Presswatch/A Profession in Decline
Eastland, Terry
PRESSWATCH A PROFESSION IN DECLINE Boston rr he American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) gathered here for its annual meeting in order to celebrate, as signs everywhere put it, "the...
...It was also assumed that "diversity," which is code for a color other than white, is a qualification, in the sense that being Hispanic, say, enables a Hispanic reporter to understand and report on Hispanic communities, it being understood that a white reporter would be disabled by his whiteness from doing that job as well, if at all...
...The editors, having just swallowed a $55 lunch, at least chuckled...
...ASNE commissioned one...
...That, of course, is subject to debate, but Brennan is a hero among the media, not only for his free-press opinions but also for those that torqued the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution into coercively libertarian documents...
...now only half do...
...Diversity," thus defined, turned out to be a crucial part of a commercial argument...
...For a variety of reasons, it has been disintegrating since World War II, and the trend is only bound to continue, presaging further loss of readership for newspapers...
...ASNE devoted an entire panel to the question, "Why Isn't There More Progress in Minority Hiring...
...The states weren't covered until this century, when, by judicial fiat, the provisions of the First began to be applied to them...
...Multiculturalism" was another catch phrase...
...If American voters were asked to ratify the Bill of Rights today, freedom of the press would not likely be included...
...Pulling out a large American flag (sent to him, he said, by some admirer who had flown it every day in strangely incongruous support of both U.S...
...The sophisticated, complex and subtle ideas of great philosophers are now available in a dramatized format that entertains and informs...
...It does not follow, however, that if newspapers were to publish news, as traditionally defined, more papers would be bought...
...Surely there are such journalists around...
...I don't know...
...Editors and publishers have occasionally tried to change their product to fit the changing times—keeping up with television, for example, the main news source for younger people—with indifferent results...
...I was far from persuaded that these students would allow their campus newspapers to dissent from the orthodoxy on affirmative action that ASNE so solidly, and uncritically, pushes...
...newspaper circulation has remained flat—at 61 to 62 million copies—even as the number of U.S...
...And we—as in "we editors"—editorialize...
...Thus he praised Arnett for his Thomas-like "passion for objectivity...
...But American voters aren't asked that question, and if they were asked it in a constitutional context—that of ratification—it's far from clear what the survey results would hold...
...for each album...
...Wintley Phipps, pastor of a Seventh Day Adventist church in Washington, D.C...
...From later cassettes in the Audio Classics Series, you'll discover the insights of The Giants of Political Thought, relive the creation and adoption of The U.S...
...they didn't find newspapers at all useful in their daily lives, which tended to revolve around local events...
...111111111111111•111111111•^—aMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMI=1111•M•1111110===l1MIIIMIIIIIMIIMIIIIIIIMIIMMIIIIIMM====11111111MINIUMIIMM=IM -"s1^1°11 I I Send me, for $1.00 plus $2.00 shipping and handling, Plato, and begin my no-risk subscription YES: to the Audio Classics Listening Library...
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...Amazingly, Arnett presented himself as though he had been, well, one of "our countrymen" in uniform...
...Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association...
...Here is what I meant: A decent respect for diversity of views (another ASNE value)would have required including on the panel an editor with the views of a Thomas Sowell (who has destroyed the premises of affirmative action in a series of books) or a Shelby Steele (who has destroyed the notion of racial "entitlement...
...On the first day of the conference the editors went to school at Harvard, picking from a menu of offerings...
...The number of minority journalists increased more in 1990 than in any year since 1978, yet only 8.72 percent of all newspaper journalists today are black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian...
...You can listen to these cassettes again and again with fresh insights and renewed enjoyment each time...
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...Inclusion of a reporter like Wallace or an editorial-page opponent of racial preferences would have given the panel a "diversity" corresponding to the debate that is taking place across the country...
...Arnett accepted this encomium without quibble...
...I thought you could have used more diversity," I replied...
...Each presentation invites the intelligent listener to ponder the great ideas without struggling through an academic or simplified writing style...
...Everyone else said "diversity policy...
...We pass out condoms in school, he noted, while ignoring the real need...
...Irina Ratushinskaya, Madeleine L'Engle, George Sayer, Thomas Howard, Walter Hooper, Peter Kreeft, Paul Ford, Calvin Seerveld, Stanley Hauerwas, Arthur Peacocke, Os Guinness, Nigel Goodwin and others...
...Chariton Heston Narrates The "I think, therefore I am...
...The at-risks identified themselves as "harried" and unable to control events around them...
...LEWIS SUMMER INSTITUTE June 30 -July 12, 1991 Theme: "Muses Unbound: Transfiguring the Imagination" no-featuring-0c...
...He observed, with intended irony, that the crisis showed what could happen to newspaper circulation when newspapers actually publish news...
...ASNE sponsored some research on readership and unveiled the results at the annual meeting...
...You can receive the first selection, Plato, at the special price of $1.00 plus $2.00 shipping and handling — a savings of $13.95...
...And even if some of the ideas "work," in the sense of attracting new readers while keeping old ones, there is the unsettling question of just what a newspaper is nowadays...
...He was preceded by the Rev...
...America, I've got that feeling . . . you like me," Arnett remarked...
...in 1789, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government...
...I will receive an album of two cassettes every month, and you'll charge my credit card $14.95 plus $2 shipping and handling ($4 outside the U.S...
...A panel on "Testing the Limits" of the First Amendment was stacked in favor of "First Amendment absolutists," as its moderator, Ellen Goodman, said most news types are...
...A winner of one of ASNE's First Amendment Awards was retired Justice William J. Brennan, who was said to have "reaffirmed through law the vision of the Founding Fathers...
...Every tape in the Audio Classics Series recreates a fragment of history, brimming with the importance of our past, present and future...
...Afterwards, as I rode up in the hotel elevator with Simpson, she asked me how I thought the panel went...
...One of the best attended and most talked about was "The Moral Life of the Young," by Robert Coles...
...It would have been impolite to point out that CNN and Arnett strove not for the kind of objectivity that might include side-taking among nations (presumably Thomas's kind), but for the neutrality that explicitly denies being on anyone's side.("Our countrymen" or its equivalent was not in Arnett's Baghdad vocabulary...
...This last figure is particularly distressing to industry executives, for researchers claimthat most people who acquire the newspaper habit do so early in life...
...The question Arnett did not address in his speech here concerns CNN's vaunted above-all-nations neutrality, for which, by the way, David Frost frosted Arnett in a recent Washington appearance...
...Besides, now isn't then...
...households has almost doubled...
...As it happened, it was their luck to have scheduled an evening reception in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library on Columbia Point at a time when all the talk in the news centered on the Kennedy boys' Good Friday fun in Palm Beach...
...Phipps came forward to provide a First Amendment "minute," consisting of a reading from some sage like John Stuart Mill or Thomas Jefferson, you could hear the hush settle over the crowd of editors...
...Just weeks earlier Newsweek had run a cover story on how violence had gone mainstream, explicitly contradicting Strossen on the connection between, if you will, what you see and read and what you do...
...The results disappointed the survey authors...
...For better or worse, we live in an age when more and more newspaper editors, especially in smaller markets, will decide that news, as the editor of a Wisconsin daily told his staff, is "what our readers say it is...
...The mood didn't improve when Ross Perot was asked about how the media had changed...
...Little did he know that in time the newspaper industry would pick up on his idea and use "diversity" to cover a multitude of personal (and personnel) sins...
...Each time the Rev...
...Box 8008, Redlands, CA 92375 • (714) 793-0949 • FAX (714) 793-7516 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991...
...Powell justified the use of race in graduate admissions with a "diversity" rationale based on First Amendment considerations...
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...At the lunch featuring Peter Arnett, the Rev...
...Ponder these facts when reading these papers' stories on affirmative action...
...The lives of newspapers depend on diversity," said one panelist...
...California's Orange County Register now covers shopping malls, plumbing such throbbing questions as which malls have the best bathroom facilities...
...Each day of the convention a "multicultural" staff of college students put out a paper for the participants...
...If I'm ever displeased, I have the right to return the current album within 15 days and owe nothing...
...Strossen represented the view that freedom is an unalloyed good, and she denied that exposure to a book or movie, or presumably to anything, might lead to behavior civilized people might deplore, such as murder...
...And it is this that everyone understands to be God...
...Phipps chose to read a text by Isaiah Thomas, not of Pistons' but Patriot fame—Thomas was a journalist during the Revolutionary War...
...Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post seemed to find one in Linda Wallace, who is black and works for the Philadelphia Inquirer...
...Here was a sight for Saddam Hussein to see, and for Americans who followed Arnett's coverage to ponder...
...Presumably, no such editor had been invited to be a panelist...
...this was as close to a worship service as ASNE could have provided...
...For three decades daily U.S...
...Moderation in all things...
...Yet it is the "diversity" movement that has helped promote the climate of PC censorship on the college campus...
...This quota (let us not mince words) has proved elusive...
...A big problem, because what kids don't have and badly need, said Coles, in a persuasive (if depressing) presentation, is "a moral life...
...It was assumed that minority qualifications were never problematic, that "people of color" had to be "better" than whites in order to be hired and promoted, and that the number of minorities hired and promoted should be the same as for non-minorities...
...She seemed unsure precisely what I meant, though she sensed I was not with the program...
...Giants of Philosophy "The unexamined life is not worth living...
...The future looks bad enough that America's newspaper editors might have to forgo meeting at places like the $150-a-night Westin Hotel on Copley Place...
...Ironically, in a speech on the meeting's last day, ASNE President Osborne deplored the advent of political correctness on college campuses and sharply criticized attempts to limit freedom of speech...
...Carole Simpson of ABC News moderated what proved a rainbow panel: three blacks, a Hispanic, an Asian, and one white...
...Richard I. Neal, of Persian Gulf briefing fame, just what could be done about "anti-media prejudice," evidently the latest form of discrimination...
...There was Dennis Barrie, director of the Cincinnati museum hauled into court for its Mapplethorpe exhibition, Nadine Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and, all by himself as the liberals' ideal stereotype of a conservative, the Rev...
...CNN's Peter Arnett was a luncheon speaker...
...I thought of Coles's lecture as I sat through the closing sessions that gloried in the First Amendment without pausing to reflect on the social and moral costs of the rights revolution in our time...
...In the text, Thomas talked about the bad things British troops had done to "our countrymen," as he called them...
...I do know that the editors had the chance to take in some baseball at Fenway Park the next day...
...Evidently, he would have to limit his crop to black journalists, since he had few Hispanics around town but presumably a sizable black community...
...Name Address City State Zip ^ Charge my credit card...
...Phipps picked these words because for some strange reason Arnett evidently reminded him of Thomas...
...In other words, what at-risks, potentials, and other such market constructs say it is...
...I liked you more rough-and-tumble, not blow-dried in $500 suits...
...In 1967 three-quarters of all adults polled said they read a paper...
...In his speech, Burl Osborne noted that censorship on the college campus today will be censorship in the newsroom tomorrow...
...ASNE adopted its year-2000 goal in 1978, the same year that saw the SuThe World's Great Philosophers faa 0; ou$100 Trial Offer Every 4 weeks you'll receive almost 3 hours of enlightenment and entertainment...
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...But the Simpson panel, organized by ASNE, was as politically correct as any college colloquium on affirmative action...
...You'll learn about their epistemology — how we know what we know...
...Further irony: in his anti-PC speech Osborne revealed no irony at all when he turned around to urge the editors to plow on toward proportional representation...
...In a story after the ASNE meeting, Kurtz quoted Wallace as saying, "Quotas take away from people's perception of our excellence...
...T hirteen years ago ASNE set the year 2000 as the deadline by which it hoped the percentage of minority journalists on the job would reflect the percentage of minorities in the general population...
...Coles probed the conditions of a society that has been so shot through with hedonism that the moral life of young people has become a problem...
...A speaker predicted that, if newspapers were to incorporate some of the ideas from the prototypes, they could increase circulation by as much as eight percent...
...Not least among them is duplicity...
...and more use of tabloid sections...
...The discussion proceeded as I expected, with Barrie able to present himself as an expert on art, with Strossen able to present herself as the sophisticate in law, and Wildmon able to, well, be Wildmon...
...The recent Gulf War, a bad one for the media, led one editor to ask Brig...
...Readership is our biggest issue," said another, "and the diversity is the key to readership...
...for newspapers to survive, they must reach minority communities, and to do that they need minority journalists...
...J. Stanley Mattson, Director C.S...
...ASNE President Burl Osborne, editor and publisher of the Dallas Morning by Terry Eastland News, took note that newspaper readership went up during the crisis in the Persian Gulf...
...No one touched on the question of whether an editor is supposed to hire a Hispanic in order to reach Hispanic communities (as the "diversity" argument commands) or simply on grounds that the person has, if one can allude to the notion anymore, superb qualifications...
...That promises to be no easy task, if only because at-risks and potentials often want different things from their newspapers, while long-time readers may not want what either of them want...
...The panel advised him to "grow his own minorities...
...While the profit margins of some newspapers remain the envy of many other businesses, they have been declining, and industry leaders fear the trend is irreversible...
...A media conference celebrating the First Amendment would have been incomplete without a Brennanesque study on same...
...Yet another said: "We need people who look like and think like our readers...
...The Brennan-like premises of the survey authors reflected the premises of the ASNE leadership, if not most of the editors here...
...The common culture that newspapers (and many other institutions) could once assume no longer exists...
...The majority of both at-risks and potentials were under 35, likely to work full-time, and more likely than "loyal" readers to be transients in their communities...
...But the tenor of the sessions bespoke a certain depression about the news business...
...Courage in Condoms" was the headline of a recent Boston Globe editorial...
...And apart from the politics (and censorship) they will bring to America's editorial offices, there is the present to consider, with many of those offices operating under racial-hiring policies...
...Wildmon did manage to make the point, agreed to by Strossen, that we are in the midst of a culture war...
...The study took the form of a poll—a survey of public attitudes toward free press and free expression generally...
...And you'll learn how each thinker related to his times and to the work of other philosophers over the centuries...
...according to the 1990 census, those minorities now make up roughly 25 percent of the population...
...PRESSWATCH A PROFESSION IN DECLINE Boston rr he American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) gathered here for its annual meeting in order to celebrate, as signs everywhere put it, "the First," as in the First Amendment, whose 200th anniversary occurs later this year...
...they were interested in hard news, including national stories, but weren't convinced that newspapers were the best way to get their news...
...All selections are guaranteed, and you have the right to return the current album, for any reason, within 15 days...
...The key opinion in that case was Justice Lewis Powell's...
...Try the Audio Classics to stimulate your mind, broaden your horizons, and enrich your life...
...I may drop out of the program at any time without penalty...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 "I'm tired of this bull...
...Six newspapers developed prototype papers, which ASNE distributed to the 500 editors and their spouses gathered here...
...In The Giants of Philosophy, you'll survey 13 of the world's greatest philosophers (plus others who worked with or against them...
...Several editors expressed a preference for traditional newspapers, i.e., those that feature international, national, state, and local news, with a heavy emphasis on politics and government...
...Arnett, needless to say, now has an agent and an assistant, and is sifting through book and other opportunities...
...Constitution (narrated by Walter Cronkite), more keenly understand economic progress and conflict in The Great Economic Thinkers (narrated by Louis Rukeyser), and explore the roots of crisis and conflict in The United States at War (narrated by George C. Scott...
...THE AUDIO CLASSICS SERIES' Hear The Giants of Philosophy pursue answers to life's most provocative questions...
...Write or call now for further information: Dr...
...And every other hire at the New York Times must be a minority...
...Phipps was a fixture of the ASNE program, having been asked, thanks to a pair of wonderfully deep and compelling vocal chords, to provide First Amendment "minutes," as they were called, at various points...
...Dorothy Gilliam of the Washington Post spoke for the other panelists when she said: "Don't just talk the talk of diversity, but walk the walk of diversity...
...more graphics...
...As for "reverse discrimination," Simpson asked one panelist about that, in a way that suggested there could be no such problem...
...troops and CNN's Baghdad crew), he unfurled it over the podium, right there in front of the lunching editors...
...1=1 masticasi ^ = vsa ^ Win" EVERATION DATE ow_ j Express ACCOUNT NUMBER SIGNATURE KNOWLEDGE"' PRODUCTSI Customer Service Center • Box 305151 • Nashville, TN 37230 0074 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 23 preme Court decide the famous Bakke case...
...One of the panelists let slip a reference to a newspaper's "racial hiring policy...
...She claimed that race relations were deteriorating nationwide, and noted with alarm that some editors, in responding to an ASNE questionnaire on minority hiring, had responded, "None of your damned business," and Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the ir...
...Yet like all Knowledge Products productions, the full substance and content of these ideas are presented in clear and understandable language...
...Perhaps some of the editors did the same...
...74 TO START YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TODAY...
...What's a diversity-conscious editor to do...
...Another editor wondered about how you keep minority journalistsaround since they're always getting hired away by bigger papers...
...One Kentucky editor said his attempt to hire a young Hispanic from another state was rejected on grounds that his city had very few Hispanics...
...The potentials thought of themselves as busy but not harried...
...Ethics and Public Policy Center in Wash- Po ington, D.C...
...You'll hear about the lives of classic authors and great historical leaders, the influences on their work, the criticisms and praises of observers, and much more...
...I'll bet that the number of newspapers that truly major in such news, with in-depth reporting and analyses, will dwindle to a handful, and that most of these will have national (the New York Times) or at least large regional (the Miami Herald) circulations...
...Interest in newspapers depends on the kind of news published, and war news is maximally interesting...
...One in every four hires at the Washington Post must be a minority...
...Each presentation combines the skill and imagination of talented actors with the narration of leading American journalists like Cbarlton Heston, Walter Cronkite, Louis Rukeyser and George C. Scott...
...Keys to Our Survival," as the glossy report is titled, suggests that of the 45 percent of American adults who don't read newspapers daily, more than half-26 percent—just might acquire the habit if newspapers change their ways...
...There is a 50 percent minority hiring quota, or "goal," at the Philadelphia Inquirer...
...This, by the way, is a common-sensical connection found in literature as old as the Bible, which admonishes the reader (in the Proverbs) to "guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life...
...The survey research suggested ways of attracting at-risks and potentials: no stories that begin on one page and "jump" to another...
...DRAMATIZED PRESENTATIONS The Audio Classics are not simply readings of great books — they are dramatized condensations of philosophy, politics, economics, war, and other timeless topics...
...Keys" identifies half of that 26 percent as "at-risk" readers, half as "potential" readers...
...Relief, just in time...
...You'll see how each philosopher created a complete and coherent system of thought, including their views on ethics, metaphysics, politics and esthetics...
...indexing of advertising...
...Perhaps more than anything else, America's newspaper editors are worried about whether their business will even survive the coming years, and if so in what form...
...How useful it might have been had the ASNE leadership put together an ideologically balanced panel of true equals that would have addressed not so much the limits of the First Amendment but rather the nature of the culture war that is raging in our country, thanks in no small part to the case law (a good bit of it written by First Amendment laureate Brennan) that has prevented communities from governing themselves in ways that at least do not undermine the possibility of living in accord with traditional moral precepts...
...Today market penetration stands at 67 percent—less than half the figure at the end of World War II...
...And only 28 percent of younger adults (ages 18-29) bother to pick up a daily, according to a poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center...
...such a charge, the editors learned, is referred to a "pluralism committee...
...Lewis Summer Institute, Oxford • P.O...
...In the wake of the Persian Gulf War, a variety of speakers were brought to Boston to talk on matters of war and peace...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
