Just how much trouble is the NY Times in?

The "Plamegate" issue has also brought a great deal of criticism on the heads of those who run the New York Times - including its executive editor, Bill Keller and its publisher, Arthur Salzberger. In particular, Judith Miller's actions have been the subject of much controversy. The Times's own public editor or ombudsman, Byron Calame, has opened up on his web site a public comments section that has been inundated with submissions; he did this after penning a stinging rebuke to Miller and the Times ("The Miller Mess: Lingering Issues Among the Answers") in last Sunday's paper - a rebuke that basically called for Miller to lose her job. Maureen Dowd, another Times columnist, also more-or-less called on Miller not to come back in a separate column last week.

Elsewhere, the Times has had criticism heaped upon it from all sides. Editor & Publisher editor Greg Mitchell has called for Miller's head. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has stated in his influential Pressthink site that the paper is now only the second best paper in the country, after the Washington Post (and only just in front of the Wall Street Journal). In an interview with Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources on Oct. 9, Rosen said that the Times

has lost the capacity to tell the truth about itself in this story. It’s completely overidentified itself and the majesty of the institution with Judy Miller and what its own people describe as her personal decision making… It isn’t the First Amendment drama that they think it is. It’s a much more complicated, darker and ultimately dubious tale.

Glenn Reynolds and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, also appearing on that show, seemed to agree.

So just how much trouble is the Times really in? Well, the paper's probably ready to let Judy Miller go (as quietly as possible), though that won't stop the criticism. Still, the paper's not about to shut up shop and shuffle off into history - it's still far too important for that. The Times remains financially healthy, both on its own terms and as the core of a significant media mini-empire that includes nineteen newspapers (including the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune), as well as eight TV stations and the widely syndicated New York Times News Service. Certainly it's true, as Slate's Jack Shafer points out, that this latest scandal - "like Jayson Blair's journalistic malfeasance and the embarrassments of the Wen Ho Lee episode before it - has sent the old gray palooka down to the mat once again, where we find it wheezing, bleeding, and struggling to find its feet." (The Jayson Blair incident, btw, also led to the resignation in 2003 of the Times' previous editor, Howell Raines in a cloud of uncertainty that seemed to infect all journalism for a while.) But the paper will get back up again, shake itself off, and keep going. Still, I note Rosen's position that the Times is no longer America's number one paper. I'm still pondering that one; but I am sure that the paper is in a continuing downward spiral, so if it's not number two - or three - yet, it could well slip down there before much longer. The New York Times has almost 110 years of accrued status, respectability and economic success - going all the way back to Adolph Ochs in 1896 - that keeps its stock high. But it can't keep taking hits like this forever.

One thing is for sure: Those liberals who hope that the Plame affair turns into another Watergate won't find their Woodward and Bernstein anywhere near Ms Miller. (Nor, for that matter with Time magazine's Matt Cooper, who caved in to the special prosecutor and whose bosses at Time willingly handed over his journalist notes to the grand jury investigation.) In fact, it's going to be tough to find any knight in shining armor in the media.

Trying to frame the Plame Affair investigation

As we're all waiting to find out what Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is going to do as his grand jury investigation into the "Plame Affair" wraps up, the Republicans are trying to get in front of an issue that has the White House deeply concerned.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, who pens the "This Modern World" satirical cartoon strip, is one of many who has commented on the new attempt by Republicans to frame the whole issue in a novel way by describing the whole process as a "criminalization of politics." This is something that's also now been spotted by a number of bloggers as well as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Real Time with Bill Maher. The Republican strategy is this: By repeatedly describing the whole issue in strictly partisan terms, and rubbishing the prosecutor as a partisan hack, the administration hopes to neutralize the political impact of any indictments (e.g., of Lewis Libby or Karl Rove) by presenting themselves as the victims of a vicious new development in American politics. It hardly needs pointing out that nobody on the right was talking about a "criminalization of politics" when special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was going after the Clintons in the '90s. But then the Clinton White House never had anything like the discipline and message control that the Bush administration maintained for four years. We'll see how effective this new strategy will be. But in any case, from a media analysis perspective, it's fascinating to see how a political party - especially one that's had this much success - responds when, really for the first time, it is actually losing control of the message and the agenda.

Race, class, poverty, and Katrina

On Thursday night I was a participant on a panel, organized by the SUNY Geneseo Philosophy Club, discussing "Race, Class & Poverty: Reflections on Katrina". I've reproduced my opening statement below, since it pretty effectively sums up my ideas and insights - such as they are - on how Katrina and its aftermath have impacted the media and the mediated national debate in America.

(Btw: The debate is also available on the web (or as a podcast) at the SUNY Geneseo American Democracy Project web site, at http://democracy.geneseo.edu/?pg=podcasts/index.html.)

Some seven weeks on from the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, how are we to make sense of the media’s role in the disaster visited on the Gulf Coast?

I'd like to tackle this at two levels. First a brief word on the “tactical” level, on the media’s day-to-day response, and then some more “strategic” comments about the broader implications of this catastrophe from a communication perspective.

First, at the tactical level, the dominant discourse remains that of a media success story. We’re reminded again just how crucial the mainstream news media are at times of national crisis, illuminating the scale of the tragedy, highlighting race and class inequities, aggressively bringing government officials to book, and all that. You probably remember watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper railing against government inaction. But then all the networks were getting into the act - even FOX, to their credit. Inevitably, though there’s also a strain of criticism against the MSM. Some critics now charge the news media in fact complicated the relief effort. Especially in the crucial early days, the media broadcast unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo—especially in New Orleans—of mass deaths, rape, pillaging, and anarchy, creating a climate of fear and suspicion that hampered rescuers. And then there is the criticism that journalists became too angry, too wrapped up in the story, and lost critical perspective. So what’s the truth of the matter? Suffice to say for now that the media’s intense spotlight can always be a force either for good or for ill—or even both concurrently.

But I’d like to move on and discuss the issue at the broader level – of whether, and how, Hurricane Katrina, as a catastrophic event, can provide the media with an opening to give serious consideration to issues such as poverty, race, and class. My answer isn’t simple. We really have to tackle it in three parts: In the short term, yes, absolutely, we’ve had a national debate of sorts, and that’s great; in the medium term, however no, not so much, I think; but in the longer term . . . maybe. I'll go into each of these in more detail.

First, the short-term answer: That’s the easiest. Yes, it’s clear that the hurricane got all of us talking about these crucial issues – sparking off a large-scale debate propelled by the seemingly revitalized news media that provided fuel for, and then amplified, the mood of national outrage at the scenes emanating from the New Orleans Superdome and the Convention Center. And we all remember those images. Suddenly reporters seemed emboldened to ask tough questions—and even tough follow-up questions—to those in power. Talking Heads, sources in the government and other powerful institutions seemed to forget their talking points, or were forced off them, and actually started talking to one another, rather than just battering lines of the day against each other. After all they, and we, were all trying at the same time to make sense of what was going on.

For a precious few days or weeks, we actually had something like a real national conversation about race, class, and poverty in America—a conversation that culminated in President Bush’s extraordinary prime-time speech from New Orleans’ Jackson Square last month, where he proclaimed to the nation that “poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality." Stirring words, right? A stirring moment in history, or so it seemed.

Yet already, it feels as if the moment is passing, the debate showing signs of closing down, as we face renewed concern about the budget deficit and a push for across-the-board cutbacks in government programs that benefit the poor. Powerful forces of the status quo—both within media corporations themselves and from their sources and benefactors in government—are reestablishing themselves. The news isn’t all bad, but the trend seems to be quietly reversing.

And in the political realm, there is little in the way of a concerted effort by anyone to provide a genuine attempt to address the issues raised by Katrina. As the Bush administration comes under fire from all sides for its Iraq policy, rising gas prices, the Harriet Miers nomination, and the continuing outrage over the Katrina response, Republican inertia seems to be taking over, while Democrats seem happy to sit back and watch the Republicans self-destruct – or so they hope. But this is bad, because powerful institutional voices making powerful, resonant and quoteworthy statements are the very fuel which drives any media debate—and remember, this is the only kind of debate we the public, are privy to, might even have a say in. This is how national policy and government agendas are influenced. So it’s important to all of us! The question is: In the absence of vigorous critical input, can the media keep the discussion front and center?

In the medium term, I’m afraid, the answer is probably no. The trouble is, the news media—in fact, all commercial MSM, do NOT like change or disruption to normal service. Now the media are not a monolithic entity, but most media organizations in the U.S. are inherently conservative, status quo institutions within the commercial paradigm. They like to be able to plan ahead, they don’t like to rock the boat, they tend to follow the path of least resistance, and they fall back on tried and trusted methods whenever possible, as long as these methods guarantee the media’s continuing obscenely high profit margins – of 20, 30, even 40 percent. Just think about how “samey” and prepackaged so many media products look, sound, and feel – whether it’s network sitcoms, Hollywood blockbusters, late night talk shows, local TV news, cable news, . . .. This all emerges from the countless reapplications of tried and trusted formulas. And as with news, so with all other media products. It takes a lot to shift the MSM from their formulaic mindset, even temporarily.

And here’s the thing: It’s only when a rare, short, sharp, truly catastrophic event—a 9/11 or a Katrina—comes along that the formulas and rule books are thrown away, at least for a while. Newsmakers have to fly by the seat of their pants, and even act like human beings. That’s when things get interesting. Now I don’t mean to universally slam all media news norms and routines – some are very necessary – but essentially, I’m saying, that in the current media environment, the extent to which we had a “real” media debate during and after Katrina is the extent to which the whole structure of news norms and media-source relations was temporarily torn down, forced into an ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants posture. Now that “packaged” structure is getting back up and running again—that is, getting the right sources back on their talking points, turning the cameras and microphones away from the poor and destitute and back to the rich and powerful, getting Anderson Cooper back in his studio. Normal service is, unfortunately, being resumed . . . well almost.

That brings me to the long term. Is there any hope for Katrina spurring a reinvigorated and ongoing debate about poverty through the media? Well, I think yes there is, but it probably won’t happen overnight, and it definitely won’t emerge independently from the media alone. Rather it’s a process that is unpredictable, and could take years to manifest.

And it’s a process that’s heavily dependent on broader political shifts (e.g., a reinvigorated Democrat Party and progressive movement – something I see little evidence of today). Or it could be a new strain of religiously based, genuinely compassionate conservatism. And government policy on the media has got to change as well (especially over media ownership rules and public service obligations). But essentially, new ideas for changes have to emerge from outside the MSM, yet come from sources that the media approve of and are willing to select, “legitimize,” and then amplify to the nation.

So to pull this all together: When Katrina opened a window of debate about issues that are typically avoided in the MSM, it really did two things. It reminded media organizations of their often-forgotten social responsibility to not only entertain consumers, but also to inform citizens of issues of importance in society. And, perhaps more importantly, it broke a status quo logjam that had, especially since 9/11, placed the news media in an exceptionally quiescent position, unwilling to really challenge the powers-that-be. 9/11 is the closest analogue here because it was the last catastrophic event that temporarily blew away the news media’s operating structure, and when that structure was eventually reestablished, it was done in a way that greatly favored the Bush administration’s view of the world—in other words, a new dominant, super-patriotic “war on terrorism” frame (with consequences that are now all too familiar to us).

We may now, at last, be seeing, at least, a revision of that frame. Katrina has given the MSM somewhat greater license to criticize the government across the board, to address questions of corruption, cronyism, the economy, Iraq, . . . all issues that, not coincidentally, have led to a sharp drop in President Bush’s opinion poll ratings. (and yes, there's a clear link between lower public support for an administration and an emboldened news media.) But if that momentum is to be maintained and extended to consistently tackle race, class and poverty as key national issues, it requires renewed political impetus from powerful and legitimated sources—frankly, it probably awaits the next Presidential election cycle, and perhaps a John Edwards or a Barack Obama to take a leading role. The media can’t and won’t keep doing it on their own in the meantime. Remember, that would mean the news media taking a harder road. And the news media really do not want to take the harder road, and won’t do it unless constantly pushed by powerful events and powerful individuals. Yes, the door’s been opened and they’ve been given a good hard shove. But it’s going to take a lot more effort and a long time for a real difference to be felt. And the impact will never be as profound as some hope. Maybe in five or 10 years people will look back on Hurricane Katrina as being the Big Event that changed the national conversation. But you can’t count on that. You can only hope for it.

Serving the public interest, convenience and necessity

An interesting Op-Ed piece in The Hill, a "newspaper for and about the U.S. Congress" reminds us about something that most broadcasters would rather forget about: their supposed public interest obligations under the Communications Act of 1934 and the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These obligations - which are supposed to be enforced by the FCC - demand that broadcasters continue to serve the “public interest, convenience and necessity."

Gloria Tristani, who served on the FCC from 1997 to 2001; and Meredith McGehee, director of the Media Policy Program at a nonpartisan government watchdog group, outline what these obligations are supposed to include: they should be about whether:

• "Our televisions can keep us alert and informed in national and local emergencies.
  
• "Our children can turn on a television and find truly educational content.
  
• "The voices and views on our airwaves reflect the diversity of our country.
  
• "People who are sight- or hearing-impaired can access all of TV’s educational, informational and entertainment programming.
  
• "We can be active and intelligent participants in our democracy with sufficient civic programming before elections."

However, they argue, in the current shift toward digital television - supposed to be completed by 2009 - broadcasters might be allowed to finally slip out from under these obligations, unless srong action is taken by Congress and the FCC, who "need to address how the transition to digital television will benefit citizens’ local, civic and electoral needs." Then, basing their position on the recommendations of a 7-year-old presidential commission on the matter, Tristiani and McGehee list a set of criteria that, they argue, "should define meaningful public-interest obligations that ensure broadcasters:

• "Air a minimum of three hours per week of local, civic or electoral-affairs programming on the most-watched channel they operate and a comparable minimum number of hours across other streams of programming they may provide.
  
• "Promote the FCC’s often-stated goal of diverse viewpoints and voices on television by ensuring that independent producers provide a minimum of 25 percent of broadcasters’ most-watched channel’s prime-time schedule.
  
• "Tell the public how they are serving the interests of their audiences by making this information available in a standardized, searchable format, not only at the station, but posted on the station’s own web site."

Seeing through the spin?

Is the Bush administration losing its deft touch in terms of media manipulation? It was notable (to me, at any rate) that, as I mentioned the other day, President Bush's photo-op at the NBC "Today"/Habitat for Humanity house build was drawing some criticism against both the show and the president. And some of the criticism (e.g., on NPR) also drew attention to how stage-managed Bush's "photo-op" seemed to be. Then. later last week, the President was criticized over a teleconference he gave to a very small and select group of US troops in Iraq. According to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, the pool report (i.e., from the designated reporter on the scene) described the event as follows:

The soldiers, nine U.S. men and one U.S. woman, plus an Iraqi, had been tipped off in advance about the questions in the highly scripted event. Allison Barber, deputy assistant to the Secretary of Defense for internal communication, could be heard asking one soldier before the start of the event, "Who are we going to give that [question] to?"

Now of course the Bush administration can argue (with some justification) that some sort of "scripting" or "choreographing" is necessary to make the whole thing run smoothly. But the more fundamental question is why the president bothered to do this in the first place? Was there any pressing national security need to talk to just these 11 soldiers? Of course not: it was simply another stagemanaged event to try to spin a news story in the president's direction. This is thus another example of what media historian Daniel Boorstin (who sadly passed away last year) famously called "pseudo events", i.e., stagemanaged events held only for the media and (usually) its television cameras. Boorstin’s groundbreaking 1964 book The Image: A guide to Pseudo-events in America, charted how the rise of the "pesudo-event" was displacing consideration (and coverage) by the media of "real" news (i.e., news that's not laid out on a plate for reporters to lap up.)

But what is different and interesting is to see some media outlets comment on the articiality of this event - interesting because typically most of the MSM like to remain silent about all the artifice and prepackaged "spin" that goes into the news they present; after all, they benefit from the massive "information subsidy" that PR and political "spinners" provide them with to make their job easier. (This information subsidy - a term associated with the work of Penn Annenberg professor Oscar Gandy - allows journalists to look like they're doing a whole lot of work while in reality much of the content they present under their byline is actually "borrowed" from spin doctors and PR professionals pushing a particular point of view.) This time, though, as with the house-building photo-op, a number of media outlets did tentatively point out, in the course of their reporting, the profoudly artificial nature of the teleconference (including the Associated Press, Newsday, Editor & Publisher, and CNN).

So what's going on? Certainly we have consider that, with President Bush's senior advisor and media guru Karl Rove otherwise engaged in giving testimony to the grand jury investigating the Plame Affair, the administration might have lost some of its touch. But other bigger factors might help to explain why the Bush White House might finally be losing its seemingly natural ability to frame the news through skilled news management.

This is hardly to suggest that the pseudo-event's day is passing. Bush's entourage has up till recently been stunningly successful at manipulating the media, setting the political agenda, and framing issues in the way it likes. Notwithstanding Rove's preoccupation elsewhere, the main reason that these tactics are starting to wear thin in this case are strategic, not tactical: the President's public ratings are at all-time lows following Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, soaring energy prices, and a prevailing sense of "malaise" and loss of direction in the country. More and more conservatives are openly questioning the President's handling of the war, the Harriet Miers nomination, and so on. At some point, even today, even the slickest spin machine starts to break down in the face of cold, harsh reality, and the news media (finally) feel emboldened (even if only tentatively) to tackle the administration and comment on issues that previously they had pointedly ignored (much to their discredit). This is a process that is only just beginning to be felt now. It's got a long way to go.

Can we avoid the ads? part 2

Gary Levin in USA Today brings us up to speed on the glut of ads and promos now overwhelming network primetime television. In the absence of any federal agency to regulate commercial time on television - neither the FCC nor the FTC regulate this - networks are free to put on as many ads as they like. The National Association of Broadcasters, the industry's lobby group, ran a voluntary code up till 1982, whereby commercials were limited "to 9.5 minutes per hour in prime time. But since the code was dropped, the number of commercials on prime-time TV has crept steadily higher." How high? Just about doubled, that's how high.

Across prime-time TV, the number of ads and promos has increased sharply over the years. A typical “one-hour” prime-time series clocks in at less than 42 minutes, down from 44 minutes several years ago and nearly 48 minutes in the 1980s. And shaving off the “previously on …” recap, opening credits and a teaser for next week's episode, Sunday's [Desperate] Housewives ran 40 minutes and 30 seconds, meaning for every two minutes of programming, there's a minute of commercials or promos for other network shows.

This problem runs across the board (or spectrum) and into cable TV as well, where "clutter" on channels such as MTV, USA and Lifetime is even worse. But Levin focuses attention on two of ABC's top shows - Lost and Desperate Housewives. ABC is the worst offender in terms of overloading its shows with ads, studies show - and this is further exacerbated by a recent change in how that network formats its primetime shows.

Until recently, dramas unfolded in four segments, or “acts,” often preceded by an introductory teaser that aired before the opening credits. Starting this fall, ABC required all drama producers to carve up each episode into six portions. For some shows, including Housewives, the first segment runs for nine to 11 minutes before the first break. Once viewers are hooked, they're confronted with four more commercial breaks, each about 3½ minutes long, over the next 45 minutes. To prevent channel surfing, networks increasingly avoid airing commercials between shows. Instead, they save several minutes of more substantial scenes for a show's ending and then move “seamlessly” into the next program.

The last tactic of "seamless" transitions between shows has been adopted by all the networks for some years now. But ABC's strategy overall takes it to a new low. The first time I noticed this new strategy, while watching Lost - one of the very few shows on network TV I try to watch - I was quite annoyed, to say the least. Yet it is surely set to become the norm.

Stepping back for a moment: It is amazing how quickly this problem is manifesting itself. As recently as April 2004, Television Week was excoriating three of the "Big Four" networks for broadcasting more than 15 minutes of "nonprogram'' material every hour during prime time in 2003. It noted then that one network, ABC, had breached 15 minutes per hour. Now ABC is close to breaching 20 minutes per hour of nonprogram material. Just how much more can viewers stand?

I know I'm ready to switch off, even though my wife loves Lost. One friend of ours now refuses to watch the show and has a simple alternative: He's waiting for the DVD to come out.

Katrina's Media Babel?

So, six weeks on (more or less), how do things stand with the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina?

The dominant discourse remains that of a media success story, with combative journalists going after the story aggressively (though sometimes too aggressively, some wonder?). Marc Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, argues in the latest American Journalism Review ("Essential Again") that Katrina reminded us just how crucial the MSM are at times of national crisis, illumating the scale of the tragedy, bringing government officials to book, and all that. He writes:

So as the summer of 2005 came to a violent end, journalism journeyed back, setting aside for a few days the allure of the Internet and the promise of a nation of citizen reporters. Once again, we understood the power of mass media, the shared experience of a nation gathering in its living rooms to see momentous events on television, to feel the satisfaction of reading a newspaper's first shot at making sense of difficult and complex times.

(This, btw, could be read an example of what prominent media scholar and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism professor James Carey would describe as the news media's centripetal "ritual" function, bringing people together in the national conversation surrounding the "drama" that was and is Hurricane Katrina.)

Anyway, Fisher certainly makes a powerful argument for a news media thumbs up - and much of it I agree with. But against this there is also a current of criticism against the MSM that has to be taken into consideration. Of course, at one level, we have to recognize that the more recent coverage has lost some of the edge that was so clear in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. All the networks are trying to figure out how to use the tragedy to boost their ratings. President Bush's photo-op at the NBC "Today"/Habitat for Humanity house build invited some easy (yet valid) criticism against that show as well as the president. But one strain of criticism goes deeper - and charges the media with making the rescue effort more difficult.

The basic argument is actually a familiar one to students of the media: It is that the news media, in reporting relentlessly, around the clock on a major issue, also ended up magnifying what USA Today describes as a "a plague of misinformation".

Robert E. Pierre and Ann Gerhart of the Washington Post, writing on Oct. 5 ("News of Pandemonium May Have Slowed Aid") summed their perspective up this way:

Behold the power of the media. Five weeks after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, some local, state and federal officials have come to believe that exaggerations of mayhem by officials and rumors repeated uncritically in the news media helped slow the response to the disaster and tarnish the image of many of its victims. With nearly all communications systems with people on the ground crippled, live television became a primary information source. "The television stations were reporting that people were literally stepping over bodies and violence was out of control," said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's press secretary Denise Bottcher, who was at the governor's side. "But the National Guardsmen were saying that what we were seeing on CNN was contradictory to what they were seeing. It didn't match up." "Rumor control was a beast for us," said Maj. Ed Bush of the Louisiana National Guard, who was stationed at the Superdome. "People would hear something on the radio and come and say that people were getting raped in the bathroom or someone had been murdered. I would say, 'Ma'am, where?' I would tell them if there were bodies, my guys would find it. Everybody heard, nobody saw. Logic was out the window because the situation was illogical."

USA Today focuses on the news media's strong tendency to report uncritically - at least initially - on comments made by government officials. With most other communication networks not functioning, most people - including rescue workers - were getting their news from CNN and Fox. And much of that news was just plain wrong. As USA Today 's Mark Memmott points out: "Much of what was reported as fact by government officials and the media during the chaotic first week after Hurricane Katrina turned out to be fiction." The paper goes on to quote John Hinderaker, "co-author of the widely read conservative weblog Power Line, who argues along with others that "the media need to take a hard look at their behavior." Notes Memmott:

“When the mayor said there might be 10,000 bodies, he was distraught, he was in the midst of a crisis,” says Hinderaker. “What was shocking was that news organizations would just pick it up and keep repeating it when there'd really been no basis for it.”

So there we have it: The downside of the media's megaphone (or the media's spotlight, if you prefer the metaphor first used by Walter Lippmann). Once again, we have to recognize how the news media can use its communicative power for ill as well as for good. It can draw attention to misinformation just as easily - at times, more easily - as "good" information.

Americans using new media

The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society.

From iPods filling commuters' ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like cellphones and Blackberry handhelds, media is everywhere in the United States, like much of the rest of the developed world.

So begins an AFP piece (reproduced on Yahoo! News) that takes another look at that study I brought up again a few days ago on American media use trends. Scholars at Ball State U in Indiana pretty much confirm the findings of a Pew Internet and American Life study on US internet use, published in January. The AFP piece notes that, typically, 70 million Americans go online every day (as of December 2004), up 37 percent over the previous year. "That figure looks set to grow, as new low cost technologies spread the benefits of the world wide web to social groups so far cut out of the information revolution."

Never mind Tribune ... What about the really big boys?

It seems that Tribune isn't the only big media company to be suffering some stock market blues these days. The really big boys - the "first-tier" TransNational Corporations that we hear so much about - are also hurting. CNNMoney reports that stock prices for the four biggest corporations – Walt Disney, Viacom, News Corp and Time Warner - "are down an average of 11.2 percent through the first three quarters of 2005." The article also notes that the S&P 500 was up 1.3 percent over the same period, so the media companies can't blame their lousy performance on a sluggish market.

In effect, there's been a major selloff of big media stocks going on. CNNMoney notes a number of reasons for this. Investors are worried about a weak advertising market, slow Hollywood box office sales this summer, and (even more worrying), flattening DVD sales. "What's more," notes the article, "many investors appear to be more attracted to the supercharged growth prospects of pure play Internet media companies like Google and Yahoo!."

Of course, we have to remember that this is only a relative downturn: Big media are still immensely profitable overall. And CNNMoney suggests that the selloff might have been overdone. But clearly the bloom is off the Big Media rose . . . at least for the moment.

Tribune Media's ailments

NPR's David Folkenflik (on Morning Edition) had an update Friday morning on the woes surrounding Tribune Media, which "is facing an eroding financial situation compounded by circulation scandals that have left the company in crisis." In some ways Tribune's problems are emblematic of what happens when a relentless drive for ever-higher profits eats into a media corporation's (supposed) public service mission and a broader societal drive to maintain diversity through regulation.

Tribune is one of the country's larger media entities - media scholar Robert McChesney (author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy) would describe it as a "second-tier" media company, right behind the Big 5 (or 6 or 7, depending on what you count) TNCs such as Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp, and so on. (Other powerful "second-tier" companies include Liberty Media, Knight Ridder, and Sinclair Broadcasting.) Tribune owns some pretty major assets nationwide: nearly 30 broadcast TV stations, "superstation" WGN, the Chicago Cubs, and - most significantly for concerned newsies - some major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Los Angeles Times. And the company's in trouble.

The company's problems seem to lie primarily with their newspapers, which have seen falling circulation and loss of advertising revenues. According to the Folkenflik, the company's newspapers recently secured a profit margin of "only" 17.5 per cent (high by almost any other industry's measures, but low for the obscenely profitable mainstream media). In other words, Tribune's making bags of money but not enough, because Wall Street expects it to make even more. So the company's managers (and its shareholders) are willing to see deep cuts to get their profit margins up. However, Tribune's "focus on the bottom line" has seen many of its brightest news editorial talent defect to other publications. Cost-cutting at Tribune's most prestigious paper, the Los Angeles Times has, according to some, compromised the quality of one of the country's top papers. But Tribune's bean-counters seem to think that higher profits can only be regained by focusing more on entertainment and local news (of the "fluff" variety) and less on "hard" news.

The company's financial problems go deeper, however. The January 2005 decision by the Justice Department not to contest a federal court ruling that blocked a relaxation of media cross-ownership rules also hurt Tribune. When it recently acquired most of its big newspaper holdings from Times Mirror, Tribune was hoping to be able to keep both newspapers and broadcast properties in rich markets such as New York. (This reduces competition, enables greater "synergy," and allows media companies to pool newsgathering resources, e.g., between the newspaper and local TV news staffs, thus allowing the company to lay off a good chunk of its workforce; shareholders love that!). But with the old cross-ownership rules either still standing, or in some flux, the company doesn't know whether it'll be allowed to continue owning both.

(This state of affairs, frankly, is very confusing at the moment. As CJR Daily explains, back in June 2004, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia rejected the FCC's sweeping recommendations to relax most ownership regulations. "The three-judge panel did, however, uphold the FCC's decision to lift the ban on owning a daily newspaper and television station in the same market. But the appeals court sought further clarification of this rule and other regulations" [My emphasis.] So the cross-ownership ban probably will finally go. But the FCC clearly is influenced by public opion and shifts in the political winds, which right now tend to oppose further deregulation in general. There's a new FCC commissioner, Kevin Martin, who's replaced the hapless Michael Powell; people are unclear about how Martin will act. So no-one can be certain that the FCC will, at the end of the day, actually lift the newspaper-TV cross-ownership ban. Markets hate uncertainty, so Tribune's stock price is suffering. Clear? No, not really, I know . . . )

Anyway, if the stock price keeps going down, and profits are less than the 20-30 percent "expected" by shareholders, it seems that the main thing to do is to make more cuts, especially in the newspaper division. And inevitably the thing that gets cut is hard news - the sort of thing news is supposed to help us be engaged citizens in a thriving democracy.

Makes you wonder if this is the best way to run a newspaper.