Carnegie Corporation Holds a Journalism Forum

On June 19, 2002, Carnegie Corporation convened a forum of journalists, publishers, broadcasters and journalism school leaders for an open discussion about existing tensions over whether the news profession exists as a public trust, a bulwark of democracy responsible for keeping Americans informed of important issues, or as a business that sees its primary allegiance to shareholders and its chief responsibility to increase profit margins and ratings regardless of the quality of content.

Although most participants acknowledged that media serve both corporate and public interests, there is disagreement about how well the public is served.

Presenting the issue from the separate perspectives of print and broadcast media and journalism schools were Leonard Downie, executive editor for The Washington Post, Neal Shapiro, president of NBC News, and Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB).

Downie, co-author of The News About News: American Journalism in Peril, maintains quality journalism and healthy profits are not incompatible, but the “objective should be finding the balance between good journalism and good business. There’s a big, big disagreement about that between many editors and many owners nowadays.”

One factor influencing news business decisions is an increasingly fragmented market due in part to the proliferation of cable stations and the rise of the Internet. Fierce competition for market share has many newspapers and broadcasters promoting sensational and “entertaining” news, some say to the detriment of the public good.

But Neal Shapiro, as head of top-ranked NBC News, argues that profits earned from news programs, in combination with more sophisticated technology, have made it possible to report stories that could not have been covered in the past.

Speaking about news content, Shapiro said, “I do think the challenge for us in the commercial world is that we are not going to put on an hour of [something] really boring. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. Find an interesting way to do it. That, I would say, is a challenge to our producers in commercial television as opposed to PBS. That is the structure. We have to make a living at it.”

Countering Shapiro was Lawrence K. Grossman, past president of both NBC News and the Public Broadcasting System, “We need to look seriously at the content gaps that are critical for this democracy. We are getting a lot of headlines from all over the world, but no matter how many news channels we have, the perspective, context and in-depth coverage of critical, yet often boring, eye-glazing issues are simply not being done in this day and age.”
Deans of America’s top journalism schools see the academic sphere as a place to develop metrics for measuring how news companies serve the public, evaluating the quality and quantity of public service information, and tracking outreach to and inclusion of America’s increasingly diverse population.

Schell of UCB also sees journalism schools as catalysts for institutional and regulatory change, particularly in broadcasting: “Whereas the news business is a business…in the case of broadcast, the public owns the airwaves,” he says. Pointing out that commercial broadcasting licenses are issued for “the public interest, convenience and necessity,” Schell argues that the only way to guarantee the public is served is to ensure that an independent public broadcasting system is adequately funded. One proposal for establishing a funding stream is to use proceeds from the electromagnetic spectrum being auctioned by the Federal Communications Commission.

The forum grew out of a Corporation-funded series of meetings that brought together journalism school leaders to examine journalism education and its impact on the journalism profession.

“Journalism schools,” said Corporation president Vartan Gregorian, “have to be not only guardians of the First Amendment, but also the guardians of public institutions and public knowledge, charged with providing the critical distance, perspective and discernment of what is happening in our country in order to protect our democracy.”

A report about the journalism forum is available at www.carnegie.org.

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