The Press After Watergate

...The power to inform, only dimly discerned in Servan-Schreiber's book, rests upon the ability to determine who wants to know what...

...Reviewed by David Bernstein Editor, Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" The junior member of the well-known French family of journalists, Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber has fallen prey to the working newsman's nightmare...

...instead, people go home and watch television...

...Much of The Power to Inform is a snip-and-paste collection of facts, anecdotes and opinions gleaned from the literature on the press familiar to readers of the Columbia Journalism Review, [More] and the like...

...It is no insult to Woodward and Bernstein or even Reston and Wicker, however, to suggest that many of the things wrong with the press before Watergate are still wrong, and that therefore this book is not as outdated as it seems...

...As a journalist operating in two worlds, he goes on to perform the more original service of placing our near-isolationist preoccupation with ourselves into a larger context...

...Many publications disappeared as a result, but American society as a whole was the real loser...

...After singling out the Times in New York and the Post in Washington, D.C., the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal, you discover that the rest are intended, not for the nation as a whole, or its governmental or business or opinion-making leaders, but for a clearly defined geographical province...

...Too few are experimenting with the role, function and definition of news in the innovative way that an abundance of media people are experimenting with computers, plate-making and typography...

...Typographical errors and infelicities of style abound, as they surely would not have 10 years ago...

...The Power to Inform, published here earlier this year, was intended as a timely analysis of the information industry, with some fresh transatlantic perspectives...

...Admittedly, such criticisms sound terribly stale following months of having one national scandal after another—from the resignation in disgrace of a Vice President to the impending vote on the impeachment of the President—thoroughly reported, analyzed and frequently uncovered by the media in fulfillment of their proper role in a free society...

...True, nobody rushes out on the street these days to buy a newspaper...

...The importance of the printed press in modern society is on the downgrade," declares Servan-Schreiber...

...And that is the heart of the matter...

...On the contrary, in the United States we have at least as many newspapers at present as we had 50 years ago...

...Any newspaper can assign reporters to blanket coverage of cops, crashes and conflagrations, along with occasional exposes of kickbacks in the Public Works Department or interviews with wifeless fathers for the family page...

...Yet total daily circulation continues to be high...

...Except for special events, every evening spent before the television screen is as barren as the next...

...A work on the media that speaks of a newspaper's "composition room" or a magazine's "editorial content" has been badly served by Paris translators and New York editors...

...The test of the breakaway from the past is the level of curiosity reporters and editors exhibit about the actions and passions of their towns—not merely the police blotters or the City Council calendars—and their talent for introducing individuality, fresh viewpoints and sharp writing into those big bland pages...

...In the matter of children's programs, chopped up with ads for chocolate-flavored dry cereals, this descent to the bottom of the intellectual barrel has reached critical proportions...

...The rest may occasionally try to imitate the leaders, but mostly they bask in their splendor...

...Innovators are rare...

...Compiling a list of the 10 best dailies in the country is a pointless exercise unless one has a sophisticated understanding of the function the other 1,700-plus papers should be serving...

...Servan-Schreiber writes: "For several generations now newspapers, magazines and television have wasted all their energies on the numbers race, forced by their advertising-based financial setup to attract great masses of people...

...All the women's magazines hand out the same advice, recipes and illustrations...

...most, regrettably, are not...

...If a local paper helps most of its readers understand their options on next year's school budget, it is probably doing its job well...

...Furthermore, he is too glib in attributing the fault solely to advertising: The grim truth is that we also do not seem to have enough talent to go around—and we have allowed our standards of performance to deteriorate...

...The barren sameness that Servan-Schreiber decried, pre-Watergate, remains with us...

...Instead of encouraging innovation, bold ideas, cultural diversity, and continued public education, advertising—because it is directed to the masses-has imposed conformity...

...Since too few people read those excellent publications, it is certainly useful merely to have their highlights brought together between hard covers...

...With all due respect to A. J. Liebling and his counterculture successors, a real need exists for a new breed of journalism critics concerned with what newspapers ought to be doing in the changed conditions of the 1970s...

...Servan-Schreiber is right when he says that newspapers are not really threatened by television, wrong when he says they could be killed by the unions...

...The majority of our community papers fail to satisfy the hunger of their readers...

...But it was written before the full force of Watergate came upon us, and we now view the news media quite differently than we did before they exposed the inner mechanisms of the Nixon Presidency...

...Today the media are respected by young people, tolerated by academicians, feared by politicians, and perhaps accepted by the public in a way that intoxicates most members of the Fourth Estate...

...But even the international approach can be misleading, especially when it relies on generalities...

...Its approach is sometimes a bit too mechanistic, but a genuine effort is made to consider each paper in relation to its local setting...

...Yet that is not all Servan-Schreiber does...

...Indeed, newsmen themselves often appear to be overlooking the reality that only a few among them, at a handful of newspapers, magazines and networks, turned the country upside down...

...It was "translated from the French with the cooperation of Paris Research Associates," but some of the associates were clearly uncooperative...

...The trap is a common one: We mourn the death of the New York Herald-Tribune while we largely ignore the rise of Long Island's Newsday...

...Daily newspapers all tend to look alike and their biggest fear is scaring off readers...

...The reason is that the reader-viewer looks to different media for different services: He watches TV for dramatic events like Watergate hearings or World Series games, relies on a news magazine for foreign and national developments, but turns at last, if he is lucky, to his hometown paper for the mosaic of news and comment that sees a local angle in an eclipse of the sun...

...His story has been overtaken by events...

...There is a danger, though, in assuming that we enjoy an enterprising press throughout post-Watergate America, stronger and more prosperous and better than ever...

...No one is there to stop or eliminate outmoded practices...

...Any newspaper can spend a little money and subscribe to a wide array of wire services to impress its readers...

...For example, Servan-Schreiber unquestioningly accepts "the rule of the disappearing daily" in every country except Japan...

...There is no such rule...

...A good start is the recent survey of New England dailies, Evaluating the Press, edited by Loren Ghiglione...

...He observes: "Newspaper staffs are hired, trained and paid to continue in the footsteps of their predecessors...

...It is the location, not the number, of papers that has changed, reflecting the movement of the population to the suburbs, the rise of suburban shopping centers, and the need for neighborhood news...

...Can an "advertising-based financial setup" be blamed for the inexcusably bad rendition of this book into English...

...Servan-Schreiber is on much surer ground when he turns to the basic problems of journalism as a profession...

...There is a greater hunger than ever to know what is happening in the community, how to cope with the prices at the gas station and the supermarket, what to do about corruption after you are bored by Watergate, how to deal with race, drugs, slums, schools, and old age after the rhetoric has died...

...In the afterglow of the press' performance on Watergate, we in the media are having some trouble locating that ability...

...Consequently, the question that should be asked about these local publications—and radio and television stations—is not whether they can get the goods on the White House but whether they give their own communities the kind of coverage that informs, surprises, delights, irritates, and illuminates...