorial pages. Beginning in April 2022, this ad hoc group of Latino leaders met regularly with L.A. Times executives, reporters, and other staff to share emerging stories relevant to the Latino community and provide expert perspectives on a range of issues from Latino representation in film and television to the preferences of Latino voters. This collaboration has created new information-sharing channels between Latino leaders and communities and the L.A. Times while also providing a forum for accountability for representation and inclusion in the paper.

As an accountability tool, this report presents data to track progress in Latino representation across three key indicators: racial/ethnic diversity on the editorial board, Latino representation in op-ed authorship, and the centrality of Latinos in op-ed content.

Our main findings are:

1. Latino representation on the editorial board of the L.A. Times increased from 11.1% in 2021 to 37.5% in 2022. Thus, the representation gap between Latinos on the board and Latinos in the county’s population decreased from 37.5 percentage points to only 11.6 percentage points.

2. The L.A. Times had the largest growth in Latino representation on the editorial board of the five papers whose boards we analyzed.

3. Latino representation in authorship more than doubled from 4.3% of all op-ed pieces in 2021 to 10% in 2022. Although there has been an increase in Latino authorship, the number of Latino-authored op-eds would need to increase nearly fivefold to achieve proportional representation with the Latino population of L.A. County.

4. Despite improvements, Latina authors continue to be particularly underrepresented. Only 6% of op-eds in 2022 were written by at least one Latina, up from 1.4% in 2021.

5. Latino representation in op-ed content also increased. The proportion of op-eds that are focused centrally on Latinos increased from 1.8% to 7.2%, and the number of pieces moderately focused on Latinos increased from 3% to 4.6%.

Despite great improvements in representation, our findings suggest that Latinos, their narratives, their lived experiences, and their policy needs remain largely invisible in both authorship of op-eds and in the editorial content of the L.A. Times. Around 90% of all op-eds in 2022 had no Latina/o/x authors in 2022 and over 88% of all op-eds did not include any content that unambiguously discussed Latino communities. The openness of L.A. Times leadership to collaborate with Latina/o/x leaders such as LPPI’s ad hoc group and the hiring of more Latinx writers on the editorial board has proven to be an effective way to increase Latino representation in its influential Opinion section. These strategies need to be strengthened and expanded to make further improvements since our study shows that there is still an urgent need for the Los Angeles Times to make its editorial pages more inclusive and representative of the community it covers.

Introduction

In 2021, the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) published a report that sought to determine the extent to which the Los Angeles Times (L.A. Times)— Southern California’s flagship newspaper—represented Latino communities and published Latino author’s opinions in the paper’s opinion and editorials section. This report found that between January 2020 and May 2021, only 4.3% of op-eds published were authored by at least one Latino/a/x and only 1.4% were authored by at least one Latina. Additionally, the 2021 report found that 95% of L.A. Times op-eds published during the 17-month study period made no explicit mention of Latinos or Latino communities and that only 1.8% of op-eds were centrally focused on Latinos.

These findings were notable for several reasons. First, Latinos represented the largest racial or ethnic group of the city and county of Los Angeles.1 Additionally, the study’s 17-month period included two important elections for Latino voters: the 2020 presidential and the 2021 gubernatorial recall. Finally, the study period included the first half of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Latinos were twice as likely as white residents to die from COVID-19.2

The Importance of Latino Representation in News and Newsrooms

News organizations play an important role in shaping public opinion and informing public policy.3 Consequently, underrepresentation of Latinos and Latino issues in news (including news about racial equity) may result in Latino voices going unheard in relation to current events and policy decisions. At present, Latinos are underrepresented in both news content and in newsrooms.

The L.A. Times bills itself as the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in the U.S., with a combined print and online local weekly audience of 4.4 million.4 The influence of a particular newspaper is predicated in part on increasing circulation and number of readers, which in turn leads to increases in subscription and advertising revenues.5 Increases in a newspaper’s influence and revenues may be enhanced by diversifying its news content.6 Between 2000 and 2020, the Latino population grew by 13% in Los Angeles County, 41% in California, and 77% in the U.S. In all of these jurisdictions, the rate of growth of the Latino population exceeded that of the general population. The implications of this population growth are even more pronounced when factoring in Latinos’ youthfulness. Nationally, the median age of Latinos is 29 while the median age of non-Hispanic whites is 43. According to a 2016 survey of Latino adults, three-quarters of Latinos receive their news from internet sources, up from 37% in 2006.7 As news consumption habits of Latinos shift, the sustainability of news organizations will depend at least in part on their ability to adapt to these shifts through diversified content and product development.

Evidence suggests that Latino issues receive limited or stereotyped coverage in news media. For example, prior studies examining the representation of Latinos in news media found that the media portrayal of Latinos often focused on specific issues like immigration and stereotypical narratives around crime and poverty.8 A recent study by the Berkeley Media Studies Group and UnidosUS found that only 5.6% of all news stories about racial equity referenced Latinos and noted that The Washington Post had the highest proportion of racial equity coverage that referenced Latinos (17.8%), followed by the L.A. Times (10%).9

Diversifying newsrooms and news coverage is an important step in ensuring the visibility of Latinos and Latino issues in public policy, but it is also increasingly important for the sustainability of news organizations. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that only 11% of all media workers and 8% in the subsector for newspapers, periodicals, books, and directory publishers are Latino.10 This underrepresentation relative to the population of the U.S. has important implications. Implicit biases coupled with news media’s structure can influence journalistic practices, including the representation of marginalized populations.11 For example, during the Trump era, the ethnicity of journalists was found to likely influence coverage of Black people and Latino immigrants; additionally, specialized reporting may lead to better representation in coverage of race.12 The persistent gap between the racial/ethnic composition of news organizations and the population at large limits the ability to cover crucial events in “an informed and even-handed way.”13

Our 2021 report found that between January 2020 and May 2021, Latinos accounted for only 11% of L.A. Times Editorial Board members.14 The 2021 report also found that of the five newspapers analyzed, the L.A. Times had the largest gap in Latino representation on its editorial board relative to its county’s population.15 We recommended that the L.A. Times focus on hiring additional Latino columnists and editorial board members in order to increase Latino representation.16

Engaging with the L.A. Times to Advance Latino Representation

To address the underrepresentation of Latinos in the L.A. Times identified by the 2021 report, LPPI reached out to the executive editor of the paper and the editor of the editorial page to initiate discussions about the report’s major findings. As a result of several discussions with the leadership of the L.A. Times, LPPI assembled a group of cross-sectoral, multi-generational Latina/o leaders to accelerate Latino representation across the newsroom, opinion, and editorial pages. Beginning in April 2022, this ad hoc group of Latino leaders met regularly with L.A. Times executives, reporters, and other staff to share emerging stories relevant to the Latino community and provide expert perspectives on a range of issues from Latino representation in film and television to the preferences of Latino voters. This collaboration has created new information-sharing channels between Latino leaders and communities and the L.A. Times while also providing a forum for accountability on representation and inclusion at the paper.

Purpose of this Follow-up Study

To assess the direction and magnitude of changes in Latino representation after the publication of the 2021 report, LPPI initiated a follow-up analysis of the L.A. Times’ opinion and editorial section in 2022. This report presents data to track progress in Latino representation across three key indicators: racial/ethnic diversity on the editorial board, Latino representation in op-ed authorship, and the centrality of Latinos in op-ed content.

From <https://latino.ucla.edu/research/latinos-latimes-2022followup/>

equal time," Westin added. "But in the continuing coverage by the (ABC) news division, I would say the Israelis get  the preponderance of coverage."

" Balance isn't always just a matter of what yc•u do in one stor y," said Stanhope Gould, who produced the Palestine profile. "I think that journalists,  like every­ body else , sometimes take the easy way out. It's easy to overlook this situation (Israeli oppression) and think of the West Bank in absolute terms.

" But until people understand it, emotionally, I mean, I

think it' going to be very difficult to g t things moving. The building (of Israeli settlements) that's going on . . . it's staggering."

One Israeli official suggested anothe r motive behind the "20/20" piece. He alluded to a "20/ 20" piece last spring on the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in which the PLO was profiled in starkly negative tones.

"ABC was under tremendous pressure from Arab countries for that ," said the Israeli official. "The Arab countries, the PLO, considered that very damaging."

Said Westin, "That's a logical thing for the Israelis to suspect. That (the PLO piece) was a strong piece, there was a need for the other side."

Interest ing ly, that segment won for "20/20" the Torch of Liberty award given by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for "showing the PLO as a danger to Is rae lis and democracy throughout the world."

Told of the thrust of tonight's segment, ADL spokes­ man Harve y Schechter said, half-j okingl y, "We might lake it ( the Torch of Liberty ) back."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright Cl'Nn er Further reproductionprohibited without permission.

'20/20' VISION OF MIDEAST: A BALANCED PORTRAYAL? '20/20' VISION

Boyer, Peter J

Los Angeles Times Feb 4, 1982; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times pg. H1

In the 15 years since American television cast a fixed stare on the Middle East, the Palestinian has seldom come into focus except as a shadowy figure with a bomb in his hand.

Last  fall. a crew  from ABC's·20/20" news magazine was sent to the Middle East in search of a new perspective on the story of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in search of some balance.

What they returned with was a grim portrayal  or  relentless Israeli occupation, a picture of brutality and displacement forced on Palestinians  by the Israelis.

Some will argue with "20/20's" notion of balance.

The report, airing tonight, comes wholly from the Palestinian point of view as suggested by its title, "Under the Israeli Thumb.” 

• A Palestinian farmer  is shown cutting his drought-parched grove for firewood, while a nearby Israeli settlement has enough water to irrigate its fields and  fill  the community swimming pool.

• Other Palestinian farmers are shown helplessly clutching paper titles to lands  being  bulldozed  for new Israeli settlements. 

• "That land is mine," said one. “Every time I see the bulldozer working, it's as if it's carving my body…"

The West Bank is given its usual depiction as a place of spontaneous violence, only in this view it's the Palestinian who is the victim. 

• Using Norwegian and Canadian news film, the " 20/20" segment shows Palestinian schoolgirls being  gunned down by members of the Israeli Occupying forces.

• There are Palestinian  mayors whose legs have been blown off, allegedly by Israeli religious activists. 

• A Palestinian youth is shown in a hospital bed with  hemorrhaging kidneys after a working over by Israeli troops. 

• He was suspected of throwing a rock at an Israeli jeep. And the beating wasn't the only punishment: The boy's father was jailed for six months; his sister was fired from her teaching job and the entire family was dispossessed and moved into a scorpion-infested refugee camp.

• Correspondent Tom Jarriel spoke to a Palestinian physicist who was arrested in a roundup of West Bank political activists and jailed for 45 months without being charged. 

"Forty-five months because they were thinking that I am thinking that I will do something against them."

It is certainly not the usual perspective of the West Bank story. But balanced?

In the 16-minute piece, only one Israeli voice is heard-that of a settler, blithely claiming title to disputed land. No view from the Israeli occupation government is presented.

 So, perhaps it was not unexpected when "20/20" Executive Producer Av Westin heard from what he calls "a delegation of Israeli officials" to protest the approach of the "20/20' ' piece.

"They objected to the methods we used, “said Westin. "There's a certain concern in official Israeli quarters in the U.S ...' Westin said he couldn't remember exactly who was in the complaining delegation.

ISRAELI PRESS ATTACHE

Samuel Moyal remembers. Moyal, the Israeli press attaché in New York, said he visited Westin several  weeks ago "to tell him that we expect a network such as ABC to give a balanced story. He assured us that he would.

 "(But) the crew went to the West Bank and didn't even bother to get the views of the military government."

Westin said that "20/ 20" tried to include Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon in the piece. but Sharon didn't want to be intercut with the Palestinians. ABC skipped the interview.

Besides, said Westin, "it is a piece done from the point or view of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.” 

"I would not say that this piece ever set out to be one of those balanced pieces in which both sides get equal time," Westin added. "But in the continuing coverage by the (ABC) news division, I would say the Israelis get the preponderance of coverage."

"Balance isn't always just a matter of what you do in one story," said Stanhope Gould, who produced the Palestine profile. "I think that journalists,  like everybody else, sometimes take the easy way out. It's easy to overlook this situation (Israeli oppression) and think of the West Bank in absolute terms.

"But until people understand it, emotionally, I mean, I think it's going to be very difficult to get things moving. The building (of Israeli settlements) that's going on…it's staggering."

One Israeli official suggested another motive behind the "20/20" piece. He alluded to a "20/ 20" piece last spring on the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in which the PLO was profiled in starkly negative tones.

"ABC was under tremendous pressure from Arab countries for that ," said the Israeli official. "The Arab countries, the PLO, considered that very damaging."

Said Westin, "That's a logical thing for the Israelis to suspect. That (the PLO piece) was a strong piece, there was a need for the other side."

Interestingly, that segment won for "20/20" the Torch of Liberty award given by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith for "showing the PLO as a danger to Israelis and democracy throughout the world."

Told of the thrust of tonight's segment, ADL spokesman Harvey Schechter said, half-jokingly, "We might take it ( the Torch of Liberty ) back."

Works Cited

Boyer, Peter J. "'20/20' VISION OF MIDEAST: A BALANCED PORTRAYAL?: '20/20' VISION." Los Angeles Times (1923-1995), Feb 04, 1982, pp. 2-h1. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.lapl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/20-vision-mideast-balanced-portrayal/docview/153042439/se-2.  

THE TV COLUMN

By John Carmody

May 9, 1993 at 8:00 p.m. ED

From <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/05/10/the-tv-column/cc4a4f25-e1ea-4135-9482-91634f636f19/>

Former "Entertainment Tonight" executive producer (and WRC news executive) David Nuell hasn't let any grass grow under his feet since leaving the syndicated show in December following a six-year run ...

After mulling offers from Paramount, King World and Fox, he's joined Time Telepictures, which is a joint venture of the Time Magazine Group and the Warner Television Group, both members of the all-powerful Time Warner family ...

He'll run the Burbank end of the operation, while legendary producer Av Westin continues to work out of New York. They're charged with developing TV programming based on the information resources of the merged companies ...

From <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/05/10/the-tv-column/cc4a4f25-e1ea-4135-9482-91634f636f19/>

THE BIAS OF NETWORK NEWS

Source Publication: Imprimis Vol#3, No. 1, Jan-1974, Hillsdale College, Michigan 

By Edward Epstein (NYT Obituary link) - 

Author and Stubborn Skeptic, Dies at 88 - Jan 11, 2024**

Dr. Epstein, who received his Ph. D. in government from Harvard is an author and contributor to many magazines, including The New Yorker. He participated in the second seminar of the Center for Constructive  Alternatives  during the 1973-74 academic year. The American Communications Media : A Study in Credibility was the seminar topic . Dr. Epstein delivered this position paper before a group of Hillsdale College students and faculty.

The  discussion   of   bias  in   television  news almost inevitably degenerates into assertions about the personal bias or the personal fairness of news-[wo]men. The assumption is always  that  bias  is a  personal  attribute of newsmen, and the skewering of news  in  one direction  or  another  can  be  analyzed  by  adding  up the personal biases of the newsmen as if  one  were adding  up  the  number   of  black  and  white  marbles  in a collection.. 

For example, recently I attended a congressional conference on the media which was intended to give legislators a further insight into the problems that concerned journalists. 

High on the agenda was the problem of bias in television news. 

But when this   subject   was  finally   broached, Theodore Kopp, a CBS News vice president , defined the issue  as  follows:

"I suggest that bias lies in the eye of the beholder rather than the newsman ." 

His  proof  was that "Walter Cronkite,  and  his  opposite  numbers, didn't get where they are by being biased."

This effectively ended the discussion, since none of the participants were interested  in  impeaching  the  integrity  of Cronkite.

PERSONAL BIAS  v. ORGANIZATIONAL BIAS [THE REAL CONCERN]

Reducing the issue of bias to a simple question about the fairness of individual newsmen not only leads to unproductive  and  dead-end discussions, but it also tends  to obscure  a much  more serious form  of bias - the bias  of  the  news organization  itself. 

Just as a roulette wheel which is  mounted  on  a  tilted table would tend to favor some numbers over others, no matter how impartial the  croupier might  be, a television network which is "tilted" in any consistent direction because of the way it is organized will tend  to favor certain  types of stories over others - no  matter  how  fair  the   newscaster  might  be.  

If one is interested in the  leanings  of  the  table,  rather than those of newsmen, it is unnecessary  to  get into  the bottomless morass of judgments  about personal bias.  Through  examining  what  might   be  called  "organization bias,"  or  other  contours  and  tilts  that-underlie network news, it is possible to explain in large measure why television news seems to flow in certain directions.

 The New  York Fulcrum

One of the main sub-surface features  of  the national news which  comes  from  the  network  is that  it  is  filtered  through  and  controlled  by  a group of producers and editors located in New York City. 

• This is especially true of the three evening newscasts - the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, and the ABC Reasoner-Smith Report - which have a combined audience each night of more than fifty million viewers. 

• The events to be covered, the story line which will be followed, the correspondent, and the editing of the story are all tightly supervised from New York.

Avram Westin,  the  executive  producer  of ABC News, candidly described the degree of control in a memorandum, stating:

 "The  senior  producers  decide if the story has been  adequately  covered  and  they also estimate how long the  report  should  run.  

In most cases, correspondents deliberately overwrite their scripts. the producer at home the option of editing it down, selecting which portions of interviews are to be  used  and which  elements  in the narration are to be kept and which are to be discarded . . . 

In some cases, the senior producer 'salvages' a report by assigning the correspondent to redo his narration or by sending a  cameraman  to refilm a sequence."

From their common vantage point in  New York, the producers and editors at each network  receive very similar sorts of information.  

GOD-DAMN NEW YORK TIMES—DICTATES THE AGENDA

Most  notably , all the   network   decision-makers  I  interviewed,  or observed at work, read and relied on  a  single  newspaper each  morning  -  the  New  York  Times.  Av Westin explained "Like it or not, the  Times  is  our Bible: it  tells  us  what  is  likely  to  be  considered  to be important by others." Producers, editors, and correspondents at all the  networks  are  powerfully aware of the fact that network executives read  the  Times  and  use  it  as  a  "scorecard,"  as  the  president of  NBC  News  termed  the  practice,  in  evaluating their performance. Indeed, as Harry Reasoner wryly pointed   out,  the  most  effective  way  of  legitimizing a  story  for  television  is  to  first   leak   it   to   the Times  -  once  stories  are  published  in   the  Times, they are considered fair game.

Even though producers and  news  editors, it was generally  sophisticated;ai P , men…..and Harry Reasoner were brought in as co-anchormen and virtually all  the  correspondents  were re-as ned. He found, however, that although the "tone" of the program  changed  somewhat,  the  "outlook,"   the way that issues were presented, remained essentially the same. He  also attempted  to establish  a measure of balance by ordering as general policy thaT< if one side of a controversial issue is presented on the program, the "other side must be given equal time within seven working days." Again,  this failed  to  provide the desired change in perspective . Instead, he found, "The liberal side was always given first stab and the most dramatic piece of film," while the more conservative side "was made to react and answer." And affiliated   stations  continued   to   protest   what they who read the Times with varying degrees of skepticism,   almost   all   of   them   use   it   to   orient themselves to the "trends" and issues in the news. In the sense that it allows them to prejudge the relative importance of different happenings, it provides an extremely   important perspective  in network news.

The efforts of ABC to alter this perspective on the news illustrates the deep-rooted nature of the problem. 

When Av Westin took charge of the ABC Evening News in 1969, he was given a mandate by management to create a news product that was "radically different" in outlook and "more evenly balanced"  politically than the newscasts of the other networks. (This strategy was born more of desperation  than politics : A large number  of key affiliates persistently  refused to carry the network's news program unless it provided them with a real alternative to the competing programs on NBC and CBS).

Westin first attempted to achieve this  "alternative"  by  changing  the  line-up of correspondents and commentators - Harry K. Smith considered the "left jab,"  as  one  affiliate  president put it, of network news. 

Westin recognized that  as long as the producers and newsmen in New York, including himself, were "briefed by the same newspapers," they would tend, willy-nilly, to see issues from   a  similar   point   of  view.  Specifically,   the " Easte rn-liberal syndrome," as he identified the point of view, placed a high value on sweeping reforms and a correspondingly low value on maintaining the status quo. 

Presumably, as long as this "syndrome" persisted, the criticism of social institutions would be given precedence over their defense when issues are presented.

To   undercut   this   impact,   Westin decided   that he had to consciously: 

 "reverse  the  perspective  of news." He recently explained  in  a  television  interview. " ... Instead  of  the  accepted  'Eastern  liberal way,' I prefer to have our pieces come at it  the other way, and make the Eastern liberal' position  answer, rather  than give them  first  stab."

Westin gave me a graphic example of this reversing of perspectives: "On the other networks, there is a cliched formula for doing abortion stories. . . You begin by showing unwanted babies with the narration suggesting that 'these children exist in their present plight because we have  antiquated  abortion  laws.' An advocate of abortion reform then explains how liberalized laws would alleviate the problem. Finally, an old fogey is shown reacting to this plea and dogmatically insisting 'Abortion is wrong.' " "To reverse the perspective,'' Westin continued , "I ordered my correspondent to begin with a shot of a destroyed fetus, or its dramatic equivalent, and state  in his narration 'This death resulted from an abortion ;' next a defender of the  present  laws  was to  present the case that 'respect for life'  was  necessary;  and then a liberal critic  would  be  allowed  to  react  to this position." Quite obviously , two very different stories can emanate from  the same event, depending on  the perspective  which  is used.

The Truncated  Geography  of Television News

Not only are the vast preponderance  of  stories about America centrally selected and edited in New York, but most of the news footage used to illustrate them are  drawn  from  four  metropolitan  centers ­ New  York,  Washington    D.C.,   Chicago, and  Los Angeles. More than  eighty  percent  of the network's domestic camera-crews and correspondents are stationed in these four cities. Moreover, permanent hook-ups are maintained in these cities so that film stories can be electronically "fed" to the broadcast center in  New  York;  and,  with  the  exception  of Los Angeles, no charge is made against the program's budget  for  transmitting   stories  from  these  cities. In the case of most other cities, special microwave channels have to be leased from A.T. & T. to transmit stories, and this usually  involves  a  heavy  expense for the program's budget. In other words, network news is set up in such a way that stories from a few cities are much more convenient and less expensive than  stories  from  the  rest  of America.

To be sure,  this  does  not  mean  that  network news crews do not venture out into the hinterland when the occasion demands it: in the case of a major news happening, such as the recent uprising at Wounded Knee, South Dakota , crews and correspondents will be dispatched despite the expense. But on more routine coverage- and especially on more general  stories  about  trends  rather  than  events- the path of least resistance is followed  and assignments are given to the crews which are most conveniently located from the networks' point of view.

The result is that "national" stories about urban violence, civil rights, anti-war protests, ecology, meat boycotts, and inflation  tend to  be depicted in terms of the special problems of four unique cities. Paradoxically, the concentration of media coverage in these four cities has tended to make them  logical stages for  demonstrations and  confrontations seeking a certain form of national attention, and thus has further reduced the value of the dramatic footage obtained from  these  cities- at  least  for  the  purpose of being representative of national trends and moods .

The National Perspective

Network news programs are sold to affiliated stations on  the understanding that they will provide   a truly national news service, and thus help the affiliates fulfill the "public service" requirements of their broadcasting license. To meet this requisite, network producers must continually transform the local news happenings in a few cities - and all news events occur in some locality- into national stories. Finding or creating  such  "national"  news  is  the daily problem of network  news . This transformation is routinely accomplished at all three networks by concentrating on themes or general hypotheses about America, rather than actual events. After a national theme is chosen, appropriate events that illustrate  it are sought after.

For example,  to  illustrate  the  theme  of  urban unrest in America, an NBC producer commissioned illustrative stories in the five cities  in  which  NBC owns its stations: 

• in New York City, a crew  was ordered  to  film  a  story  about  "slums  and  welfare;"

• in Washington, D.C., a crew was given the assignment of depicting "ghetto crime;"

• in Chicago,  cameramen were  dispatched  to  film  examples  of  "urban blight;"

• In Los Angeles, a correspondent was asked to interview blacks about "job opportunities" for minorities; and

• In Cleveland, a report was requested about the progress of "black politics." T

These  five  segments were then spliced together into a "national"  story about the worsening urban crisis. 

It should be noted that none of the individual segments were precipitated by an actual event, but by the producer's search for example to illustrate a theme.

In this modern day form of alchemy, where local events (and even non-events) are transmuted into national stories, the news undergoes a significant change. 

The complexities which tie an event to  a single locality are stripped away, and the possible ramifications of the event are raised to a different order  of  magnitude so that it can  plausibly  illustrate a national theme. For example,  the  closing  of  a single gas station in the suburbs must be abstracted from the surrounding circumstances of the  area so that it can be used to dramatically illustrate " the energy  crisis" or a drug-arrest in a single high school must  be simplified so that it can be used to illustrate  a national  "drug  epidemic."  The logic  of  producing a steady diet of national stories thus also tends to escalate the importance of incidents to crisis-proportions.

The Requisite of Conflict

Network news  has  the  basic  problem  of  holding the attention of a  nationwide  audience  for  half  an hour. Whereas local news programs report on happenings  of   immediate   interest   to  local  audiences,  even if they are merely ball scores,  weather  forecasts ,  or fires in the locality, network news reports on more diffuse matters which cannot be  expected  to  be  of equal  interest  to  audiences  scattered  across  the entire country. But while the information  may  be of  interest to only a limited portion of the audience, it is assumed that accompanying visual action of an exciting  nature will have nearly  universal  appeal.  This,  at  least,  is the assumption of network news executives, producers , and news editors. In  virtually  all  network  news stories, there is a constant demand  for  such  visual action. Fred Freed, a NB C award-winning producer , describes the  three-fold  distillation  of  action  in network  news: "The  cameraman  seeks  out   the moment  s  of  high  action  at  the  actual   event,  the film editor then further concentrates the action by cutting  out  the  dead  periods  in  the  film   of   the event s, and  finally  the  producer  selects  the  portion of the story which contains the most gripping visual action."

 "Action," though a prime ingredient, cannot be sought at  the expense  of  confusing  home  viewers; it must therefore be contained in a form which is instantly comprehensible to most people, especially since there is  usually  only  a few  minutes available in any story for explanation. Producers have commonly found that the one situation which provides the highest potential for visual action  and  the least risk of audience confusion is the violent confrontation between two clearly defined sides.

For example, 

• confrontations between blacks and whites, 

• uniformed police and bearded demonstrators, or 

• any other  easily  identifiable  groups  present  a drama which is presumably understood by the entire audience ( the specific issues causing the  clash  can thus be neglected  or  passed  over  lightly  without confusing the home viewers). 

• Moreover, confrontations which seek maximum  publicity  for  their  cause are usually scheduled days or weeks in advance of the actual   event,  

• and   they  fit  easily  into  the scheduling requirements of  networks,  which  require  some  time to dispatch camera-crews and arrange coverage.

Convergent Biases

The organizational tilts  in  network  news can  all be seen dove-tailing and converging in a  single direction : toward s emphasizing challenges to  the myths and symbols of national authority. The New York view , through  which  all  network  news  is percolated , tend s to stress the need for reform and change; the geographic contours of  network  news tend to focus attention on a few metropolitan areas which have been the drumhead for causes and movements challenging the status quo; the need to create national news tends to amplify local problems into apparent national crises; and the action requisite tends to direct the camera towards violent confrontations.

Not all stories, or all newsmen, follow these underlying directions, but the  attraction  is sufficient so as to produce a unique version  of  national news  on television.t should  be stressed that this version of  the news is not the product of a group of willful, biased, or political men. To the contrary, in the studies of the network news operations I have made in 1968-1970 and in 1973 , I observed correspondents, producers, news editors, and executives constantly struggling to escape the gravity of the  organizational  tilts  but, with a few striking exceptions, being  unable  to prevent stories from flowing in the se consistent directions. During this five year period, producers, editors, and anchormen came and went at the three networks (with the exception  of  Cronkite),  and yet the version of news they presented remained fairly constant. To understand the persistence of this version, I submit, it is more  important  to  understand the structure- and leaning s- of the  networks than   the individual   preferences   of   the newsmen.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Imprimis-The-Bias-of-Network-News-J

The third CCA seminar in Hillsdale College's 1973-74 academic year will examine two of the most widely divergent systems of government  devised  by men: that of our own Republic, and Communism . Lectures and discussion  will focus  on the question  "Communism: Has the Protracted Conflict Ended ?"

Students and faculty of  the college will part1c1pate  in the February 3-8 session with a distinguished group of guests, in cluding :

Gerhart Niemeyer professor of government Univer sit y of Notr e Dame

Peter James author  and engineer

Clarence Manion former  dean of Notre Dame Law School

Bruce Herschensonn Deputy Special Assistant to the President

Milorad Drochkovitch senior fellow Hoover Institution

Stefan Possony senior fellow Hoover  Institution

Carlos Lopez professor Menlo Park College

Thomas Molnar visiting professor Hillsdale College

Anthony Harrigan

columnist and author

Rev. Raymond De Jaegher

author  and lecturer

The opinions expressed in  IMPRIMIS mav be, but  are not  necessarily, the views of  the Center  for  Constructive Alternatives or  Hillsdale College.

Copyright  ©  1973 by  Hillsdale   College. Permission  to reprint  in whole or in part is hereby  granted , provided  customary  credit is given 

Source: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Imprimis-The-Bias-of-Network-News-Jan-1974.pdf

Edward Epstein (NYT Obituary link) - Author and Stubborn Skeptic, Dies at 88 - Jan 11, 2024**

Mr. Epstein earned a doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies, where his coursework was overseen by Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future U.S. senator from New York.

For three years Mr. Epstein taught political science at Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles, and M.I.T., and wrote part time for The New Yorker. But he decided to return to the city of his birth to become a full-time author rather than pursue an academic career any further.

“I wanted to be in New York, ever since I met Clay Felker,” the editor of New York Magazine, he said in an interview last year with the online magazine Air Mail. “He knew the whole world.”

Mr. Epstein lived alone in a lavish rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. His niece and nephews are his closest survivors.

Av Westin, Newsman Behind ABC’s ‘20/20,’ Dies at 92

After nearly 20 years at CBS News, he went to a rival network and elped turn its answer to “60 Minutes” into a frequent Emmy Award winner.

By Richard Sandomir

March 18, 2022

Av Westin, an influential television producer who rose from copy boy at CBS News for Edward R. Murrow in the 1940s to help make ABC’s “20/20” newsmagazine a perennial winner of Emmy Awards, died on March 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.

His wife, Ellen Rossen, said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Mr. Westin had spent a year as the executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight” when he took over at “20/20” in 1979. Over the next seven years, the program won more than 30 news and documentary Emmy Awards, including 11 in 1981.

Looking to differentiate “20/20” from the entertainment shows it competed with in prime-time, as well as from CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Westin mixed ambitious investigative reports with celebrity profiles, lifestyle features and “process pieces” about artistic endeavors like the making of a new album of standards by Linda Ronstadt.

A documentarian at heart, Mr. Westin also ordered a series of features called “Moment of Crisis,” which looked back at news events like the disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the efforts to save President Ronald Reagan’s life after he was wounded in an assassination attempt.

“20/20,” which was hosted by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs in the 1980s, had an A-list group of correspondents that included Sylvia Chase, Lynn Sherr, Geraldo Rivera, Tom Jarriel, Bob Brown and Sander Vanocur.

Mr. Brown recalled that Mr. Westin gave correspondents and producers considerable leeway to cover a story as they chose.

“But when the piece was screened, Av took over and was at his best,” Mr. Brown said in a phone interview. “He could break apart a story and make you see everything you’d done wrong and let you know what you had to do to fix it. He had a genius for going straight to a problem.”

Mr. Westin’s time at “20/20” came to an end in February 1987, when he circulated an 18-page memo within ABC News and to its top executives at its parent company, Capital Cities/ABC, criticizing news-gathering procedures and calling the division inefficient and in need of a new focus.

He said that he had been quietly asked by a Capital Cities executive to critique ABC News, whose president was Roone Arledge.

“Cap Cities had essentially decided that Roone was not their guy anymore,” Mr. Westin said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2011. The executive told him that “Roone’s tenure was going to end, and I was likely to be the preferred candidate of management.”

“What I wrote was accurate,” Mr. Westin added, “but obviously it was inflammatory.”

The memo led Mr. Arledge to suspend him and take him off “20/20.” But the suspension did not last long, and Mr. Westin went on to work on projects like “The Blessings of Liberty,” about the U.S. Constitution at its centennial, until he left the network in 1989.

It was not the first time the two men clashed. In 1985, Mr. Arledge killed a “20/20” segment about the death of Marilyn Monroe and her ties to the Kennedys, calling it “gossip-column stuff.” Mr. Westin objected, and Mr. Rivera angrily told the gossip columnist Liz Smith that he and others at “20/20” were appalled that Mr. Arledge “would overturn a respected, honorable, great newsman like Av.”

Avram Robert Westin was born on July 29, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, Elliot, was a vice president of a commercial baking company. His mother, Harriet (Radin) Westin, was a homemaker. Av Westin graduated from New York University in 1949. He had begun his studies as a pre-med student, but an experience during a summer job as a copy boy at CBS in 1947 altered his direction, to English and history.

“A bulletin moved that a ship was sinking off Newfoundland,” he told the Television Academy, and he promptly carried the teletype copy to an editor. “I was the only person at CBS News headquarters who knew that information,” he said. “I was the ultimate insider. That’s the epiphany.”

Mr. Westin was a writer, director, reporter and producer for 18 years at CBS, during which he earned a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies at Columbia University in 1958. He won an Emmy in 1960 as a writer for the documentary “The Population Explosion,” and in 1963 created and produced “CBS Morning News” with Mike Wallace.

He left CBS in 1967, spent two years as executive director of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Laboratory and joined ABC News in 1969 as the executive producer of its evening newscast, then anchored by Frank Reynolds. It was an era when “ABC Evening News” trailed CBS and NBC’s nightly news operations in prestige, ratings and financial resources.

“My target is ‘H and B,’” Mr. Westin told The Indianapolis News in 1969, referring to NBC’s co-anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “I think people are getting tired of them, and if they’re shopping around, I want them to look at us before they automatically turn to Walter” Cronkite.

The broadcast journalist Ted Koppel, who was a correspondent on the evening news program, said of Mr. Westin in a phone interview, “He probably elevated the ‘ABC Evening News’ as much as anyone until Roone Arledge,” adding, “Av was a very ambitious man, who thought he should have been ABC News president.”

While at ABC News, Mr. Westin ran its “Close-Up” documentary unit, for which he won a Peabody Award in 1973. He won another Peabody the next year, for producing and directing the documentary “Sadat: Action Biography,” about the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat.

He left ABC News in 1976 in a dispute with Bill Sheehan, the president of the division, but returned two years later at Mr. Arledge’s request “to get rid of” the incompatible, feuding “Evening News” anchor team of Ms. Walters and Harry Reasoner.

“The day I arrived back at ABC, one of the producers who was in the Reasoner camp came up to me and said, ‘You know, she owes us 5 minutes and 25 seconds,’” Mr. Westin told the Television Academy, referring to how much more Ms. Walters had been on the air than Mr. Reasoner over the past year.

After returning as the executive producer of “Evening News,” Mr. Westin collaborated with Mr. Arledge on an overhaul in 1978 that transformed the show into the faster-paced, graphics-oriented “World News Tonight,” with three anchors: Mr. Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson in Chicago and Peter Jennings in London.

A year later, Mr. Arledge moved Mr. Westin to “20/20.”

After leaving ABC News, Mr. Westin was an executive at King World Productions, Time Warner and the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s foundation.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, Mark. His previous marriages to Sandra Glick and Kathleen Lingo ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.

To Mr. Westin, evening news programs, which cannot provide much depth in 22 minutes of airtime, have a clear mandate.

“I believe the audience at dinner time wants to know the answers to three very important questions,” he said, explaining a rule he had at ABC News. “Is the world safe? Is my hometown and my home safe? If my wife and children are safe, what has happened in the past 24 hours to make them better off or to amuse them?”

new

From <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/business/media/av-westin-dead.html>

Abc Denies Plans to Produce Film to Give ‘israeli Viewpoint’

February 9, 1982 JTA

SEE ORIGINAL DAILY BULLETIN FROM THIS DATE

ABC News denied today that it has plans to produce a new television film on the West Bank giving the “Israeli viewpoint.” The denial was issued following reports from Israel that an ABC production crew was due there shortly.

A segment on the West Bank titled “Under the Israeli Thumb,” which appeared on the ABC-TV “20-20” program last Thursday night, was strongly criticized for pro-Arab bias by Israeli officials and friends here and abroad. It reportedly drew expressions of intense displeasure from Premier Menachem Begin in Jerusalem and the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Shmuel Moyal, press attache at the Israel Consulate in New York, called the segment “entirely unbalanced” and a “gross distortion of history.”

According to the reports from Israel today, the network proposed to produce a new film on the subject and the Prime Minister’s Office offered it “every facility and aid.” ABC News, in issuing its denial, noted that during the preparation of the segment for last week’s “20-20” program, repeated requests were made for a responsible Israeli official to address the issues raised in the report.

ABC News said it stands by this broadcast and invites the questions and comments of the Israeli government or any other concerned party.

Meanwhile, Ivan Novick, president of the Zionist Organization of America, urged the American public today to join in protesting the “20-20” segment on the West Bank broadcast February 4. In a letter to Roore Arledge, president of ABC News, Novick urged that it immediately schedule another segment showing “the positive side of the issue and the point of view of the government of Israel.”

Last Thursday’s program was also sharply attacked by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. George Klein and Jack Friedgut, chairmen of the JCRC’s Commission on International Concern, termed the documentary biased and misleading. In a letter to Arledge, they said the program was “a prepackaged presentation that amounted to little more than a restatement of Arab propaganda and accusations.”

From <https://www.jta.org/archive/abc-denies-plans-to-produce-film-to-give-israeli-viewpoint>

Av Westin to Leave ABC

May 1, 1989

Av Westin, the former executive producer of the prime-time ABC News program ''20/20,'' has announced plans to leave the network to form his own production company, probably with the backing of either the Walt Disney Company or Warner Communications. Mr. Westin has been producer of the ABC ''Burning Questions'' documentaries since 1987, when he was removed from ''20/20'' after a dispute with Roone Arledge, the president of the news division.

Mr. Westin's contract with ABC News has expired, and he said Friday that while he hoped to produce work independently for the network, he expected to be out of his office at ABC by the end of June.

''I want to set up a company that will enable me to combine 35 years in information programming and the trend toward reality programming,'' Mr. Westin said. ''They will be programs that involve docudrama, that start from an information base, but use every device in television.''

''ABC wants me to continue supervising some projects and create others,'' he said. ''I will leave with very good feelings.''

new

us

Nixon Tried to Spoil Johnson’s Vietnam Peace Talks in ’68, Notes Show

For more stories, return to home.

A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 1989, Section C, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: Av Westin to Leave ABC. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

From <https://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/01/arts/av-westin-to-leave-abc.html>

latimes.com

Critical of Division's Affluence : ABC News Suspends Producer Over Article - Los Angeles Times

JAY SHARBUTT

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-02-27-fi-3823-story.html

ABC News President Roone Arledge, angered by an unpublished article written by “20/20” executive producer Av Westin that criticized ABC News operations, Thursday relieved him of all duties “indefinitely.”

The unusual action was announced shortly after an hourlong meeting between Arledge and the veteran news executive, who in addition to the 20/20 series also oversees ABC’s “Our World” series and is the news division’s vice president for program development.

2:30 PM

REACTIONS TO WESTIN’S SUSPENSION

By JAY SHARBUTT

Feb. 28, 1987 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

NEW YORK — 

Former “20/20” correspondent Sylvia Chase was shocked at the news, former CBS News chief Richard Salant wasn’t, and one network source thought that Av Westin, although in trouble now, may eventually return to work at ABC News.

Such were some of the reactions in the wake of ABC News President Roone Arledge’s “indefinite” suspension Thursday of Westin, his Emmy-winning vice president of program development and executive producer of “20/20.”

Arledge, who wasn’t available for comment Friday, gave no public reason for his action. But sources said it was due to his anger over two things:

From <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-02-28-ca-6414-story.html>

ARLEDGE HINTS HE MIGHT LET ABC EXECUTIVE RETURN

PUBLISHED: March 3, 1987

From <https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1987/03/03/arledge-hints-he-might-let-abc-executive-return/>

 suspended, hinted of return

Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, indicated Friday that he might allow the return of Av Westin, the executive he dismissed last week because of a widely distributed criticism of the network’s news operations.

Arledge assembled the staff members of the two programs Westin directly supervises, 20/20 and Our World, in a small private dining room adjacent to the ABC cafeteria. Staff members from other programs also crowded the room to hear Arledge explain that “once order is restored,” Westin may be reinstated, according to staff members who attended the meeting.

Arledge referred to the tumult at ABC News last week caused by the Westin document, an 18-page thesis on the inefficiencies of modern network news. The document, which focused on ABC News and was taken as a criticism of Arledge’s management, was distributed widely within the news division, with copies dispatched also to the top corporate executives at Capital Cities-ABC.

Several other news managers also took offense at Westin’s document — and especially at its wide distribution — and were said to have pressed Arledge for action.

On Thursday night, Arledge notified Westin, who is a vice president of news programming as well as executive producer of 20/20, that he was relieved of his duties.

At Friday’s meeting, several staff members asked Arledge if Westin might return; the ABC News president did not answer directly, according to those present, saying only that calm would have to be restored before the matter could be resolved.

Westin did not return telephone calls and Arledge would not comment. At the meeting, he suggested that news reports about the Westin document forced his hand, and he seemed to discourage ABC journalists from talking to outside reporters about the matter, according to some in attendance.

“I would rather you be limited in what you say,” one producer quoted Arledge as having said. “Don’t fan the fires.”

From <https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1987/03/03/arledge-hints-he-might-let-abc-executive-return/>

https://abcnews.go.com/International/video/august-1982-heavy-fighting-israel-plo-beirut-ceasefire-56871147

August 1, 1982: After heavy fighting between Israel and the PLO, a ceasefire

President Reagan tries to crack down on the fighting in the region.

July 26, 2018

transcripts dec israel refusal to withdraw

https://archive.org/stream/ABCNews19781979/ABC%20News-1982-1983-B-a.txt

https://niemanreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Fall-1983_150.pdf

The Arabs And The Israelis: A Continuing Deadlock Norman Kempster 

NIEMAN~ REPORTS PuBLISHED Qu.1RTF-RLY RY THE NIEM.1N FouND.1TION FOR JouRN.1LISM .1T HARV.1RD UNIVERSITY VoL. XXXVII, No. 3 AuTUMN 1983

 AV WESTIN INTERVIEW | WNYC [2001]

Av Westin

April 20, 2001

Summary Transcript

Veteran TV producer Av Westin talked to over 100 TV executives, reporters and producers as a part of research he was doing for a handbook for television journalists. He was dismayed by what he discovered about the issue of race in TV news. Westin joined Bob to share his findings. 

From <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/132185-av-westin>

April 21, 2001

BOB GARFIELD: As part of the research for a handbook for television journalists more than a hundred television executives, reporters and producers sat down with TV news veteran Av Westin. Because of Westin's good reputation after nearly 50 years in the news business and because the participants were all off the record, they said some amazing things, specifically on the topic of race. An article in the April issue of Brill's Content magazine documents his findings. Av Westin, welcome to On the Media.

AV WESTIN: Delighted to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: When a black face is about to be photographed does everything change in the making of television news?

AV WESTIN: I think steps are taken so that black faces aren't photographed at all, and therefore you don't have to make that decision in terms of whether the piece gets changed or not. Now mind you, when I talk to the management of these programs and to the management of the news divisions themselves, they deny fervently that race is a factor. They're adamant about it. And yet in interviewing 137 people av--at all ranks, as soon as you got down below the senior producer level and started talking to the troops, they would tell me story after story about how Blacks were rejected either as the grist for a story or essentially rejected as being part of the cast of the story -- that is, who is the expert that you get to comment; who is the family that you get to be the-- the exemplar of whatever story you're doing.

BOB GARFIELD: All right let me see if I got this right. Let's say I'm a producer for a news magazine and I'm producing a piece about arsenic in drinking water, and I find a family in a town where there's a high level of arsenic in drinking water and they happen to be black, what happens?

AV WESTIN: It will be suggested to you that since Whites also are drinking the, the arsenic-laden water that go find a white family. Example: one young woman told me that a network -- and I'm going to preserve their anonymity so I'm going to - I'm not going to mention which network, and I, and, and - nor am I going to be specific enough so that retribution could land upon the shoulders of this person. She told me that she, that they, that this network was going to do a one hour special about a pediatric disease and she was told to go out and find a family-- and a child and all of the component parts; and she did. And when she revealed, however, that the family was black, she was told look, other people have this disease, white people have this disease; go back and find a white family. And she did!

 BOB GARFIELD:Now let us presume and let us hope to God that this isn't because the executive producer of whatever this news magazine is is so nakedly racist that he just doesn't want to have black faces on his air, there's-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE] 

AV WESTIN: No. None of them are. I know them all.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. So what's behind this? 

AV WESTIN: In the past ten years, minute by minute ratings became available to producers and they were never available before, and there has been a, a direct interpretation on the part of some of these people that, that Blacks don't get us the ratings! And so if Blacks don't get us the ratings, the word gets passed. Now it doesn't get passed explicitly.

BOB GARFIELD: No memos, no paper trail.

AV WESTIN: No, what happens is this: 

it, it's much more subtle; as, as somebody said who, as an observer of it from the inside, look a story involving Blacks is unlikely to get approved. If it does get approved, it's going to get done and it's going to sit on the shelf and will have much more difficult time getting broadcast. 

Now I asked a lot of the young people why it mattered to them -- why didn't they continue to suggest stories, and they said look, our jobs or I should say our performance ratings and therefore our jobs depend on the degree to which the stories we suggest are accepted and are produced and are broadcast.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you know Neil Shapiro [sp?] from Dateline and Don Hewitt from 60 Minutes?

AV WESTIN: Oh, yeah!

BOB GARFIELD: All right. They have claimed up and down that it's simply not true.

AV WESTIN: That's right. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB GARFIELD:But have any of these people kind of taken you aside, winked at you, and said look, you know, what am I gonna do? I've got to make my number.

AV WESTIN: No, it didn't come that way. I had a conversation with somebody and not, not with -not in Neil's shop but somewhere else. Oh, by the way I told Neil that I found this problem in his shop as well as 20/20 as well as -- the only place I didn't find it by the way was 60 Minutes 

BOB GARFIELD:Mr. Hewitt says he never looks at the minute by minute ratings. Why is he insulated from the necessity to do that when the other news magazines feel that they must.

AV WESTIN: 60 Minutes essentially is -- faces no competition. It does not have to worry about a cop show on one side, a hospital show on the other, it essentially is the dominant factor at 7 to 8 for that audience.

BOB GARFIELD:It's been a dozen years since you were executive producer of 20/20 on ABC. Put yourself though in that job in the year 2001, and now you're facing the ratings pressures and the bottom line pressures that were much less severe in your day. What do you do?

AV WESTIN: It would be easy to say that based on all of those years of experience and the gray hairs and, and the heritage that presumably I brought from starting out working for Murrow that I would stand up and say no way is this going to happen. And you can do it to a degree. But-- the truth is that the business has become THE BUSINESS. Eventually it's - it gets you.

BOB GARFIELD: Av Westin, thank you very much. Appreciate you joining us.

AV WESTIN:A pleasure to be here. I hope what I've had to say will be provocative and maybe some responses will occur at television stations and maybe there'll even be a, a ripple at one of the news magazines, who knows? 33:00

BOB GARFIELD: Av Westin, 6 time Emmy, 4 time Peabody Award winner and author of The Best Practices for Television Journalism.

From <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/132185-av-westin?tab=transcript>

 AV WESTIN INTERVIEW | PBS NEWSHOUR [2001]

Extended Interview: Av Westin

Jan 24, 2001

From <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/extended-interview-av-westin>

Transcript

The veteran television executive discusses how changes in network newsrooms and boardrooms have affected the shape of the evening news. The following are extended excerpts of his interview with media correspondent Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH:

When you look at the evening news broadcasts today versus what they were 10 or 20 years ago, what strikes you?

AV WESTIN:

The evening news broadcasts on television today are quite a different animal than they were when they first went to a half an hour, which is sort of the modern era. I mean, there were 15-minute programs in black and white, but the half-hour stuff started in '62.

In those days, the programs were essentially, I would say, an illustrated headline service. They tried to cover all the news of the day, at some length. Indeed, sometimes, their length was a minute [and] fifteen [seconds] and, sometimes, it was 20-seconds voice-over, but, basically, if you tuned into the evening news, you got a full menu of what happened throughout the day.

I was at CBS when the half-hour program started, and the definition of news, then, around the hallways, was [journalist Edward R.] Murrow's definition, in a sense. It was geopolitical news, economic news. Then, after they got rid of all of that, there might be a feature, which, interestingly enough, was probably ripped out of the first page, second section, of The New York Times. But basically they had a definition of what we would call "hard news."

Now, today, I think if you look at the evening news, you find out that it's a mini magazine. In most cases, the anchor comes on and tells you that the top story is Bush's new– President Bush's new economic program.

But later in the program, we're also going to tell you about a new cure for cancer. They split that. Then they'll go and do four or five minutes, perhaps, on the Bush thing, and then they'll promo the rest, several times throughout the broadcast.

TERENCE SMITH:

What's going on behind that?

AV WESTIN:

Well, I think what's happened is we in the television news business have video-educated the American public to expect that they're going to get more entertainment, or more news you can use. That used to be a pejorative phrase. "News you can use" was something that local did. Well, now, as a matter of fact, the networks are doing it all the time. They're seeking out those same kinds of stories.

TERENCE SMITH:

Explain what you mean by "news you can use."

AV WESTIN:

Well, it's consumer-oriented news. It's how to raise your children, if you have latch-key kids, how to deal with it. People who are engaging in good works, whose actions you might want to emulate. That's "news you can use," as opposed to, for the fifth day in a row, "There has been a debate about whether John Ashcroft should be approved." In fact what will happen, I think, is that after a story has an initial impact, its coverage diminishes, day by day and something else begins to replace it.

TERENCE SMITH:

What does that suggest? What does it seem that the producers have concluded about the viewers and their patience and appetite for hard news?

AV WESTIN:

The business of television news has become the business of television news, and if you are concerned about the bottom line, you do three things:

First of all, you, you worry about ratings, and in some cases you go "down market," or become more popular, to put the nicest spin on it. But you really go down market to get the widest possible viewer interest.

The second thing is you cut the size of your staff, and we've seen that at the networks. We see it at local too. But the networks, particularly, have smaller staffs overseas, in bureaus, and that means that they're doing less enterprise reporting.

Third, you pay those people less, which means that maybe what's happened to television news, generally, is that the "best and the brightest" have gone elsewhere.

AV WESTIN:

Now minute by minute ratings, or, certainly, attention to ratings, now dominates the thinking. Again, if you're going down market and you're worrying about ratings, and you're worrying about profits, you want to make sure your ratings are up. I think what we have seen here is a number of editorial decisions are made in order to either increase or hold the ratings.

In my view, one of the worst things that happened is when newspapers began to publish, each week, the ratings of the nightly news programs — thus equating higher ratings with good journalism.

Now those articles are read in the newsrooms, and they're read, not only by the producers, they're read by their bosses, and, now, in this age of conglomeration, their bosses are no longer news-oriented.

Now back, go back to the original days. In the original days, pieces ran a minute-15, a minute-30. I mean, we were criticized. I ran the ABC Evening News back then, and a minute-30 was a long time, but it was a minute-30 on today's news, and the reporter was on the scene about today's news.

We were much more closely attuned to the headlines of the day than we were to what was going to happen two, three, five weeks away.

Now what's happened is, indeed, the pieces may be running longer. There's no question about the fact that all of the network news programs have a closer look, eye on America, in depth, focus. They are longer. And then on occasion, they will be tied to the day's news. But, by and large, most of them are features that have been in the works for quite some time and bear as little relationship to today's news as a day-old newspaper. They just don't tie in as much.

TERENCE SMITH:

How candid are producers about those minute-by-minute ratings that they have?

AV WESTIN:

I just wrote a book which was based on interviews, 135 interviews with men and women at all networks, in the news divisions, and at five major station groups, and at The NewsHour. I promised everybody anonymity in order to get candor, and in getting the candor, I uncovered what is really the dark secrets of the television business.

TERENCE SMITH:

Namely?

AV WESTIN:

One, minute-by-minute ratings do play a role in how decisions are made. Two, because of minute-by-minute ratings, closet racism has emerged. There are definitely, at all the networks, and in most of the shops within those networks, decisions about who do we include in a story as the expert, and what stories to do, are affected by whether the subject involves African Americans or Asians. "Blacks don't give good demos" is one of the quotes I got in that dark candor.

The third thing is that everybody, just by the fact that the only way they would talk to me is, is off the record, under the cloak of anonymity, is scared that the business is in such turmoil, and is changing so rapidly, that what used to be journalistic standards have gone away, and everybody is affected by the bottom line.

A new generation is taking over, not necessarily this week, but within a few years. Those men and women who are taking over grew up in the business in the last 10 years, and in the last 10 years is precisely when this concern for the bottom line, and minute by minute ratings, and all of that, have become the watchword of the day.

Unlike a previous era, when journalistic considerations were paramount, now, it is not there anymore.

TERENCE SMITH:

Do you think the three flagship broadcasts have a clear sense of mission today?

AV WESTIN:

All of them state that they no longer feel that they are an illustrated headline service. In my day, that's what we thought we were. Now they say that they prefer to pick one or two stories and run with it at greater length. Whether that mission is accomplished with the purity of just journalistic judgments, or corrupted by the concern for bottom line is really what's at issue.

TERENCE SMITH:

Some years ago, evening news broadcasts were appointment television for anybody interested in the news. Are they today?

AV WESTIN:

The evening news used to be appointment television. It no longer is because you can get your news elsewhere, and because there are a lot of other distractions that enable you to get your news or get information without sitting down in front of your tube at the dinner hour.

I think we all remember — certainly my generation–coming home at night, even when we weren't working in the business and sitting down around the dinner table and watching Huntley-Brinkley or Doug Edwards, in the early days, Howard K. Smith and Frank Reynolds at ABC.

That no longer happens, I think, with the same regularity, because you don't need to be there, and in terms of a generational thing, the Internet, and in dialing up ABCNews.com, or CNN.com, or whatever the dot-coms are you prefer, you can get that information, get the headline right there.

TERENCE SMITH:

Your former colleague Mike Wallace, has posited a theory that, in due course, the evening news broadcasts will switch from their current time slots and go to an hour, say, between 10:00 and 11:00, in which they'll present the hard news at the beginning, and the rest of it will resemble 60 Minutes, or a news magazine show. Do you think that's likely?

AV WESTIN:

I think it's possible, but I don't think it's likely anymore. There was a moment, about three, four, five years ago, when the magazine shows were proliferating across the board.

They were on at 10:00 and Dateline, in particular, had a hard news top. They did a story that was at length off today's news, and then they would have their normal features.

And I think that it was quite possible, at that moment, but television is still an entertainment medium, and although the profits were higher than some of the losing entertainment programs, as soon as the managers of the networks can find a program that will, for less money than some $2 million movie, make them a profit, the magazine shows will go away, or will diminish. And we're seeing that — it's happening already.

CBS, at one time, had Street Stories, it had 48 Hours, it had 60 Minutes II. It was filling up its weeknight primetime, and as soon as "Survivor" came along, goodnight to that.

And at ABC, 20/20 was across the board. Now it's, for a variety of reasons, back to being 20/20 and Primetime Live, but it's now down to two programs because along came "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

TERENCE SMITH:

So a good entertainment show will drive out news?

AV WESTIN:

Every time. It's the tradition of it. There's no question about it. Listen, going back to, to the early days of television — and these gray hairs remember it quite clearly — the people who ran the networks used to believe that news programming belonged at the dinner hour and in the Sunday morning ghetto. The idea that a network news program could move into primetime and stay there was just anathema.

Now I ran 20/20 at ABC News, and the only reason we managed to stay in there was because, number one, our ratings went up, principally when were doing more interesting stories, and Barbara Walters joined us, and, secondly, we were, we were doing that program for about $400,000, or less, an hour, and a cop show was in the area of $800,000 to a million or $1,200,000. So the profit we were generating was just extraordinary.

TERENCE SMITH:

What does it say to you, that these three flagship broadcasts are still anchored by three white men in their '60s, who have been there for years?

AV WESTIN:

Habit. The choice of anchors has, until now, been a sort of logical progression of watching an individual who had star quality and ability to communicate and an ability to interest viewers to stay with them, and you develop a loyalty, and that's what the whole essence of news viewing is. Television news viewing is habit viewing. If you like the anchor, and if you like the show, it's unlikely you're going to change to somebody else.

What is happening is, first of all, I think this is the last class of star anchors. They're going to be replaced, if not in the next immediate generation, but one generation down, by people who do not bring to the parties the same credentials that the Rathers and the Jennings and the Brokaws, and the Cronkites before them, and the Reynolds and the Smiths, and you can see there's a diminution of their credentials.

The second thing you can look at is where the network news budgets are going. It used to be that the news division's budget stood in support, almost entirely, of the network evening news. That's no longer the case.

They now stand in support of the magazine shows, they stand in support of the morning programs, because those programs generate revenues and bring back more money to the coffers, to the bottom line than any other entity.

So the evening news has essentially been diminished. It's no longer the flagship. Just as network news, which used to be the El Dorado, the top of a mountain where everybody who wanted to get into the business fought their way through the wars of the local stations because they wanted to get to work for the network. That's no longer the case either.

TERENCE SMITH:

What do you forecast five or ten years down the road? Will we see three evening news broadcasts on the principal networks? Will they look largely as they have for these many years?

AV WESTIN:

We'll probably see quite a revolution. Number one, I think that the public's desire for news and information will lead viewers to various niches, whether it's The NewsHour or whether it's watching it on some part of cable — I mean, a CNBC which will dominate business news, and things of that sort. Or whether it's a Nightline, which is a particular kind of program at a particular time of day. I think that's where the serious news viewer will go in order to see the news. And the Internet, we can't really tell, yet, where that's going to go.

TERENCE SMITH:

And the evening news?

AV WESTIN:

I think the evening news, at its length, became the flagship, because the owners of the networks, in those days, wanted to deliver to the public, at least once a day, something that was a payback for letting them make all that other money in the entertainment side.

If you look at who owns the television networks today, they may pay lip service but the whole business of "jewel in the crown," which is what CBS Evening News used to be. With all due respect to the gentlemen who are now running CBS, they are salesmen. They are entertainment people. They are not news. And the same thing can be argued, I think, with equal strength, that the Disney people do not have that direct tie to the news people at ABC.

GE got religion along the way, and have turned [NBC] into something which transcends not only network, but cable. And, I think, there we might see a longer investment of support for evening news. But by and large, five to ten years out, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some reasonable excuse found not to do it.

From <https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/extended-interview-av-westin>

####NEXTDOC

 AV WESTIN INTERVIEW | TELEVISION ACADEMY