I spend a lot of time in this blog showing you what’s wrong with the news today, but for the month of July, I want to show you a little bit about how I think the media got into this situation in the first place. This has fascinated me for years, and I don’t think enough people know that what’s happening in U.S. media right now did NOT AT ALL start with Donald Trump. In fact, after doing a lot of research on the topic, I’ve determined that it’s been happening for decades at least, most overtly since the Vietnam War era.
I pitched a book about this to agents in 2018, but for various reasons, it was never picked up. I’m a firm believer, though, that everything happens for a reason. Over the last several years, I’ve spent time learning from some pretty remarkable people, way more knowledgeable than I. Between their guidance, my own extensive research and even the writing of this blog, I have learned so much more about how the decline in our media ties in to a much bigger picture. Still, my original premise, I think, remains correct. I truly believe that the downfall of journalism in America was facilitated by the rise in prevalence of broadcast (TV) news.
This post and next, I’m sharing the beginning of that book with you here on Substack. Today, I’m including the Introduction and Chapter One; next post, I’ll print the synopsis of the whole book, so you get a feel for the bigger picture. You may agree with what I write. You may not. It’s crucial to understand that I was a baby when much of this was happening so what I’ve written is not based on personal experience, but on extensive research and my professional experiences in the decades afterwards. I’d love feedback, honestly, from people who were adults during the Vietnam War era, as all I’ve ever known outside of research are the narratives the media has been feeding Gen-X-ers like me since we were kids.
Someday, God willing, I’ll get paid to write this book. In the meantime, my heartfelt hope is that these peeks at the manuscript help readers begin to understand just how old and extensive this nation’s media problem really is. *And - FYI - this post is a bit longer than my usual posts (and no pictures!), so settle in to a comfortable spot before you tackle it -
INTRODUCTION:
On Wednesday, November 7, 2018, in the White House press room, CNN news reporter Jim Acosta stood to ask a question of President Trump, as he’d done hundreds of times before. The exchange was about a caravan of thousands of migrants heading north toward the United States from Central America. Here’s the transcript:
Acosta (A): Thank you Mr President. I challenge you on one of those statements that you made on the tail end of the campaign in the midterms…
Trump (T): Here we go. Let’s go, come on, let’s go (whistles, motions to hurry up with his hands)
A: …this caravan was an invasion.
T: I consider it to be an invasion.
A: Mr. President, the caravan was not an invasion. It’s a group of migrants moving up from Central America towards the border with the U.S.
T: Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate that.
A: Why did you characterize it as such?
T: Because I consider it an invasion. You and I have a difference of opinion.
A: Do you think that you demonized immigrants in this election?
T: (interrupting) No. Not at all. I want them to come into the country but they have to come in legally. You know they have to come in, Jim, through a process. I want it to be a process. And I want people to come in. We need the people here. (Acosta tries to interrupt) Wait – wait. You know why we need the people, don’t you? Because we have hundreds of companies moving in. We need the people.
A: You had an ad showing migrants climbing over walls…
T: Well, that’s true. They weren’t actors.
A: But we’re not going to be doing –
T: They weren’t actors. No – it’s true. Do you think they were actors? They weren’t actors, they didn’t come from Hollywood. These were people – this was actual – you know – it happened a few days ago.
A: They’re hundreds of miles away, though. They’re hundreds and hundreds of miles.
T: I think you should –
A: That’s not an invasion, honestly.
T: I think you should let me run the country. You run CNN. And if you did it well, your ratings would be much better.
A: Let me ask you –
T: Next questions (looks around; female intern runs over to get microphone)
A: Mr. President – may I ask one more question (without waiting) are you –
T: That’s enough. That’s enough (pointing at Acosta)
A: Mr. President – I want to ask one more. The other folks –
(intern grabs microphone and starts trying to walk away but Acosta won’t let go)
T: That’s enough. That’s enough.
A: (to intern) Pardon me ma’am, I –
(intern turns, looks at Trump)
T: (To Acosta) That’s enough
A: Mr. President I want to –
T: That’s enough –
A: On, on the Russia investigation (intern crouches down in front of Acosta), are you concerned that you made –
T (pointing at Acosta): I’m not concerned about anything with this investigation because it’s a hoax. (Acosta talking the whole time under him). That’s enough. Put down the mic.
A: Mr. President – Are you worried about indictments coming down … (Trump starts walking away from podium; intern gets mic and starts walking away from Acosta. Acosta finally sits down).
T: (back at podium, hasn’t taken his eyes off Acosta the entire time): I’ll tell you what. CNN should be ashamed of itself (points at Acosta), having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn’t be working for CNN. (looks away)
A: I think that’s unfair –
T: You’re a very rude person. The way you treat Sarah Huckabee is horrible and the way you treat other people are (sic) horrible (still pointing). You shouldn’t treat people that way (points to someone else). Go ahead.
Reporter #2: In Jim’s defense I’ve traveled with him & watched him. He’s a diligent reporter –
T: (to reporter #2) Well I’m not a big fan of yours either, so –
Reporter #2: I understand.
By the end of the exchange, the intern had reclaimed the microphone, President Trump accused CNN of being “the enemy of the people” and the video footage of the whole event was already going viral online. In the days immediately following, the white house would revoke Acosta’s press pass, CNN would sue the white house and the public conversation about the whole event would turn away from the content of the argument and toward whether or not Acosta manhandledthe female intern who took back the mic.
Gone in a flash would be the shock at the whole thing – the shock of a President calling out a reporter in front of his peers, certainly. But for those who take journalism seriously, the shock of a reporter refusing to stop questioning the President, even after he’d said “that’s enough” eight different times. And the shock of a reporter shouting accusations at a sitting President, too, like a prosecutor in a criminal trial, ultimately making the whole exchange more about himself than the subject matter he was supposedly there to investigate.
Just days before, President Trump had been riling up audiences at midterm rallies nationwide, calling out “fake news” as “the enemy of the people”— claims the exchange with Acosta only fueled. By year’s end, in the span of just a few weeks, three more things would happen that would seem, again, to be proving President Trump’s point:
A CNN Journalist of the Year would confess to having fabricated much of his work, most notably on an assignment where the reporter spent months embedded deep in Minnesota “Trump country,” making up everything from sources to quotes, data and much of the actual storyline.
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson would begin promoting Merchants of Truth, her tell-all book about the dangers of the New York Times’ unabashed bias against Donald Trump.
And NBC News veteran reporter William Arkin would pen a public retirement note stating that “the world and the state of journalism (are) in tandem crisis,” noting that the news media can “no longer keep up with the world” and calling NBC and its peers “defender(s) of Washington and the system.” His most scathing assessment of the current state of news media? “The things this and most organizations fear most – variability, disturbance, difference – those things that are also the primary drivers of creativity – are not really things that I see valued in the reporting ranks.”
By January, those four events would, like so much news today, be quickly swept away in the fast-moving current of today’s 24-hour news cycle— “increasingly lost,” as Arkin described in his retirement letter, “in a directionless adrenaline rush” of social media.
But for those paying close attention, the four events would signal yet another series of flares shot up by the swiftly sinking ship of journalism in the U.S. today. Because even though, on the surface, each one of those events seemed to be about present day politics and Donald Trump, in reality, they had almost nothing to do with the nation’s 45th President at all.
Instead, they had everything to do with an eerily similar story that happened once before, in the late 1960’s, with then-candidate Nixon and the press. They had everything to do, too, with other, similar stories involving members of the media that have been playing out over and over again hundreds of times since then, with a different cast of characters each time but invariably with the same end result.
What if I told you that this story isn’t so much about politics as it is about television news, and the way it destroyed journalism over the course of the last sixty years?
More than 64% of Americans believe the media today has done more to divide the country than unite it.
I’m betting those same 64% of Americans would believe me.
Would you?
CHAPTER ONE
“News is what I say it is. It is something worth knowing by my standards.”
– NBC Reporter David Brinkley, 1970
It was early fall in 1971 New York and, on the spartan set of William F. Buckley’s current affairs television program, Firing Line, a, faint but ever-present curl of her own cigarette smoke hung silently around Edith Efron’s face. She, 49 years old and clad in a pink-patterned, floor-length gown, black oval-shaped glasses and short coiffed hair to match had been invited on the program to debate Andy Rooney, a seasoned news writer and producer for CBS sitting comfortably, one leg crossed over the other, in a dark blazer and grey dress pants. Efron spoke mechanically at first, but within minutes developed an authentic, confident, almost ethereal calmness that would remain with her throughout the rest of the hour-long show. Rooney, meantime, the theoretical man with an upper hand for all his years in the broadcast news business, started the interview indignant and condescending but by the end was mentally, physically and emotionally defeated, at one point nearly curling into fetal position in his chair on set.
Efron, who’d written for Time, Life, TV Guide and the New York Times Magazine (among others), was both discussing and defending—before an audience of roughly two dozen newsmen, no less—her latest book, The News Twisters, which would come out the very next day. The book was the culmination of multiple published articles and two years of research, and its sole purpose was to detail the results of a study she’d done in the seven weeks leading up to the 1968 Presidential election. The subject? Bias in broadcast news.
The subject should have been irrelevant thanks to consistent U.S. government regulation of the television news industry almost from its inception, and a then-law-slash-mandate called the Fairness Doctrine, the basic point of which (as its name implied), was to ensure that broadcast news was “fair” with respect to both airtime andcoverage of ‘conflicting views on issues of public importance,’ especially politics. The catch? No established method had ever been used or even devised, really, to monitor, regulate or realistically enforce the broadly-worded mandate. Making matters worse, a significant and growing chunk of the news-viewing population (and, at that point, the political community as well), had been suspicious for years, since 1964 at least, when Efron had written her first piece on the topic, that broadcast television news was unequivocally biased and skewed.
By the thousands, Efron noticed, TV Guide readers wrote in to express concern that reporters increasingly seemed to be presenting just one side of every story, a side many viewers weren’t entirely sure matched their own interpretation of things - a side that didn’t always match up with stories they were reading in the newspapers, either. Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey would speak out against the very same bias in 1968. Vice President Spiro Agnew would deliver a scathing public speech about it in 1969, which would be widely refuted by network news executives and anchors alike (although some reporters would concede Agnew was right). By the time Efron and Rooney would arrive on Buckley’s set, between 57 and 70 percent of viewers surveyed nationwide would agree with Efron, Humphrey and Agnew. Something, they all knew, was wrong with television news.
The research that prompted the public debate about bias in the first place began on September 16, 1968, seven weeks before that year’s Presidential election, when Efron—supported by a grant from the conservative-backed Historical Research Foundation and a team of 13 audio recorders, transcriptionists and researchers (plus her main partner on the project, lawyer, sociologist and public relations guru Clytia Chambers)—set out to do just that. Every weeknight at 7:00 pm, Efron and a handful of female helpers used audio tape recorders—the bulky, old fashioned, push-button kind, no doubt, because nothing back then was digital and VCRs, DVDs and DVR had definitely not yet been invented—to record the only three nightly newscasts then in existence, on public networks ABC, CBS and NBC (because cable t.v. didn’t exist yet, either). Their plan was to transcribe and then literally count the number of words spoken for and against a variety of hot-button topics of the time on nightly television newscasts: each of the three Presidential candidates, of course (Republican Richard Nixon, Independent George Wallace and Democrat Hubert Humphrey), but also the Vietnam War, violent radicals, demonstrators, “The White Middle Class,” Liberals, Conservatives, “The Left,” Black Militants and the Viet Cong. Efron and Chambers had decided that this admittedly “simple” method of counting words (which was also widely used at the time by networks themselves for tracking their own metrics) was the best way, given the technology of the time, to determine if broadcast news was actually biased.
Adding to the challenge was the fact that 1968 had been a year beset with more tragedy and civil unrest than any other in U.S. history. Through the lens of their television sets in living rooms across the country, families gathered nightly to watch as the world ripped apart at its seams. They watched increasingly disturbing film footage from the Vietnam War, where death tolls soared and where, contrary to President Johnson’s assurances otherwise, things did not seem to be going well for U.S. soldiers or allies. They watched Americans in cities nationwide erupt into violent civil rights protests after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, shot while standing on a Memphis, Tennessee hotel balcony. They saw images of a busboy cradling Senator and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy’s head on the crowded floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen after he, too, had been shot and killed. Two months later, they watched horrifying footage from the streets of Chicago where police and protestors clashed violently in the wake of the Democratic National Convention – an event allegedly so lopsidedly reported that it would lead to an FCC investigation of all three networks.
The results of the Efron / Chambers study, as revealed in Efron’s News Twisters, were astounding. Without question, they clearly illustrated that all three major networks, though technical competitors and the only sources of television news at the time, were delivering the exact same messages, almost in lockstep, regarding these hot button issues. Over the course of the seven weeks, newscasters and reporters spoke 17,027 words against Nixon but only 8,317 words against Humphrey, and 3,144 words against the U.S policy on the Vietnam War but just 700 words in support of it. Not only did the pair’s research show strong evidence of bias, especially where both the Vietnam War and the Presidential race were concerned, it showed that network coverage overwhelmingly corresponded directly with left-of-center beliefs that the war was bad policy and that Humphrey was the preferable Presidential candidate; this, Efron noted in the debate against Rooney, despite the fact that Nixon was clearly leading in the pre-election polls and the majority of U.S. citizens supported the Vietnam War.
Even more interesting was that the nightly television news broadcasts seemed to flat out ignore controversial causes to which left-leaning Americans were sympathetic. Throughout Efron and Chambers’ entire seven-week measurement period, all three networks aired just 81 words total about the Viet Cong, a communist-backed guerilla group that violently opposed both South Korea and the U.S., (zero words against them and 81 words in favor of them). During that same time period all three news broadcasts aired just 281 words total about “violent radicals,” as well (zero words in favor of them and 281 words against)—again, despite the fact that “a large fraction of the country is intensely concerned with the issue of the violent radicals in 1968, and the subject is constantly aired in the press,” notes Efron in News Twisters.
All told, Efron’s book presented a damning image of television news – one that not only fit the public’s narrative of imbalance and bias, but exposed an even more disturbing view of journalist’s underhanded methods and a lower level of shoddy reporting than anyone had ever suspected, among them: selectively omitting information from stories that could significantly alter the public’s perception; making “sweeping and groundless generalizations” without facts to back them up; overinflating the importance of small details to make an issue or event seem more widespread than it was; reporting on unmeasurable things like “the unconscious psychological motivations of (everything from) single persons to entire socioeconomic classes;” using vague language like “critics feel,” “experts believe” and “it is widely thought” to disguise a reporter’s own opinion; and asking “leading” questions to try and trick interview subjects into saying things they didn’t necessarily mean.
When the book was released, it resonated so clearly with news consumers it ended up on the New York TimesBestseller list. It also caused an immediate controversy in the broadcast news community, which then, as now, largely considered itself both neutral and unbiased. Though one unnamed critic would concede that “the book is useful in its exposure of the myth of political objectivity in broadcast news reporting,” Efron would also be accused of – among other things - using “long-outdated and inadequate content analysis techniques with no application of relevant statistical analysis.” CBS network executives would be so outraged by the book’s premise, they would launch a campaign to try and stop it from even being published (in 1972, Efron wrote a follow up to News Twisters called How CBS Tried to Kill a Book).
In the four-and-a-half decades between then and now, television news has eclipsed print as Americans’ number one source of daily news. But somehow Efron’s groundbreaking investigative work, which should have been a major wakeup call to the broadcast news industry, has largely been forgotten, and the state of journalism has gotten substantially worse. On nightly local and national newscasts nationwide, complex stories are consistently downsized into thirty-second soundbites. News anchors are valued more for their looks and popularity than for their ability to generate thoughtful and original content. Accuracy is an afterthought, as competing organizations trample one another in the rush to be the first in breaking news. And the entire broadcast news medium is overrun with an endless supply of news-lite programming more reminiscent of the Jerry SpringerShow than credible reporting of factual information.
In an extraordinary turn of events, the current political and journalistic climate is also uncannily similar to 1968. In fact, Efron’s book could easily have been written just last year; in almost every sentence on every page of News Twisters, Nixon’s name could be exchanged with Trump’s – right down to the journalistic descriptions of him as “overconfident,” “morally unprincipled,” “divisive,” “a liar,” “a danger to the country,” and “a racist” – and no one reading today would question the swap. Even more alarming? The underhanded “reporting” techniques Efron exposed in New Twisters (selective reporting, making broad unsubstantiated generalizations, asking leading questions, heavy reliance on anonymous sources and more) have now become standard operating procedure in newsrooms across the country.
In 1976, 72 percent of Americans trusted the media to be purveyors of mostly legitimate, bi-partisan or non-partisan information; by 2016, that number fell to an unprecedented 32%. By November of 2018, 64% of Americans surveyed thought the media had done more to divide the country than unite it while 72% of journalists surveyed just a few months before that thought of themselves and their peers as “very or somewhat trustworthy.” By 2021, United States news outlets have become the lest trusted in the entire world, with just 29% of U.S. citizens saying they trust the news.
In an era in which humans are theoretically capable of communicating with each other in more ways than ever, where up-to-the-minute news can be accessed 24 hours a day / 365 days a year, where there are so many national news providers in print, on television and online most consumers can’t even name them all and where nearly everyone—regardless of age, socioeconomic class or race—is armed with a smart device that connects us to any information we want or need instantly, this disconnect seems absurd. And yet, it exists and, per the above mentioned poll numbers, continues to grow.
At the very beginning of Efron’s 1971 debate against Rooney, she offers an eerie premonition, almost as an afterthought. Network news bias “is enormously dangerous,” she says, “because so long as you have actual bias on the air of a publicly owned medium which is supposedly regulated by a Fairness Doctrine, and when huge numbers of citizens are aware of this bias and are intensely angered by it, it is a setup for an assault on the First Amendment from which we might not recover.”
Implicit in this statement are two conclusions she reaches, albeit briefly, in News Twisters’ preface, about how to restore order in the world of news. If the government would abolish the Fairness Doctrine, and really all government regulation of television, she speculates, television stations would be afforded the same First Amendment Freedoms as printed news (the implication being that “the press,” she says in the Rooney debate, traditionally “offers a complete spectrum of opinion”). And, she adds, if something like “CATV” (the 1970’s name for what would eventually become Cable television) would become a reality and offer alternative news programming to the three major networks, news bias would become irrelevant by default, thanks again to the “complete spectrum of opinion” that would theoretically be available on air.
Fast forward to today. The Fairness Doctrine has been fully abolished, cable television ebbs and flows in popularity but is still thriving and the internet and social media have taken news to unprecedented new levels and availability. Based on Efron’s theories, bias in newsmedia should be irrelevant and Americans should have at their disposal the promised “spectrum” of thoughts and ideas. And yet, here we are, facing the lowest moment in the history of journalism. The broadcast news business not only hasn’t changed since 1968; in many ways it’s worse.
Efron had no way of knowing that the damage had already been done by the time News Twisters came out, and that the 1960’s trajectory of journalism in general was on already on the irreversible, and ultimately First Amendment-destroying course she warned about. She had no way of knowing that, by 2018, with journalism in almost every medium at its lowest levels of trust and popularity ever, the words “fake news” would become a shorthand means for describing the crisis, or that the nation would elect a President who would clash at every turn with an increasingly unhinged and openly hostile newsmedia that oftentimes seems fueled solely by its hatred of him.
But Edith Efron did know one thing: “To keep lying, idiotically, about the liberal orientation of a national news service, and increasingly enraging those to the right and left of that position who are fully aware that they are being lied to,” says Efron in How CBS Tried to Kill a Book, “is to court a disastrous reaction which can totally destroy the broadcast press and ricochet on to the print media.”
In other words, unless someone stepped forward or spoke up or did something about it, journalism as this nation had always known it would die, and in its place would be something else altogether: a frightening version of “news” based not on fact, but on a one-sided narrative manufactured by generations of well-meaning newsmen and women who could no longer see their own bias.
Thanks, Lisa. Ralph and I are going to start consciously listening to stories on NBC evening news to see if we think there is bias. Most of the stories are just fact eg. last night I believe the lead story was the assassination in Haiti,; then the building collapse in Florida; the tropical storm in the east; the withdrawal from Afghanistan and Taliban taking over. (NBC said the good about this - troops leaving, and the bad - Taliban may take over and it will be very bad for girls and women. ) Any stories after this I was probably asleep and can't remember. Ha. I know there was a story about Bill Cosby either last night or night before. NBC spent more time talking to his victims and getting their POV than they did talking to Cosby or his reps, but we did get a comment from Cosby. I guess you could say this was bias but I support this. I wanted to hear from the victims rather than Cosby. Of course I'm biased against the man because of the crimes he committed and he's out of jail on a legal technicality, not because he's innocent.
Before the Presidential election I think there was some democratic leaning bias on NBC. I could tell Savanah Guthrie did not like Trump. But I respect Savanah and she doesn't back down in her questions so I watched her. (And I'm leaning democratic myself these days, although I'm still half Republican meaning that I give Trump credit for doing a good job on the border, the economy, and getting a vaccine developed. ) If I want a republican bias on the news I'll watch Fox. Overall I consider NBC moderate and that's why I watch them. But Ralph and I will start looking for signs of bias, esp regarding politics and elections.