PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Human Nature and the Newsroom One recent morning, I curled up with a New York Times column— Get Thee to a Mental Gym —by Max Frankel, recently morphed from editorial...
...CBS and NBC wouldn't touch the story...
...PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas Human Nature and the Newsroom One recent morning, I curled up with a New York Times column— Get Thee to a Mental Gym —by Max Frankel, recently morphed from editorial management to (uh oh...
...Here Frankel learned that "the nature of 'news' is shaped more by human nature than editorial discretion...
...In chapters like "The Color of Evil Is Black," Rivers documents how the news media overrepresent black men as criminals (fact: fewer than 1 percent of African Americans are criminals) and underrepre-sent them as law enforcers, "good Samaritans," and regular people...
...This would give Frankel real rectus femoris tendinitis, but that's not the only reason to make this part of your library...
...It was on the history of the news...
...ABC did a brief piece on it...
...Here vou will see less the hand of "human nature" and more the hand of powerful corporations and entrenched government bureaucracies playing a key role in determining what you do and do not get to see and read about in the news...
...You will learn, for example, that at the same time those lazy, fatcat welfare moms were being bashed on a weekly basis by the pundits for bankrupting America, seven of the largest oil companies in the United States owed the federal government more than $1.5 billion in uncollected royalties, interest, and penalties...
...I'm glad I took Frankel's advice and read around, for it further documented that "human nature" is not some ineluctable, transhistorical force that inevitably produces superficial, sensationalist journalism...
...Now he got a bit more exercised...
...Mail them all back to the magazine without subscribing—that'll teach 'em...
...hospitals each year than from airline and automobile accidents combined...
...Frankel began the column by urging that "mental laborers" need to "take time off to think new thoughts...
...Maybe Frankel needs a better trainer, for the bulk of Fallows's book bemoans just that—the news media's failure to inform its audience about the substance of Susan Douglas teaches at the University of Michigan, Her column appears in this space every month...
...EILEEN FITZGERALD SMITH different welfare-"reform" proposals, the impact of NAFTA and GATT, the successes and failures of various health-care plans, and so forth...
...Thev haven't had to go to a mental gym to figure that one out...
...Fallows leaves no room for the customary journalistic ambition to inform and instruct...
...Frankel does, however, commend Fallows's footnoting format...
...So the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" style of journalism appears, alas, to be inevitable, Frankel concluded...
...What did Frankel turn to...
...His solution...
...Is that a whiff of self-justification, wafting off the mental stairmas-ter...
...And they suspect they are getting screwed over, often with the complicity of the elite press...
...But they are also deeply interested in less flashv issues that affect their everyday lives...
...Another neglected story: Violations of child-labor laws are worse today than they were in the 1930s, and in 1992 alone, more than 64.100 children went to the emergency room for work-related injuries...
...To do this, they need to declare a reading day, when they crack open those journals, books, and magazines that have served primarily as dust-mote condos in the corners of their offices...
...But hey, it's human nature that Americans wouldn't want to know about such things...
...Or how about the finding that more people are killed or seriously injured in U.S...
...I pressed the mute button on the McLaughlin Group for this...
...Project Censored is based at Sonoma Stale University, and each year lists the top twenty-five censored stories of the year...
...the ridiculous and futile obsession with predicting future election results...
...Hyperventilating by now (and giving off a somewhat defensive odor), Frankel accused Fallows of trying to turn journalists into social activists who no longer just report the news, but become actors in it as well...
...and the rise of an elite corps of millionaire celebrity journalists completely out of touch with regular people—have undermined the nation's ability to discuss sensible solutions to our social problems and have made two-thirds of the American public deeply hostile to the news media...
...Fallows's book argues that recent trends in journalism—the overemphasis on which politician, or party, is "on top...
...the appalling undercoverage of substantive issues...
...pundit...
...Her chapters on the media's demoniza-tion of single mothers and the scapegoat-ing of women on welfare are also must reading...
...For centuries, it turns out, people have always been drawn to murder and mayhem stories...
...First he reported on an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington...
...Yes, people are interested in murders, hurricanes, and fires...
...Following Frankel's exhortation, I kept reading around, and dove into Censored: The News That Didn't Make the News—and Why...
...Next, Frankel read James Fallows's Breaking the News...
...I wrapped up my reading day with Caryl Rivers's Slick Spins and Fractured Facts: How Cultural Myths Distort the News...
...Fallows doesn't even get into corporate censorship of the news, but his argument was too much for Frankel who, in his rebuttal, proves Fallows's point that all too many elite journalists are in denial about the excesses and failures of their field...
...You will also learn that ABC's 20/20 was planning to do an investigative report on the dangers of fiberglass—currently in 90 percent of American homes—as a possible cause of lung cancer when the network bowed to the $2 billion-a-year fiberglass industry and yanked the story...
...Cooling down at the end of his workout, he tackles a truly big topic—"the blizzard of postcards that descends from every magazine . . . cluttering the floor and straining the back...
Vol. 60 • July 1996 • No. 7
