Presswatch/Invasion of the Auto-Neuts

...Not surprisingly, the ad campaign is scheduled to run through 1991, the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights...

...That because they depended on advertising, which depended on circulation, which depended on not alienating potential readers, these dailies became much less partisan as journalists began embracing the ideals of objectivity, balance, and fairness, the point being to report, rather than participate in, the political debate...

...He observes that the public's increasingly dimmer view of the media may lead to growing public support for restrictions on the power and autonomy of the press...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 31...

...During the economic expansion that began in November 1982 (and continues still today), broadcast reporters uncovered ever more new problems with the economy while reporting fewer of the increasingly favorable economic statistics...

...His call for a more traditional kind of journalism is altogether right...

...A case in point is economic coverage on evening network newscasts...

...Smith is on to something...

...The auto-neuts...

...The editor of this magazineoften asks why more conservatives aren't found in the mainstream media...

...As evidence Smith offers a current public-service ad campaign sponsored by the Ad Council and the Society of Professional Journalists (a campaign designed to win back public support...

...T n "The Watchdog's Bite" Ted Smith has successfully explained the negative character of so much media coverage by identifying a type of journalist more and more evident these days: the reporter who "flits" from position to position, who has the luxury of being "irresponsible...

...As the phrase goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant...

...It is this stance that has led to the cynical and sometimes apocalyptic negativism that permeates the daily news, especially on network television, and for which the public has less and less taste...

...Consider, for example, the recent retrospectives on the 1980s, which found little good to say about a decade that witnessed the record U.S.-postwar economic expansion and the worldwide demise of Communism...

...It's a different take on the media from any I've seen," a network correspondent told me...

...papers, only one of them a daily, and all of them were highly partisan...

...Smith writes that the press "is the only American institution that is never subjected to the full inquisitional rigor of investigative journalism...

...It is hard to imagine any sensible conservative aspiring to the sensibility of the auto-neut...

...When I hear a top editor of the Washington Post say that he not only refrains from voting but also tries to avoid having opinions on public issues, I hear the voice of the strictest auto-neut, the journalist seemingly attached to nothing at all politically or spiritually...

...So might more criticism of the media by the media...

...The theme of "Project Watchdog" is, "If the press didn't tell us, who would...

...This gene is hostile to commitments of every public kind (and sometimes private ones, too), yet is intensely fascinated by events and actors in the public arena...

...For example, the eighties saw a dramatic growth in the number of Soviet sources cited during network newscasts, and an even more dramatic growth in the number of speaking appearances by Soviet spokesmen...

...In the Winter issue of Dissent, Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, notes that Riesman's inside dopester has evolved into "a harsher, more brittle and cynical type still more knowledgeable in the ways in which things really work, still more purposefully disengaged, still more knowledgeable in a managerial way, allergic to political commitments...

...But for Smith this is not the only recent change, nor the most important...

...For it is also in recent decades that the media have made the "watchdog" role their primary one...

...They constitute a sort of "permanent parliamentary opposition, but without the need to defend a position or offer any reasonable alternatives to the politics it attacks...

...The "right" answer, of course, is no one...

...Smith would probably agree that a journalist of this sort is a throwback to the preby Terry Eastland penny-press days of the participant-press, though with this difference: he is not constrained by the obligations of partisanship or governing or anything else (save in the long run, perhaps, by public opinion—hence the ad campaign...

...Here's one reason: conservatives prefer to think of themselves as citizens of the United States...

...Different, indeed...

...Smith, one of the few conservatives in the journalism wing of academe, agrees with these critics up to a point, but notes there is a deeper problem indicated by polls showing that the public's main complaint isn't political bias but "negativity...

...Or take the Panama coverage, which found plenty of things wrong with the American invasion until, finally, Manuel Noriega gave himself up, at which point it was time to move on to other subject matter...

...One key reason: it is inconsistent with the requirements of an informed electorate...

...They regard themselves as committed to the American enterprise...

...Smith's piece raises an importantquestion: the future of American journalism...

...This particular auto-neut gene is most often seen at work during network coverage of U.S...

...My difference is with Smith's use of the term "watchdog" to identify this type...

...In other words, a man in the know but without a chest, to borrow that haunting phrase from C. S. Lewis...

...The auto-neut impulse shapes much 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 coverage today...

...The idea that the press is the only institution that could "tell us" (whatever awful thing has happened) and thus protect our rights suggests for Smith a "subtle but profound change" in the media's self-understanding...

...This gene was well identified, in effect, by David Riesman forty years ago in The Lonely Crowd, in his discussion of the inside dopester who refuses "to be taken in by any person, cause, or event...

...foreign policy...

...Such a reporter is, in Smith's phrase, "omni-principled"i.e., "free to flit from position to position, adopting and discarding attacks until he finds one that draws blood...

...Journalists "are free to raise unresolvable problems, demand integration of contradictory positions, and enforce standards of conduct that neither they nor anyone else can meet...

...The press, he says, now takes the position of the objective or neutral critic not of the society but somehow outside and above it...

...PRESSWATCH INVASION OF THE AUTO-NEUTS irr he Watchdog's Bite," a recent I magazine article by a journalism professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, has been well thumbed by key figures at ABC News, Gannett, and other leading media organs, and even by some White House officials...

...That the origins of the modern press lie in the 1830s, with the appearance of mass-circulation dailies...

...And the implication is that without the press our constitutional rights would be in jeopardy...

...There are, I think, two kinds of autoneut genes that have invaded the body media (not to mention other elite bodies, especially academe, which it penetrated first...

...The media can prevent this outcome, he concludes, by restoring the informative role of the press to a position of primacy...

...Consequently, it is denied the range of information needed to make intelligent decisions...

...What might help is competition—the emergence of new media organizations committed to informing their readers and listeners accurately and fairly while resisting the "omni-principled" approach of the auto-neut that inevitably leads to negative coverage...

...But by and large Smith is right...

...It is hard to live this way, but modernism has made it possible, and in the media we find plenty of "savvy spectators," as Gitlin calls them...

...Actually, individual stories and newscasts are sometimes given this treatment...

...In recent decades, of course, the press has come to include broadcast media...

...In this way journalists can appear "superior to all other social leaders, especially politicians," says Smith, and this makes them "irresponsible...

...The spokesmen generally were allowed to rake over the United States, no hard questions asked...

...Writing in the inaugural (January/February 1990) issue of the American Enterprise, Ted J. Smith III addresses "the crisis of confidence" that has afflicted the media in recent years...

...I would prefer a different term, a neologism coined from words Smith uses, "autonomous" and "neutral": auto-neut...

...Smith argues that the media have taken "a false turn," that their new position as omni-principled critics will damage our society...

...Smith notes some useful history: that at the American founding, the press as we know it today did not exist (there were only a handful of newsTerry Eastland is resident scholar at the National Legal Center for the Public Interest...

...Smith finds the answer in the way the media view themselves as society's "watchdog...

...But why must it be so...

...Polls show slippage in public confidence in the press, especially its credibility...

...Now the other kind of auto-neut gene produces journalists detached not from the world, but from their societies...

...He stands outside and above society, as Smith says, but let's also specify the society in question: it is American society...

...So it turns out that our autonomous, neutral critic is in fact a participant in the discussion...

...Because the neutral critic dwells on shortcomings, the electorate learns more about what doesn't work than what works, what fails than what succeeds, what is wrong than what is right...

...In The Vanished Economy, a study he did for the Media Institute examining such coverage for 1982-1987, Smith found that as the economy improved, the ratio of predominantly negative to positive stories increased from five to one in 1982-83 to seven to one in 1986-87...

...Journalists will often tell you that coverage must be negative, that it is inevitable in their work...

...This kind of coverage obviously influences public perceptions and political agendas...

...Critics routinely explain this as a reaction to media bias...

...The autonomous, neutral critic thus may appear in one of two guises: either as a citizen of nothing, or a citizen of the world...

...This kind of journalist is a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite...

...C mith takes issue with this "idealized role" of the press as "an autonomous and neutral critic...

...Not every watchdog is an auto-neut, in my book, and it is the auto-neut that merits attention...