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- Last weekend, reports on the Internet,
in the New York Post and on the BBC told the story of young Danny Williams
and his quest to determine whether Bill Clinton is really, as his prostitute-mother
claims, his Daddy. The results of a DNA test should set the record straight
very soon. But the question I was asked on radio talk shows all over America
yesterday was: Why hasn't the "mainstream media" covered this
story yet? It's a good question -- a darn good question.
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- Let me try to answer it, not as a media
critic, but as a news professional who has spent most of my adult life
running daily newspapers in major markets.
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- There are a couple of institutional problems
at play.
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- When we say "the media," these
days, what we're really talking about is a very small group of newspapers
and one -- count 'em, one -- wire service that controls nearly the entire
flow of mainstream news. That's it. What Americans know from the establishment
press is based on the decisions and the reporting of a handful of people.
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- There are very few establishment news
organizations that are actually doing any serious investigative or enterprising
reporting. When they do, they count on it being recycled by the Associated
Press, which really holds a monopoly nowadays as the major wire service.
If it doesn't make it on AP, it didn't happen. And it doesn't get on AP
unless it is either written by one of their small coterie of national reporters
or it appears first in The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times,
Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune or another of those elite "serious"
national papers.
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- Think of how this story broke -- as a
result of enterprising reporting by a "trashy" tabloid magazine
and hyped by the dreaded Internet. If there is one entity more despised
by the media elitists than the tabloid industry, it's the fledgling independent
Internet news business. Don't you think it bugs journalists that Matt Drudge
and his laptop have more influence than 99 percent of the daily newspapers
in this country? Don't you think it bugs the elite old media, as they battle
trends of declining circulation and ratings, that WorldNetDaily, after
19 months of Internet publishing, got more than 1 million hits on Monday
of this week?
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- The other institutional problem is that
the news media has truly lost its way, its moorings, its sense of purpose,
its mission.
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- I know I have said this before, but it
bears repeating. The central role of a free press in a free society is
to serve as a watchdog on government. From Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson,
the Founding Fathers understood this. The American press instinctively
understood it and lived by that code for nearly two centuries.
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- Sometime in the last 30 years or so,
the press drifted in another direction. Ask most reporters and editors
today what the central role of a free press in a free society is and you're
likely to get a blank stare. That was not the case a generation ago, or
even when I entered the business during the Watergate era.
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- Nailing government officials for fraud,
waste, corruption and abuse were always the hallmarks of good reporting.
Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for holding government officials accountable
for their words and deeds. Not any more.
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- In the 1990s, the U.S. press establishment
crawled into bed with the government. Reporting on government today means
rewriting press releases, transcribing the words of official spokesmen,
standing in front of the Capitol with the videocam on and repeating what
you just read in The New York Times. Today, the government-media complex
is more scary than the military-industrial complex.
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- And that's how a story like the Danny
Williams story can go virtually unreported in the establishment press --
even though the whole nation is talking about it. Without the Internet,
you could learn more about the details of this U.S. story in London than
you could in Washington. Not a word in the big papers. Not a word on the
semi-official U.S. news agency AP.
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- It's just one more example of how the
"mainstream press" is digging its own grave. And it's why the
independent new media, which actually performs the mission the old media
were created to perform, are experiencing such unprecedented growth.
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- ___________________
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- A daily radio broadcast adaptation of
Joseph Farah's commentaries can be heard at http://www.ktkz.com/
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- © 1999 Western Journalism Center
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