I had a friend who would often ask me about liberal bias in the news. This started in the 1980’s when I was young and naive and just starting my career in the liberal elite media. I didn’t know at the time about my elite status or I would have found a better apartment. My answer to him then turned out to be consistent with what I know now.
Journalists, by nature and tradition, challenge the status quo. The old saying about “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” is one of my favorites. The comfortable tend to be richer, with more political power and more opportunities to take advantage of the rest of us. That’s not a partisan distinction by any means. We tend to stand up to authority, just at the framers of the Constitution asked us to do.
I’m still surprised that I was able to have a relatively cogent idea like that at the time. I was much more motivated by money than by principles. I have always worked in local TV news, which is a different animal than the national media. Local TV news was in its prime in the 1990’s. The style was created by consultants and news directors, who saw that hyper-paced, flashy, loud and sexy would attract eyeballs to the TV. Those who questioned the sensationalism were derided as “Big J journalists.” That term survives to this day, used diminish anyone who questions a gimmick or insists on substance over style.
I loved it all, and I was very good at it. As a producer, I was all about the flash, the wow, the shock value. The idea of chasing “bad guys” with cameras was thrilling. The idea that the bad guy was ether Republican or Democrat never entered my mind. This was the time of tabloid television. Jerry Springer had higher ratings than Oprah Winfrey.
One of the pioneers of this style was Joel Cheatwood. First in Miami, Cheatwood created a formula that emphasized loud breaking news, live reports from crime scenes, fires, murders and mayhem. That news was delivered by young, super-sexy reporters and anchors. One of his innovations was the clear acrylic anchor desk, the better to see the ladies’ legs. The team motto was “if it bleeds, it leads.” Not to be too Big J here, but the notion of journalistic responsibility wasn’t found in any mission statement.
Cheatwood went on to be one of the founding producers of FOX News. As cable news emerged as a force in media, they lifted the flash and trash from local news and it worked like magic.
It worked for me, too, for a long time. At Jerry Springer’s old TV station in Cincinnati, I pounded out the Breaking News with fury, pushing the the term to new highs and new lows. The ratings went up, until the other stations in the market realized how easy it is to scream BREAKING NEWS even louder. The consultants were now telling producers to include at least one or two mandatory breaking news stories in each newscast. It was a zero sum game. Jerry Springer’s ratings declined, too.
I spent more than 30 years working in large and small newsrooms across this country. Even in our most extreme convulsions of tabloid ecstasy, we lived by some basic rules. You don’t report something if it can’t be verified by a reliable source, or at least two independent sources if you’re not naming them. Obviously, you don’t make up facts. You have a responsibility to tell both sides of the story. If you get it wrong, you correct it. I worked with very few people who were exceptions, eccentrics or obvious partisans. Those people usually flamed out or faded away fast.
We all know what happened to FOX News and then to our country. They stole our dirty tricks, then erased the part about attempting to be fair and balanced, even as they adopted that phrase as a winking, cynical slogan. There’s no need to verify anything, just make an outlandish claim about Hillary Clinton’s child sex farms or a deadly pandemic being a liberal conspiracy while thousands of Americans are dying from it every day, and the audience will accept it as the truth. The ratings will go up, which is the only true bias that has ever driven this whole industry.
Local TV has changed, too. The accusations of shallow content and sensational style eventually caught up to us. This business has consolidated into a few mega-corporations, some with an overtly conservative bias, others with more subtle directives to provide balance in an era of false equivalencies. In all of them, marketing departments lead the content as much or more than the journalists. Now, they just want to be your friends.
Give the people what they want. They wanted Trump and they got him. God help us when we find out what they ask for next.