The New Media Order

...In general, we now have lowest-common denominator journalism, where the sordid tends to drive out the important, where more people know that Robert Alton Harris ate pizza at his pre-execution dinner than could tell you even the most basic differences between the candidates on health care...

...Rather, it may be propelling that media out of the business of reaching the average man altogether...

...We need only look to the Los Angeles riots to appreciate the powerful forces such irresponsibility has unleashed...

...The entire presidential campaign shut down when Flowers made her allegations, and there was no way of pretending it didn’t...

...It was ho-hum news, barely covered...

...Talk shows from CNN’s “Crossfire” to “Donahue” are increasingly warping traditional campaign coverage...

...After all, most voters don’t watch “MacNeil-Lehrer...

...They just related the story without doing their job, which is to report...

...For lots of people the story was the story: The Star’s checkbook journalism, the “60 Minutes” rebuttal, and so forth...

...Worst of all, few major news organizations took the time to either check out Flowers’ claims about her background (many of which turned out to be bogus) or to track down areas of inquiry suggested by the tapes...

...Last month, South Africa announced that by the end of the year it would have a black president -at least on a rotating basis...

...Consider the Gennifer Flowers fiasco again...

...Or Maureen Dowd’s front-page review of Kitty Kelley’s Nancy Reagan bio...

...I played that game myself, getting some of the Gennifer details through customs as part of a media critique...

...But, believe it or not, Gennifer Flowers was never interviewed by any of the networks...

...The most poorly understood loss of control this year has been on the part of the media...

...At their best, Phil and Larry and Brian Lamb’s C-Span interviews are as democratic as American media politics gets...

...Recall that when Donahue interviewed Clinton, his audience wanted more issues, not more sex...

...In 1988, I began putting together a Newsweek feature called Conventional Wisdom Watch, not only for a good chuckle, but to alert people to the tyranny of the conventional wisdom, where elites think the same thing at the same moment-and are usually wrong...

...The pop media defines news as what’s visual and stark...

...Still, it’s hard to blame the big guys...

...And this past fall, over at The New York Times, a long (inside) article appeared when the story broke, rationally attempting to explain why the overdrafts were of minor significance...

...issue coverage is up...

...That means that when the process of regaining control resumes, there’s hope that it can be accomplished from the bottom up...

...Tens of millions saw her on Fox’s “A Current Affair...

...To have ignored that story completely would have been the equivalent of ignoring a group of strippers standing beside Clinton at an NEA convention...

...In fact, Brown and Clinton talk endlessly about it...

...The loss of control by despots and stultifying Communist bureaucracies is obviously the best news of the latter part of the 20th century...

...video technology takes TV where it has never been before...

...In the future, the national media may increasingly become an elite media shaping elite opinion-with The Washington Post, “The CBS Evening News,” and Newsweek all Still, it’d be foolish to assert that the new order is all benign...

...This points to perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the new media order...

...And many of the questions callers ask are good ones...

...Consider also the House Bank uproar...

...So the big media held up the story with asbestos mittens...

...Horse-race coverage is down...

...Ross Perot circumvented the print press and the networks and announced his candidacy on “Larry King Live...

...So confounded are editors that The New York Times, for example, consistently reports breaking character news as news briefs deep inside the paper and puts follow-ups on palge one...

...The problem is that-despite one’s best optimistic, antielitist arguments-the new hegemony of Phil and Larry clearly isn’t teaching Americans enough about the people who will lead them...

...Issues like global competitiveness, the S&L mess, and the deficit are hard to understand and a little boring...

...And after taking a drubbing in the weeks leading up to the New York primary, Bill Clinton helped reverse his momentum not by a sit-down interview with The New York Times editorial board, or even with Newsday’s campaign correspondent, but by poking fun at himself in a short appearance on Don Imus’ irreverent morning radio show...

...investigative work on the William Kennedy Smith case...

...Take the Gennifer Flowers episode...

...In the meantime, USA Today-a popular tip sheet for radio talk-show hosts-trumpeted the news on its colorful page one...

...And shows like “Donahue” and “Larry King Live” and some radio talk shows-which the elite media view as faintly demagogicactually contribute something positive to the political process...

...Clearly, the media elite’s in a bind: Damned by the highbrow if they do, damned demographically if they don’t...

...Call me Pollyanna, but I see a silver lining in this loss of control...

...Rather, it’s the thread that’s unraveling through the events of our time...

...You can’t ignore the story, but you can’t quite run with it either...

...Just as in the collapse of authority in the Eastern bloc-or in Washington-we are witnessing the dawning of a new media order...

...This may help to explain how America as a whole got into such a pickle in the eighties...

...Then again, she didn’t need them to get her story out...

...How Phil Donahue Came to Manage the ’92 Campaign by Jonathan Alter A loss of control: You could say it’s the thread running through the events of our time, but then the metaphor would be backwards...

...Today, his main hope for taking his case for redemption to the American people is on shows like these...

...Congressional leaders can convince The Washington Post they need higher salaries, and Bill Clinton can make nice with The New Republic...

...Jonathan Alter is a senior editor at Newsweek and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...he may decide to forgo the campaign plane altogether and run his campaign by satellite linkup...

...The world is freer now than at any time in human history, a strange and exhilarating concept we don’t often pause to consider...

...The Star and “Inside Edition” going for the same few -million people who run the country...

...fiber optics networks will soon bring whole libraries into the home...

...They’re neither confident enough to ignore the little guys nor humble enough-r crass enough-to follow up on their work...

...Even if they do understand the subtleties, though, there’s little incentive to try to explain them since they only lessen the punch of a sexy story...

...When they have gotten down into the dirt recently, it’s had a remarkable tendency to smudge: their own faces...

...With any luck, the democratization of the media will loosen the stranglehold of conventional wisdom...

...Desktop publishing now allows virtually anyone to publish a magazine...

...But if loss of control helped free the world, at home it translated into abdication of responsibilityon the part of government and the individual...

...When Vunity Fair ran a story mentioning the issue of George Bush’s alleged mistress, it was reported in a tiny box buried in the national section...

...And they will thus have ceded their connection, however tenuous, to the majority of can’t tell you, for context’s sake, that great presidents people who live-and vote-in America...

...A lot of journalists will make perfectly fine livings doing this (and certain elite advertisers will love it), but the big guns will have ceded the mass market altogether...

...At the international level, the loss of control is generally good news...

...First, when fewer than half of Americans vote, it’s pretty churlish to complain about fringemedia dominance...

...And, given the mass-market audience, sex is something even Larry King and Phil Donahue have to respond to...

...This is an expanded version of a speech he delivered before Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a Chicago civic group...

...At the national level, the loss of control has us fearing the apocalypse...

...But one bit of good news in the aftermath is that the idea of personal responsibility is finally getting a hearing...

...And it’s probably not teaching the smug media elite a lesson about what the average man wants in his news, either...

...But what talk-radio hosts and small-town editors did that the elite media couldn’t was reach the part of the country with an average income of $28,000, not $108,000-and let those folks communicate their opinions (or in this case, their outrage...

...Yes, the big media needed a comeuppance, and these tiny anlino acids now eating new media order is that spin control is now a hell of a lot harder for national politicians...

...It’s a quandary that will only become more complex as technology further restnictures the business of information...

...Sure enough, the public looked right past the establishment papers and spun into a frenzy...

...They allow viewers to ask questions and get closer to the candidates than they would in the requisite 60-second piece on “World News Tonight...

...These all have the potential to redefine power relationships, to further dilute the power of the media elite...

...The good news now comes at nearly the same pace as the bad news in the mid-to-late forties, when countries turning communist didn’t always make the front page...

...we should probably thank God that the fringe media, which reaches tens of millions more Americans than “Washington Week in Review,” is paying attention at all-that Phil’s fans get an hour with Brown and Clinton instead of just more lesbians who hate other lesbians’ mothers...

...C-Span broadcasts round-the-clock, real-time news...

...And in the media, it’s a mixed blessing, suggesting promises and dangers at the same time...

...One reason is because they can’t really tell you much about Franklin Roosevelt...

...As the midnight raise turned into a month-long controversy, congressmen were forced to make their case for upping their pay-something the fully sympathetic national media hadn’t really required them to do...

...A current despair away atbur certainty are generally healthy...

...Well over a year ago, The Washington Post ran a story revealing the mismanagement and overdrafts but downplayed its findings...

...One reason the national press didn’t wax indignant about congressional pay raises last fall was that to well-salaried Washington columnists, those raises seemed fully justifiable...

...Remember Fox Butterfield’s embarrassing...

...But when Dan Quayle’s press secretary, David Beckwith, was trying to spin radio talk shows not long ago about allegations of his boss’ drug use, he had to stealthily resort to identifying himself as “Dave, a caller from Washington, D.C...

...But what the candidates say when they aren’t attacking each other is not defined as news, SCI it rarely gets reported, so people think the candidaites aren’t saying anything, and on and on in an endless cycle of alienation...

...Actually, coverage of politics by the so-called national media has not been as terrible this campaign as in 1988...

...An additional-and not unrelated-benefit of the like Franklin Roosevelt had mistresses-that disqualifying a candidate on that basis is folly...

...Context-the sense of proportion-that was once something the mandarins of the business could control, is now in the hands of people who cannot be described as journalists...

...In some ways, that’s already happening...

...The candidates talk substance, but if people get their news about politics from a coimbination of “Inside Edition” and local news, they won’t hear it...

...The result is that the whole structure of the media, like that of other institutions, is coming unglued...

...Today, as we saw in the William Kennedy Smith case, when The National Enquirer sneezes, The New York Times catches a cold...

...People who say they can’t find details about where the candidates stand in the print press haven’t been trying very hard...

...And now, sick as it sounds, a whole presidential campaign may turn on the fact that Democratic mistresses are less discreet than R.epublican ones...

...Even network television is making a greater effort to cover substance...

...If the media splinter is arguably good for democracy, it’s also a swift kick in the pants for the national media, which can easily be insulated from the issues that affect middle America...

...The networks and other mainstream news organizations, which at one time dominated the election process, don’t do so anymore...

...News used to filter down from the country’s most powerful news organizations...

...Similarly, Jerry Brown has been more likely to pop up on the “Today” show or MTV than on “Nightline...

...Small media at large Regardless of whether the national media’s loss of control of the political agenda is good for America, it’s clearly not good for the national media, which are floundering perhaps more than ever...

...A woman asked me recently, “Why don’t the Democratic candidates ever talk about conservation...

...But it doesn’t matter...