The Good News is the Bad News Is Wrong

...chances are that Wattenberg has defaced it beyond repair...

...There is no reason to believe that the black rate of illegitimate births is perse symptomatic of a pathological disorder...

...Wattenberg's America, in short, is thoroughly at odds with the images of this country that have come to dominate the news-so thoroughly, in fact, that the obvious question suggests itself on each and every page...

...The media have failed not only to meet their audience's standards of competence...

...Mass media have a commercial bias toward sensationalism...

...Enter Ben Wattenberg- demographer, columnist, sociologist-at-large-who has emerged from the Statistical Abstracts with a question of his own: Are three or four months of unemployment (typical), with unemployment compensation (typical), with the likelihood of a second earner (typical), likely to lead to deep trauma, shattered families, battered wives...

...and with the election of 1984, they dealt a telling blow to the apocalyptic guardians of the news...

...The sources of their limitations, he suggests, are myriad...

...But for everyone else, and for Wattenberg in particular, the news is not so simple...

...There is nothing particularly ominous about the unemployment rate for black teenagers...

...He is reasonable...

...they have even failed to meet their own...

...this...

...The answer, of course, is that times were not as grievous in 1982 as the media insisted they were...

...The number attending greyhound races climbed to 21 million, and the number of cable television subscribers soared from 4.5 to 21 million...

...Where," asks Wattenberg, sensibly enough, "did all that money come from, right in the middle of a grievous economic period...

...If there is a flaw in Wat-tenberg's own portrait of America, it is that this one corner of his canvas is not quite bright enough...

...What this list captures is Wat-tenberg's unique contribution to the annals of media criticism...

...They are all on display in The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, a picaresque tale of one man's journey through the media mausoleum...

...They have missed the biggest stories of our time: the developments and trends that will shape America most in the decades to come...

...Wattenberg delights in vandalism like Mary Tedeschi is managing editor of the Public Interest...

...There are 1,700 daily newspapers in this country, and most of them do not deserve the ridicule that a handful have labored to earn...

...as Wattenberg observes, the rate of illegitimate births in Sweden is 40 percent, and our social workers never suggest that the Swedes are mired in a "self-perpetuating tangle of pathology...

...Everyone knows that the media elite make a travesty of objectivity...

...Indeed, what if the most important stories of our time are not about events at all...

...Why, in the book's own terms, do the media get so many stories so very wrong...

...This process of selection, of course, is not without its champions...

...Such are the traits that create the news as we know it-a synopsis of reality that is not exactly false, but carefully tailored to the requirements of ideology and commerce...

...Or integration: The number of blacks in college has increased tenfold since 1950, while the percentage of all blacks living in suburbs has doubled...

...Over 25 million of its people attended professional football and basketball games, while 21 million paid to hear orchestras perform...

...and above all, he respects and heeds the dictates of common sense...

...For some, the biggest story of the decade was uncovered when the media managed to locate a restaurateur-perhaps the last in America-who refused to integrate his lunch counter...

...Or, above all, the technological innovations whose effect on American life is too ubiquitous even to quantify: self-regulating cameras, miracle drugs, walkmans, word processors, laser surgery, VCRs, and, what is perhaps the single least appreciated wonder of the age, air conditioning...

...Wattenberg's quarrel is not with the rank and file, but with the highly visible elite-the journalists of our major newspapers, weekly magazines, and television networks...

...THE GOOD NEWS IS THE BAD NEWS IS WRONG Ben Wattenberg/Simon and Schuster/$ 17.95 Mary Tedeschi Consider America in the closing months of 1982...

...America was a Walker Evans photograph brought to life...

...on the American dream of home-owning (the percentage of married couples under 30 who own their homes rose from 49 percent in 1970 to 62 percent in 1982), on the plight of the elderly (by including non-cash benefits, he shows that only 4.1 percent live below the poverty line), and, not least, on education and integration (in 1982, the median years of school completed by 25-29 year-olds was 12.9 for whites and 12.7 for blacks...

...thus, they prefer events (scandals, riots, marches, and so on) to phenomena that develop over time...

...Or safety in transportation: During 1980 and 1981, only one passenger died in nearly 11 million airline flights (he fell from a gangplank...

...Husbands beat their wives, fathers beat their children, and those who had no one to beat became criminals instead...

...The media are not and never have been as important as they believe themselves to be, and with every passing lawsuit, their.tattered credibility is rent anew...

...Or was it...

...he is fair...

...Wattenberg illuminates hundreds of statistics like these, along the way correcting a wealth of distorted impressions: on the truly moneyed lobbyists (the two top spenders by far are Common Cause and Handgun Control, Inc...

...Wattenberg should surely relax...

...Over 10 percent of its labor force was unemployed, and the nation's media had eyes for nothing else...

...It is all the more curious, then, that even Wattenberg lapses into intermittent distress...

...For example, life expectancy: It has increased more in the past decade (by 2.6 years) than in any other decade of this century...

...Likewise, in Wattenberg's portrait of America today, it is impossible to discern the racist, sexist, warlike hues that daily appear in the news...

...Likewise, there are wire services that produce hundreds of straightforward stories every day...

...Why," he asks pointedly, "does it automatically mean that among black Americans...

...The events that are deemed newsworthy are in turn distorted by the left-wing politics and personal self-righteousness that are rampant among prominent journalists...

...In demonstrating as much, Wattenberg is a paragon of the virtues that his targets so conspicuously lack...

...He worries now and then about the media's effect on the stock market, on the decision to have children, on the election of politicians-on a whole range of choices that are based in part on wagers about the future...

...And what was Wattenberg's America in 1982...

...To be sure, Wattenberg does not indict the media wholesale...

...It was a country that spent more on video games than the entire GNP ($37 billion) of Panama...

...Choose any other portrait of America from the media's latest collection...

...if we exclude those who are in school or at home taking care of their children, the rate becomes not 40 but around 10 percent...

...There is no such thing as a causal link between gender and destitution (the so-called "feminization of poverty...

...On his own account, the American people are as optimistic as ever about their country and their future...

...America was a trailer park without begonias...

...Other media fans are no doubt eagerly awaiting the debut of the next endangered arthropod...

...Between 1970 and 1982, the number of Americans who traveled abroad rose 60 percent...

...one-parent families have always been a major correlative of poverty, regardless of whether the parent is male or female...

...America was the land of soup kitchens and cheese lines, its people ragged and broken...

...Wattenberg, corroborating this, adduces something more...