Trivial pursuits
McCarthy, Abigail
here is mounting evidence that the media on which we depend for our knowledge of the world affect us powerfully, for good or for ill. There is also much evidence that we have come...
...Euro boosters claim the EU will succeed in balancing the global center of gravity, pulling it away from the U.S...
...One reader told the Post, "Never in American history has so much been said by so many who know so little about nothing...
...On the eve of 2002, the euro will begin to circulate as notes and coins, and the national currencies will be retired from circulation...
...Crime coverage has long been a staple in the news, but we have seen a steady rise in the time given to crime on evening news programs and the space allotted to it in the morning papers...
...In France they led to the ouster of Jacques Chirac's parliamentary majority and abandonment of many of his government's plans to begin dismantling France's vast social insurance system...
...No doubt Europe's forecasters foresaw the macro-economic cycle that is now showing itself...
...which has become an arrogantly titanic "king of the world...
...I think the Herald in the days immediately after the flood was the identity of this town," said Mike Jacobs, the editor...
...But newspapers and television news can do the opposite...
...On January 1, 1999, the EMU will launch the new pan-European currency, the euro...
...And there are objections...
...Although some journalists defend the media's performance on the ground that "it is news" and by citing the public's apparent appetite for the sordid, many others, to their credit, are critical...
...There is also much evidence that we have come to distrust these same channels and to hold journalists in low esteem...
...that is, by putting more emphasis on civic journalism in a time of diminishing straight news...
...The political stresses of this belt-tightening have been considerable...
...O n May 2 in Brussels, in one of the boldest experiments of modern political economy, the European Union (EU) gave birth to the European Monetary Union (EMU...
...No longer will the U.S...
...One way for print and television reporters and editors to buck this trend-and to regain public trust--is suggested by the Grand Forks Herald story...
...Another is handling straight news--what happened yesterday--as just that: sticking to the facts, giving information, avoiding opinion...
...The euro will become the official bookkeeping currency...
...But since January the media have come under attack from many critics for overkill in their coverage...
...With 290 million people, 19.4 percent of the world's economic output, and 18.6 percent of world trade (as compared to the 270 million population of the United States, with its 19.6 percent of world GDP, and 16.6 percent of world trade), aggregated Euroland represents tremendous economic and financial power...
...Ever since the "roaring" t w e n t i e s d u r i n g which tens of thousands of deutschmarks were needed to buy groceries, fear of inflation has been deeply etched into the German psyche...
...Clearly there has been an abandonment of personal standards, an increase of prurient curiosity, an addiction to the story resembling a fixation on soap opera...
...Replying, Overholzer admitted that good news about crime--for example, a drop of 22 percent in overall crime and 29 percent in homicides--got little play in her paper, in contrast to the detailed daily reporting of murders, thefts, and muggings...
...In 1991, Europe's odd couple managed to corral each other and most of the rest of the Europe into the Maastricht treaty, which set the ground rules for the euro...
...It was a touchstone for them...
...You don't realize how much all this endless negativism tears down people's hopes," wrote one reader to the Washington Post's ombudsman, Geneva Overholzer...
...In an article in the April American Journalism Review about this give-and-take, writer Sherry Ricchiadi quotes Pulitzer-winner James V. Risser: "The speed with which this story developed and the willingness of news organizations to use poorly sourced information has caused some of the criticism and for good reason...
...But now, "for the first time ever there is no line---it's both consequential and as grubby as it gets...
...The euro-chasers have all continually promised that monetary union will be precisely the thing that will bring good times to all...
...It seems to me the media went out of control on this...
...Jorge Pedraza THE EURO COMETH Bringing unity or fratricide...
...The different incarnations of the pan-European association have never stopped talking about it...
...A case in point is the way in which the reporting of crime news can negatively affect the way people view their own communities...
...The award recognized the paper's role in preserving the town's sense of community during the devastating flood there and its aftermath...
...She also took note of evidence showing that heavy watchers of TV news see the world as menacing, and tend to overestimate both the amount of crime in their communities and the criminal involvement of various ethnic groups...
...There could not be a more appropriate moment...
...Britain, Sweden, and Denmark have opted not to join for now...
...What effect, then, has the daily drumbeat coverage of the possible scandal involving President Clinton and an intern had on the national spirit...
...Quite unenthusiastic about the loss of their beloved deutschmark, they have made the once invulnerable Helmut Kohl, up for re-election in the fall, start to run scared...
...In a press conference Betty Friedan scolded newspersons for their obsession with the salacious and speculative to the neglect of more important news...
...CBS's Dan Rather expressed disgust with the media frenzy over Lewinsky...
...European leaders have been talking up European economic integration with considerable persistence since the end of WWII...
...dollar be the sole world currency reserve, fine-tuning monetary policy to its own advantage...
...This is what a good newspaper can do...
...Eleven countries--Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, and Ireland--are the founding members of what economists are calling Euroland...
...Journalists are now holding forums nationwide to examine their values and responsibilities...
...I just can't imagine Walter Cronkite sitting there reading a story that argues about the meaningfulness of oral sex or giving graphic details on it...
...To qualify for membership, annual budget deficits had to be reigned in to 3 percent of GDP, and the aggregate of public debt brought down to 60 percent of GDP...
...It went to residents of the community who were widely dispersed...
...The last seven years have been lean ones for the plump governments of the EU that committed themselves to monetary union...
...Greece is slotted to join by 2001...
...They will cease to exist except as souvenirs...
...Europe, it seems, is entering into fat years, even before the euro is launched...
...The citation accompanying the prestigious Pulitzer Prize spoke in similar terms...
...Consequently, the two countries do not exactly see eye-to-eye on fiscal policy...
...Until now there have been topical subjects too grubby for anyone except comedians or the tabloids to touch, and on the other side of the bright media line were subjects of high consequence," wrote essayist Kurt Anderson (New Yorker, February 16...
...Tensions have run high from Italy to Finland as governments figure out ways to reign in spending while not getting voted out of office...
...This is the essential point: in the gradual progression from straight news to Commonweal 8 June 5, 1998 "soft news" over the past twenty years, journalists finally seem to have crossed the line...
...For their part, the German electorate, having had to swallow the huge costs of unification, is disgruntled...
...Supporters in France, always attuned to questions of grandeur, like to say that this millennial event is "the greatest thing to happen in Europe since Charlemagne...
...People are reading and listening...
...In such a time the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for civic journalism to the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald in April was heartening...
...Even unemployment, the b~te noire Commonweal 9 June 5,1998...
...Paul Newman, for one, spoke in a television interview with wondering disdain of the networks that pulled anchors from Cuba during the pope's visit--"an event of international importance'--to cover the Lewinsky story...
...Letters expressing similar sentiments have poured into newspapers and magazines...
...French politicians, on the other hand, manifest a symmetrically strong need to keep their hand on the economic pump, always ready to prime it with a little more currency flow when political circumstances demand...
...The European Central Bank (ECB) will replace the central banks of the member nations and determine monetary policy for all of Euroland...
...Economic growth is picking up, inflation remains low, business investments and even that intractable beast, consumer confidence, are looking up...
...But France has always known how to push Germany's buttons with regard to residual war guilt and guilt about German economic success...
...This was done in the midst of an economic stall in which unemployment has remained near 12 percent across the continent...
...Picking up where Konrad Adenauer and Charles DeGaulle had left off, Francois Mitterand, sensing an uncannily familiar pull of the economic tide toward Germany, pushed in the 1980s for a monetary union that would "control" the Germans and their hegemonic Bundesbank...
...The Treaty of Rome proclaimed union as an eventual goal...
...With the launch of the euro the currencies of the Euroland states will be locked into a fixed set of exchange rates...
...We must hope that they will experiment with what will restore trust and forge community...
...MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, though he covered the story heavily himself, thinks journalists should exercise greater care...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 11
