S.

Robert Lichter Stanley Rothman

Linda S. Lichter
The Media Elite is the first systematic
study of the people who teil as nost
of what we know about tb v. orld
around us. Who are the mcr .bers of
this elite? What do they think about
the issues they report on? What di­
rections do they want American soci­
ety to take?
To find out, a team of social scientists
interviewed 240 journalists in a proj­
ect that already has received wide­
spread media attention. Comprising
the elite: staffers at the New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post, Time, Newsweek,
and U.S. News and World Report,
and the news departments at ABC,
CBS, NBC, and PBS. The journalists
were questioned about their back­
grounds, their voting habits, and
their attitudes on a wide range of so­
cial issues. They were then given psy­
chological tests designed to explore
their motivations and perceptions.
The authors also explore how the ma­
jor media reported some of the most
controversial stories of the last de­
cade—the safety of nuclear power,
busing for racial integration, the oil
co m p an ie s’ role in the energy
crunch. By analyzing these stories,
and comparing media coverage with
the views of academic or scientific
experts, the authors offer resettling
insights into when and how personal
perspectives affect reporting.
( ( 'outinto’ / ' ■>! i.vu.i?
S. Robert Lichter
Stanley Rothman
Linda S. Lichter

A D LtR & A D L K R
The Media Elite is part of a larger study of social and political leadership in
the United States of which Stanley Rothman is the director and S. Robert
Lichter is the associate director. It is sponsored by the Center for the Study
of Social and Political Change at Smith College, the Center for Media and
Public Affairs, the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia
University, and George Washington University.

Published in the United States in 1986 by

Adler & Adler, Publishers, Inc.
4550 Montgomery Avenue
Bethesda, Maryland 20814

Copyright © 1986 by S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and

Linda S. Lichter
A ll rights reserved. No part of this book may
be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lichter, S. Robert.
The media elite.
Includes index.
i. Mass media— United States. 2. Journalism— United States. I. Rothman,
Stanley, 1927- . II. Lichter, Linda S. III. Title.
P92.U5L46 1986 001.5^0973 85-28747
ISBN 0-917561-11-2

First Edition

Printed in the United States of America

To Renatus Hartogs, Eleanor Rothman ,
and Rose Batstone
 PREFACE ix

1 The Rise of the National Media i

2 Group Portrait 20

3 Whose News? 54

4 Inside the Media Mind 93

5 The Rashomon Principle 132

6 Media Meltdown 166

7 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights 220

8 Looking for J.R. 254

9 And That’s the Way It Is . . . 293

APPENDIX 302

NOTES 306

INDEX 337

vii
T h i s b o o k looks at the social, psychological, and political milieu
of the national media, and the relationship between this milieu and
news coverage of controversial social issues. Our findings are the
outcome of a lengthy and multifaceted empirical study that com­
bined public opinion polling, psychological testing, and scientific
content analysis. A t the same time, this is the first installment of
a series of books that will examine how social change in contempo­
rary America is shaped by competition among elite groups. While
the present volume is self-contained, its argument can best be
understood in this broader context.
In 1956, C. Wright Mills described a self-perpetuating estab­
lishment of corporate, military, legal, and political leaders he
called the power elite.1 His notion that a few people with common
social backgrounds and political outlooks made the key decisions
that determined America’s destiny was always overdrawn. Thirty
years later, it has been completely overtaken by rapid change at
the top. Today, the traditional elites are challenged by new opin­
ion leaders and institutions that have gained immensely in influ­
ence since the 1960s. Among the emerging elites are the public
interest movement, a vastly expanded federal bureaucracy, and a
national media network that serves as watchdog over other social
institutions.
The ultimate goal of our research is to illuminate the conflicts
among these strategic elites and trace their impact on American
life. Thus, this book is part of a larger study of leadership and
social change in America, of which Stanley Rothman is director
and S. Robert Lichter is associate director. This project was
inaugurated by Rothman in 1977 to test his hypotheses about the
role the new elites play in producing social and cultural change.

IX
 Preface
He initially chose to compare business leaders, the archetypal elite
of bourgeois industrial society, with the national media, a key elite
of America’s emerging post-industrial society. Later the project
was expanded into a full-scale study of a dozen contemporary elite
groups ranging from leaders in the military and religion to public
interest groups and the entertainment industry.
In 1978, Robert Lichter joined the project with primary re­
sponsibility for the news media study and direction of the data
collection and analysis. In 1979, Linda S. Lichter completed the
research team as a specialist in content analysis and director of a
study of television entertainment. This is the first of three volumes
describing our findings, which will appear during the next two
years. Robert Lichter is primary author of the current work on the
news media; Linda Lichter will be primary author of a book on
television entertainment; and Stanley Rothman will be primary
author of a broader account of elite conflict and contemporary
social change. That volume will present the findings of our entire
range of elite surveys in the context of his theoretical framework.
This work focuses on the national media as an emerging elite
whose role is central to understanding changing patterns of influ­
ence in American society. To a degree that was hardly envisaged
a generation ago, the major media stand at the center of the
struggle for social influence. They act as gatekeepers for the mes­
sages contending groups and individuals wish to send to each
other and to the general public. As a result, considerable attention
has been focused on the perspectives of those who staff national
media organizations, as well as their coverage of controversial
issues. Yet no previous empirical study has systematically exam­
ined both the life situations of these newspeople and the nature of
their product, to determine whether or how the two are linked.
This was the goal of our research. The studies in this book com­
bine two distinct elements: a survey of the backgrounds, attitudes,
and psychological traits of journalists at national media outlets,
and content analyses of how these outlets covered some of the
major social controversies of the past fifteen years.
The core of the book contains results from a survey of a
random sample of journalists at America’s leading national media:

x
 Preface
the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time,
Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, the three major commer­
cial television networks, AB C, CBS, and n b c , and public television.
We examine their social backgrounds, political opinions, motiva­
tions, and orientations toward the news.
The book also presents the results of in-depth content analyses
of three major public issues covered by the national media during
the 1970s and early 1980s: busing to achieve integration, the safety
of nuclear power, and the oil industry’s role in the energy crisis.
There are unusual features to both the survey and the content
analyses. In addition to standard attitude questions, the survey
instrument contains tests designed to tap the manner in which
journalists view news situations, and includes a set of ambiguous
pictures, the Thematic Apperception Test ( t a t ), which those
being interviewed were asked to interpret. The t a t is used widely
by psychologists to study personality needs and motivational
structures.
The content analyses are unusual both for their breadth and
depth and for their attempt to establish norms against which news
coverage is judged. For example, in order to check the accuracy
with which journalists have reported the views of the scientific
community on nuclear energy, we polled that community and
compared their actual views with journalists’ descriptions of them.
To minimize the possibility that we might affect responses
through our participation, we hired Response Analysis, Inc., a
commercial survey research firm, to administer the questionnaires
and collate the data. Moreover, the psychological material was
scored by professionals who knew nothing about either the nature
of the study or the persons interviewed. The content analysis
involved the development of empirical coding categories, which
can be reviewed and replicated by other scholars. The computer
tapes have been placed on file at the Roper Survey Center at the
University of Connecticut for this purpose.
Our methods and instruments are explained in general, non­
technical terms in various chapters of this book. Additional details
are provided in an appendix.2
The book consists of nine chapters. The first describes both the

xi
 Preface
unique and lasting features of the American media and the rapid
changes they have undergone during the past two decades. Chap­
ter Two outlines our findings on journalists’ backgrounds and
attitudes and develops the argument that the national media have
become a new elite. We also compare today’s leading journalists
with a recent class from the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism, for a glimpse at some of tomorrow’s poten­
tial media leaders.
Chapter Three goes beyond surface attitudes to examine the
orientations and preconceptions journalists bring with them in
covering the news. We consider their choice of reliable sources,
their selective perceptions of newsworthy events, and the ways
they interpret ambiguous social situations in light of their preexist­
ing worldviews. The purpose is to show how social and psycholog­
ical factors can structure journalists’ interpretations and descrip­
tions of reality in ways that are powerful, if subtle. The underlying
theme of this chapter is that much of the debate over media bias
is misguided. Addressing only the crudest overt instances of how
journalists’ preconceptions shape their view of the news distracts
attention from the far more prevalent and subtle psychological
processes that can operate beneath the level of conscious aware­
ness.
Chapter Four takes us deeper still into the psychology of lead­
ing journalists. By analyzing motivational material from the The­
matic Apperception Tests, we create a profile of the national
media based on their scores on social psychological dimensions,
such as the needs for power and achievement. After presenting the
findings, we speculate as to how these inner forces might help
explain some features of contemporary journalistic behavior,
ranging from a focus on scoops to an adversarial stance toward
politicians.
With Chapter Five our focus shifts from the newspeople to
their product. We discuss the role subjective or personal elements
play in all news coverage. If the news is something more than a
mirror of reality, how can one take its measure, since all reality
is mediated in one way or another? We describe a technique for
judging news content by the procedures of scientific content analy­

xii
 Preface
sis in conjunction with reviews of expert or scholarly opinion. We
then proceed to our three examples of content analysis, which
contrast expert opinion with news coverage of social issues that
combine technical and political elements.
Chapter Six begins with our most thorough content study, that
of nuclear safety. We trace the path of information leading from
scientific and technical opinion through journalistic attitudes and
practices and, finally, news coverage. As a norm against which to
gauge media coverage of this issue, we surveyed large samples of
scientists, engineers, and decision makers, as well as journalists,
on their attitudes toward nuclear power.
We asked Dr. Robert Rycroft to serve as project director for
this study. Dr. Rycroft, a political scientist who is associate direc­
tor of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Public
Policy at George Washington University, first surveyed the tech­
nical literature on nuclear safety. On the basis of his survey, we
developed a content analysis system to determine how major
media covered the significant issues in this field from 1970 through
1983. Finally, we compared the results of our polls and literature
review with the content analysis to compare news coverage with
the views of scientists and other experts.
The other content analyses followed this approach of compar­
ing expert knowledge with media coverage, though we lacked the
resources to actually poll the experts on busing and the economics
of petroleum. Chapter Seven presents findings on media coverage
of busing for racial integration from 1971 through 1979. The project
director for this study was Dr. Donald Jensen, who is a research
associate of Stanford University’s Institute for Research on Edu­
cational Finance and Governance. He reviewed the literature on
the social scientific evidence on controversies ranging from white
flight to minority achievement. The research team then developed
coding categories and analyzed coverage of the significant issues
in this debate.
The last content analysis, presented in Chapter Eight, con­
cerns the role of the oil industry in the energy crisis of the 1970s.
The research team for this project consisted of several individ­
uals with advanced training and/or professional experience in

xiii
 Preface
international economics. The literature review was conducted by
Eileen McColgan (M.B.A., Graduate School of Business, Co­
lumbia University). The coding was supervised by Karen Grip
(M.A., School of International Affairs, Columbia University) and
Joseph Hakin (M.A., School of Foreign Service, Georgetown Uni­
versity). The data analysis was conducted by Leslie Moushey
(M.A., international relations, Goddard College).
We chose to study the long-range coverage of complex and
ambiguous social issues, because underlying assumptions that
affect the ways journalists view reality are more likely to show up
there than in the coverage of relatively short-term and highly
structured events, such as legislative debates or election cam­
paigns.3
Finally, Chapter Nine reviews our findings and recapitulates
the overall argument about the relationship between journalists
and their work. This conclusion is also an introduction to the next
phase of our ongoing research, which will consider the role jour­
nalists and other strategic elites play in the current transformation
of American society.
Many people and several institutions assisted in the various
phases of the research. The project was made possible by grants
from the following foundations: Earhart, Harry Frank Guggen­
heim, Institute for Educational Affairs, John M. Olin, and Sarah
Scaife. Institutional support was provided by Smith College, the
Research Institute on International Change at Columbia Univer­
sity, and the Graduate Program in Science, Technology, and Pub­
lic Policy at George Washington University. The surveys of jour­
nalists and businessmen were conducted by Response Analysis,
Inc., under the supervision of A l Vogel. Other phases of the pro­
ject were administered with the assistance of Dan Amundson,
Barbara Benham, Robert Cohen, Jessica Fowler, Karen Grip,
Rosemary Hollis, Janice and Carol Mason, and Sharon Shambra.
Abigail Stewart and David Winter helped us to obtain t a t coders.
John Williams and Alan McArdle brought welcome order to the
chaos of the computer analysis. We also wish to thank collectively
the many student coders and research assistants who contributed
their time and skills. We are grateful for William C. Adams’ close

xiv
 Preface
reading of the draft manuscript, which prompted substantial revi­
sion and, we hope, improvement of the final product. Finally,
Audrey Wolf, our agent, and George Walsh, our editor at Adler
& Adler, brought fresh perspectives to the work that helped shape
a more readable manuscript.
 THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL
M EDIA

“ This has been the best generation of all in

which to have lived as a journalist in this
country.”
— Eric Severeid, CBS

S o m e y e a r s a g o , a reporter told the president, then late in his

second term, that he hoped the press hadn’t made the president’s
job too difficult. The puzzled occupant of the White House re­
sponded, “ What could you do to me?" It is difficult to imagine
those words coming from Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson.
As economist Herbert Stein comments in recounting this anec­
dote, “ No president since Eisenhower would or could have said
that.” '
In this era of the celebrity journalist and allegedly imperial
media, it is important to remember how far the profession has
progressed in recent years. Journalism’s rapid rise to social promi­
nence is bound up with a host of changes that have transformed
American life during the past quarter century. The emergence of
national networks in higher education, communications, and
transportation have ensured that residents of Manhattan, Kansas,
have access to much the same social images as their New York
City namesakes. In today’s information-hungry society, the media

i
 T he M edia E lite

increasingly play a crucial role in linking social and political elites

to one another and to the general public.
This expanded role, and the social changes underlying it, are
responsible for the new elite status that the national media now
enjoy. It is also responsible for the rising number of media critics.
Indeed, the increased scrutiny of news reports may be the supreme
compliment to the media’s perceived importance. Unfortunately,
much current media criticism is confined to short-term instant
analysis. It is criticism of the moment at the moment, no less than
news itself, and it is similarly limited by the ephemeral nature of
the material. If we are to understand the media’s changing role as
society’s mythmaker, transmitter of our shared sense of social
reality, we must begin by taking a longer view.

Media Made in America

It is no accident that America, despite its relatively short history,
took the lead in establishing a relatively free press. The rapid
democratization of American life, under the aegis of the classical
liberal ideology that defined the nation, is certainly responsible for
that development.2
Ideologically, America has been the quintessential bourgeois
capitalist nation. Classical liberalism, with its commitment to in­
dividualism, freedom, equality, private property, and democracy,
provided the common philosophical groundwork for both the
liberal and conservative camps in American politics.3This liberal-
capitalist ideology emerged in England from a secularized version
of Calvinism. There and in Europe, however, liberal-capitalism
developed in the midst of societies emerging from feudalism—
societies containing aristocracies, peasantries, and long historical
traditions.
In Europe, liberal-capitalism was part of a complex whole; in
America it was everything. As America lacked a peasantry, so it
lacked a genuine aristocracy, except for remnants from British
rule. And as it lacked a feudal heritage, so it lacked a history with
which to compare itself. For these reasons America developed
neither a class-conscious middle class, nor a class-conscious work­
ing class.

2
 The Rise of the National Media
This heritage is also partly responsible for the fact that journal­
ism for the masses first developed in the United States, followed
closely by England and other Western European countries. The
absence of sharp class prejudices and divisions in America made
it easier to envisage a mass press. Further, the United States
pioneered the technology of the mass press, just as it was to lead
the world in the development of the automobile and television for
the masses.4
While both America and Western Europe have been the home
of a free press, the American media (both newspapers and televi­
sion) have always differed from the European media for reasons
having to do with cultural, economic, and political factors as well
as with the sheer size of the United States.5
First, the mass media in the United States have been primarily
privately owned businesses, even though radio and television oper­
ate within the framework of public regulation of a sort. Yet in
most European countries, both radio and television have been
primarily public enterprises. Even where private enterprise has
recently come to play a more significant role, it is far less impor­
tant than in this country.
Second, while newspapers in the United States and Western
Europe are privately owned enterprises, the historical tradition in
the United States has been quite different. In Europe, many news­
papers and magazines began as the organs of political parties and
remained closely affiliated with them. Others began as organs of
the Catholic church, especially in countries such as Germany,
where Catholics considered themselves an embattled minority, or
France, where the church felt that it was crucial to protect its flock
from the secularizing and anticlerical tendencies of the political
Left’s presses.
The American pattern was quite different. To be sure, some
newspapers were party affiliated, and the Catholic press in this
country (as well as papers produced by other religious groups)
played some role. Since the mid-nineteenth century, however, few
publishers have emphasized such group attachments. That left
them free to concentrate on making profits, expressing their
views, and reporting the news. Even before the ideal of objective

3
 T he M edia E lite

reporting began to take hold in the United States in the late

nineteenth century, editors and reporters were not intellectuals.
They also had little sense of the clash of ideological positions so
characteristic of European countries.6
The differences between the European and American press tell
us a good deal about the American heritage. The United States
was characterized by a broad ideological consensus during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was assumed that both
liberalism (i.e., a democratic republic) and capitalism had been
handed down from on high. America did not develop a mass
socialist party; nor did it develop a traditional conservative party.
For some of the same reasons, the country lacked explicitly ethnic
or religious parties. To become an American meant to see oneself
primarily as a free individual, not as the member of some corpo­
rate group. One could join, indeed was encouraged to join, various
ethnic or religious groups, but one did not form political parties
based on them. To do so would have violated the underlying
American compact.7
It is no accident that the notion of objective news reportage
was first fully institutionalized in the United States at a time when
most European newspapers still emphasized interpretive commen­
tary. Living within the framework of a broad ideological consen­
sus, American newsmen, like most other Americans, found it
difficult to recognize that their view of the world might be shaped
by a particular set of premises, a paradigm or Weltanschauung,
which strongly influenced their views of social causation and
hence their view of what the facts were. Under such circumstances
the facts were merely the facts. As Michael Schudson notes,

Before the 1920’s, journalists did not think much about the
subjectivity of perception. They had relatively little incentive to
doubt the firmness of the “ reality” by which they lived. Ameri­
can society . . . remained buoyant with hope and promise.
Democracy was a value unquestioned in politics; free enterprise
was still widely worshipped in economic life; the novels of
Horatio Alger sold well. Few people doubted the inevitability of
progress.8

4
 The Rise of the National Media
Even in the 1920s and 1930s, as awareness of the inevitable
elements of subjectivity in news reporting began to grow in this
country, the response was to place greater emphasis on scientific
understanding and training in order to approximate as closely as
possible an objective reporting of the facts.9
On the other hand, the best European journalists, writing in
societies rent by more severe social conflicts and political parties
and ideologies based upon them, were far more aware that percep­
tions of social action flowed partly from the assumptions people
brought to them. These historical differences still influence the
manner in which American and European journalists approach
the news. Despite their greater sophistication today, those in
America still seem to find it difficult to recognize that the facts are
not merely given, but rather are, to some extent, determined by
the perspective one brings to them.
The American propensity for (and enjoyment of) exposing and
denouncing political leaders stems from a powerful populist strain
in the classical liberal tradition. Americans may have felt a strong
attachment to their socio-political system, but they were wary of
those to whom they delegated political power. As de Tocqueville
noted, Americans have always been more than willing to criticize,
expose, and denounce “ political malefactors,” though less likely
to develop fundamental criticisms of the political system than
their European counterparts.10
This difference is also partly cultural in origin. The European
establishment has always considered the maintenance of order
problematic. Their view derives from a classical conservative
worldview. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have
generally assumed that order is relatively easy to maintain if the
people are properly informed. To them the great danger lies in the
possible tyranny of those chosen to govern.
One other unique quality of the American media deserves
mention. Unlike most Western European countries, America has
historically lacked a national press. To be sure, there were maga­
zines with national circulations, growing newspaper chains, and,
even before World War II, a very few prestigious newspapers such
as the New York Times, which boasted a national influence.

5
 T he M edia E lite

However, localism was the dominant theme. The twenties may

have roared in New York and Chicago, but Babbitt dominated
Main Street in most cities around the country, including the ethnic
enclaves of metropolitan areas. In the short run, at least, most
Americans remained relatively unaffected by the middle- and
upper-class culture of the few cosmopolitan centers.
All these features of the American media predominated until
after World War II. Even in the midst of the great depression,
most Americans were not especially conscious of New York or
even Washington. Most also accepted the basic cultural and social
parameters of their society as good and right and thought that
those who wished to change them radically were either odd or evil.
This view was reinforced by the images obtained from the newspa­
pers, radio, and Hollywood. Newspaper publishers were relatively
conservative, as were those who controlled the airwaves and mo­
tion pictures.11
The working press was probably more liberal than were
publishers, and some newsmen were even radicals. But the reins
of authority were in the hands of the publishers, and reporters
who wanted to keep their jobs stayed in line. Publishers and
network officials also actively catered to the preferences of their
advertisers.
For the most part, however, the threat of economic pressure
was not the major force behind the media’s conservatism. News
and entertainment took the hue they did largely because publish­
ers and most reporters believed that was the way it was and should
be. Key elites in American society accepted the broad framework
of the American ideological consensus, and most did not even
realize that there might be other ways to look at the world. Walter
Lippmann, criticizing the New York Times’ hostile coverage of the
Bolshevik regime in the 1920s, correctly pointed out that the issue
was not the control of publishers or advertisers:

The news as a whole is dominated by the hopes of men who

composed the news organization. . . . In the large, news about
Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished

6
 The Rise of the National Media
to see----The chief censor and the chief propagandist were hope
and fear in the minds of reporters and editors.12

There were surely, in New York and a few other places, small
groups of radicals publishing journals, organizing workers, and,
with the onset of the New Deal, even entering government. For
the most part, however, their influence on the broader social,
cultural, and political underpinnings of society was marginal.
Even when some of these people rose to positions in the culture
where they might have an impact, a sense of limits (and fear) held
them back.

Television and the New Sensibility

Meanwhile, the nature of the American mass media was changing.
The changes were a function of both technology and affluence.
Improvements in communication led to the development of jour­
nals with large national audiences, while the development of the
jet airplane, universal automobile ownership, and a national high­
way system contributed to the breakdown of regional differences
and isolation.
Radio had also developed national audiences, and by the 1930s,
newspaper chains were forming, and national magazines, led by
Time and Life, were changing the consciousness of Americans.
Thus, the United States was beginning to develop a national
media network; that is, a relatively small group of media outlets
was increasingly determining the manner in which the world was
being presented to Americans. And these outlets were largely
centered in New York and, for political news, Washington.
The development of a national media network did not really
come to fruition until the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was due,
in part, to the emergence of television. By 1958, the number of
television sets almost equalled the number of American homes,
and the age of television began, dominated immediately by the
three major networks centered in New York. Given the expense
of producing programs, local stations came to depend on the
networks for both entertainment and news programs. At the same

7
 T he M edia E lite

time, the rapid growth of newspaper chains, and the death of

major newspapers like the Washington Star, reduced diversity
within the daily press. By 1976, media scholars Thomas Patterson
and Ronald Abeles worried that, “ Decisions about what the pub­
lic will know rest increasingly upon the beliefs of the small elite
which determines what they should know.’’11
By its very nature television added new dimensions to the
communication of information, and radically changed the rules of
the game.14By the middle 1960s, television was already transform­
ing America. Most Americans owned television sets, and adults
and children were watching television programs six to seven hours
a day. Television had become an integral part of American life.
Television is a major business in a competitive capitalist society.
Whatever the social and political views of those who make deci­
sions, the bottom line was, and is, capturing audience attention
and increasing the size of audiences. This is what produces profits
and ensures solvency.
Given network television’s need for mass audiences, and the
visual and experiential information it conveys, its emphasis is
bound to be on the personal and dramatic rather than the abstract
and discursive.
It is difficult to distinguish the effects of television as an instru­
ment of communication from its character as a commercial enter­
prise, but television clearly provides its audience with a sense that
what it views is true and real far more than newspapers, radio, or
movies. The audience sees events taking place in its living room.
Stories, documentaries, even drama assume a reality with which
other media cannot compete. Events are seen “as they happen.’’
The written word can be discounted, but pictures seen in the
privacy of one’s home are more compelling.
Television has also broken down class and regional boundaries
to a far greater extent than other media. Newspapers and books
are segregated by area of distribution and readership. Few but the
well educated read books on serious subjects, and the style of the
New York Times appeals mainly to those with higher levels of
education and affluence. Thus, newspapers and books encourage
the segregation of knowledge. Radio begins to break down that

8
 The Rise of the National Media
segregation. Television goes much further. The news is watched
by millions of Americans of all educational and social back­
grounds, and they see the same pictures and receive the same
information.
Television breaks down regional boundaries in information
retrieval as well. The same voices, the same accents, and the same
lifestyles reach rural areas in Arkansas as readily as the upper East
Side of New York. Insofar as those who live on New York’s upper
East Side or in Los Angeles help create the reality America sees,
so they help change the expectations and outlooks of Americans.
At one time a young person from a rural background or a
small town experienced a genuine culture shock upon enrolling
in an eastern elite college or even a major state university. He or
she experienced new and different lifestyles for the first time.
The cultural gap between rural America, the main streets of
small-town America, and urban metropolitan areas has been
considerably narrowed, and the influence of new metropolitan
styles created in New York or Los Angeles spreads far more
rapidly than it once did.
This narrowing cultural gap has played an important role in
weakening traditional ties of church, ethnic group, and neighbor­
hood. It has contributed to American social and geographic mo­
bility as much as the revolution in transportation, in part because
it has enabled Americans to feel almost equally at home in Osh­
kosh, New York, or Dallas. It has homogenized American culture
and nationalized it.
It is impossible to understand the revolution that took place
in American values and attitudes during the 1960s and 1970s with­
out taking into account the influence of television on the fabric of
American life. For the first time metropolitan America was
becoming all of America.
America has become, as Richard Merelman points out in
Making Something of Ourselves, a “ loose bounded culture.” 1’
Americans’ primordial ties to family, locality, church, and what
is considered appropriate behavior have eroded,’ and Americans
have lost their sense of place. They are not alone in this: their
experience is shared increasingly by Europeans and Japanese, and

9
 T he M edia E lite

certainly mass television is not the only factor at work. The revo­
lution is real, however, and the epoch we live in is quite new. As
Merelman puts it:

The contemporary weakness of the Puritan, democratic and

class visions of America has released large numbers of Ameri­
cans from comprehensive group identifications and from firm
social moorings. The liberated individual, not the social group
must therefore become the basic cultural unit.. . . Group mem­
bership . . . becomes voluntary, contingent and fluid, not
“given,” fixed, and rigid.“

Working-class parochials may continue to identify with their

co-workers, acquaintances, and neighbors, but public reality is
now such that we also know and develop intimate and intense
relationships with public figures of all kinds to a far greater extent
than we once did. The stars of television, from anchormen, to rock
performers, to politicians, have become pseudo-intimate acquaint­
ances.
The impact of television on the substance of politics has been
at least as great as it has been on our personal life. When viewing
political events, the facial expressions and hand or eye gestures
employed by political figures during an interview add a concrete
dimension to these people. Politicians who perspire on television
lose points with the public. The camera can make a political figure
look as if he or she is evading a question or is stammering and
confused, and situations that might never appear in print, or at
least would not have the same impact, routinely appear on televi­
sion.
Politicians and other newsmakers are caught exhibiting behav­
ior on stage that in other epochs would have occurred only off
stage, thus breaking down the barrier between the two realms. In
print, for example, politicians and others can set their thoughts
down carefully. They conceal their doubts, their boredom, their
prejudices when they present public statements. In the age of
television, however, this is far more difficult, especially in time of
crisis. As television becomes more and more ubiquitous, we all
have increasing access to backstage behavior.

IO
 The Rise of the National Media
The television revolution has also affected the approach of
newspapers and newsmagazines. In part, it has forced them to
turn to in-depth reportage of the kind television handles much less
effectively. It has also encouraged them, partly for competitive
reasons, and partly because television has created a new atmo­
sphere, to seek out the same dramatic offstage exposés that televi­
sion can achieve. However much Vietnam and Watergate later
contributed to the development of an adversary press, so did the
changing assumptions of media personnel as to what constitutes
news and how one deals with political figures.
Paradoxically, the advent of television increased the influence
of a few East Coast newspapers and magazines. What television
had done, of course, was to nationalize and standardize communi­
cation to an extent never before achieved in the United States.
New York and Washington styles and modes now became na­
tional styles and modes. The New York Times was read by the
New York and the Washington elites, and by those who produced
the news for the television networks. Thanks to their amplification
via television, the issues the Times considered important and the
approach it took to them would become national currency.17
Most studies agree that the key national news media today
consist of national television, the New York Times, the Washing­
ton Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and possibly
U.S. News and World Report. “
Since the early 1960s, television has been the main source of
news for the greatest number of Americans. Moreover, the public
consistently rates it above the print media and radio in terms of
credibility and fairness.19 Despite recent competition from Cable
News Network and elsewhere, ABC, CBS, and n b c continue to hold
the lion’s share of the audience. On the average, approximately 50
million people per night watch one of these three evening news­
casts. The Public Broadcasting Service is also important for its
upscale audience and the high prestige of its news division.20
Among print media, the newspapers and magazines listed
above outpace all others in their ability to reach decision-makers
and opinion leaders, as several studies show. For example, Co­
lumbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research examined

11
 T he M edia E lite

the reading habits of top leaders of American institutions, ranging

from senators and cabinet members to presidents of large labor
unions and chief executive officers of major corporations.21 Among
newspapers, the Times was most widely read, but the Post was
preeminent among Washington officialdom, and the Journal won
out in the business community. The three major newsmagazines
were just as dominant among periodicals. U.S. News usually
finished behind Time and Newsweek, but it was competitive in
official Washington, placing first on Capitol Hill.
No other magazine or newspapers came close to these six
outlets in their access to America’s leaders. These media are read
by various leadership groups because they are perceived as influen­
tial and important, and they are influential and important because
they are read by such groups.

The Sixties and Beyond

Even as the influence of the media grew, the nature of the journal­
istic community was changing. In the old days, most journalists,
like most Americans, went to work with high school diplomas at
best. While some journalists and executives on leading papers
were from upper-middle-class backgrounds, journalism most
often was a source of social mobility for working-class and lower-
middle-class youth. The generally Democratic sympathies of
working reporters in the 1930s were partly a function of their class
background.
After World War II the pattern changed. Increasingly young
people from upper-middle-class backgrounds began to seek jobs in
newspapers and television as an exciting and creative career that
would also have an impact on society. By 1961, a survey of the
Washington press corps found that four out of five members were
college graduates and one in five possessed a graduate degree.22
The professionalization of journalism reflected broader social
changes. Although enrollment at American universities had been
growing since the turn of the century, the post-World War II
period saw a quantum jump in college attendance. In 1940, only
5 percent of Americans over twenty-five years old held college
degrees. Thirty years later their number had tripled, surpassing

12
 The Rise of the National Media
the ten million mark. Between 1950 and 1974 the number of profes­
sionals in the work force also tripled, jumping from four to over
twelve million.23
This boom in education was bound up with America’s eco­
nomic growth and our movement toward a post-industrial society
fueled more by information than smokestacks. The number of
college faculty reached a half million by the mid-1960s, and social
policy increasingly came to depend on trained professionals whose
ideas were formed in universities. By the 1960s, the number of
these “ metro-Americans,” in Eric Goldman’s phrase, had reached
a critical mass capable of setting the tone of intellectual life.24
The combination of unprecedented affluence and intellectual
and cultural sophistication produced a cosmopolitan sensibility
that clashed sharply with the verities of small-town America.
Skeptical toward received truths and civic myths, critical of tradi­
tional norms and the authorities who upheld them, the new strata
of intellectuals and skilled professionals fanned out from the uni­
versities into government, think tanks, consulting firms, and other
elements of the public arena.
Subtly but inexorably the national press shifted its focus to
accommodate the upsurge of new opinion leaders and trendset­
ters. Coverage of the social and behavioral sciences increased, and
with it the need for more sophisticated and highly educated re­
porters who could keep up with intellectual developments and
their social and political consequences. Inevitably, this meant that
many top journalists would go to the same elite schools and study
the same material as the sociologists, psychologists, and econo­
mists whose work percolated down into the public arena. In order
to keep the average American informed about these developments,
the traditionally anti-intellectual working press was becoming an
adjunct to the intelligentsia. The days were numbered for the
self-educated newspaperman whose only degree was from the
school of hard knocks. In his place a new generation of educated
professionals began to bring the milieu of upper-status cos­
mopolitanism into the newsroom.
Then, in the 1960s, a changing journalistic profession suddenly
collided with a series of political conflicts. The result would prove

13
 T he M edia E lite

fateful for both the media and society. In its broad contours this
is a familiar story, and we need only recall it briefly here. During
the early 1960s many young reporters, just out of college, cut their
teeth on the civil rights revolution. A then-novel scenario of pro­
test, repression, outrage, and renewed protest was played out in
small towns and big cities across the South. This drama was
carried to a national audience by television crews and by print
reporters. The historic 1964 Civil Rights Act owed much to the
newfound power of television to mobilize a new consensus on a
political hot potato. In one study, almost two-thirds of the net­
work correspondents interviewed credited network news for the
passage of civil rights legislation. According to one n b c corre­
spondent, “ We showed [the American public] what was happen­
ing: the brutality, the police dogs, the miserable conditions
[blacks] were forced to live in. We made it impossible for Congress
not to act.” 25
In covering this struggle journalists could experience the ex­
hilaration of acting as patrons of the oppressed.26 To present this
story from a racist’s viewpoint, rather than a Martin Luther
King’s, would have been unthinkable. Good reporting seemed to
permit or even require a point of view and a choice of one side
against another.
Hard on the heels of the civil rights drama came another story
that pitted the press against political authority, but in far more
problematic and polarizing circumstances. The current era of
more adversarial media-government relations probably dates from
1965, the year American advisors were replaced by regular forces
in Vietnam. That summer CBS correspondent Morley Safer ac­
companied a Marine unit on a search-and-destroy mission in the
village of Cam Ne. Safer sent back a dramatic report showing the
Marines using their cigarette lighters to ignite the huts of the
villagers. His story stressed the futility of the operation and the
Marines’ apparent casual cruelty. In his “ closer” he asserted, “ to
a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-break­
ing labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince
him that we are on his side.” 27
The immediate effect of this broadcast was to sour the relation­

14
 The Rise of the National Media
ship between CBS and the Johnson administration, a portent of
future conflict. The Cam Ne story also became the prototype for
the battlefield vignette, a genre of reportage that presaged a new
style of television coverage. For it was not simply Safer’s critical
perspective that distinguished his report. It was the entire style of
the story, which was far more emotional and interpretive than that
of traditional journalism.28
Most importantly, the media were thrust into the middle of the
Vietnam debate, which divided newsrooms as well as homes and
offices. For the next eight years, the tenor of Vietnam coverage
itself became the focus of heated debate and recurring acrimony
during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Television was
most often the lightning rod. But the prestige press was also thrust
into the spotlight, most prominently when the New York Times
and Washington Post, along with the Boston Globe, published the
Pentagon Papers.
Tensions reached a crescendo during and after the 1968 Tet
offensive, when journalistic criticism of Vietnam policy was
capped by Walter Cronkite’s on-air call for peace negotiations.
Press critics, most prominently former Saigon correspondent
Peter Braestrup, later charged that the media had misrepresented
the outcome and significance of Tet.29 The resulting mistrust be­
tween the media and military has not yet abated.
In the early 1970s, even as America’s Vietnam involvement
wound down, a third front appeared in the now ongoing media-
government conflict. Watergate became the next major long-run­
ning story in a decade to pit the national media against political
authority. This time the Washington Post took the lead, though
the New York Times and television also played major roles. In
fact, the public image of a more adversarial media probably owes
less to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigations than to
the celebrated confrontation between President Nixon and c b s
White House correspondent Dan Rather.
In the years that followed Watergate, the national media rode
a wave of popularity and perceived power. They appeared to have
chosen the “ right” side in the critical conflicts of a turbulent
decade. Moreover, they had consistently picked the winning side.

15
 T he M edia E lite

They prevailed in conflicts with such seemingly entrenched forces

as southern segregationists, Vietnam hawks, and two once-popu-
lar presidents. They were courted by politicians and revered on
college campuses. Investigative journalism inherited the cachet
young activists had earlier conferred on the Peace Corps and
Nader’s raiders. Bright and idealistic young people flocked to the
profession, lured by the prospect of exercising both personal
creativity and social influence, not to mention the chance for fame
and fortune.
Inevitably, this wave of popularity crested and broke. By the
early 1980s, public confidence in the press had dropped sharply
from its Watergate high point.30Public criticism of media negativ­
ism and lack of fairness also began to emerge.31 A series of scandals
and libel suits also seemed to cast doubt on the credibility of
several major media outlets. At one point three of the most impor­
tant and prestigious news organizations simultaneously faced em­
barrassing and financially threatening lawsuits— CBS from Gen­
eral William Westmoreland, Time from Israeli Defense Minister
Ariel Sharon, and the Washington Post from Mobil Oil’s chief
executive officer.
Public disenchantment with the media may simply reflect
changes in the social agenda. After Watergate, the great issues of
the day offered less opportunity for the media to play the role of
public tribune. Issues like inflation and energy could neither be
explained nor solved by public morality plays. Television played
a major role in the Iranian hostage crisis, but the cameras proved
impotent in resolving the events they conveyed. Then, in the 1980s,
an upsurge of national pride, almost in reaction against a decade
of bad news, seemed to catch the media by surprise. For the first
time in two decades, the critical and reformist strain of national
journalism seemed to go against the grain of a changing Zeitgeist.
A profusion of conferences and columnists have debated the
significance of the public’s apparent loss of confidence in the
media. In actuality, though, they may not have risen so high nor
fallen so low as the conventional wisdom holds. Sociologists
Gladys and Kurt Lang recently deflated the popular myth of two
unknown reporters bringing down a president during Watergate.32

16
 The Rise of the National Media
Even in that time of triumph, the Langs show that the media were
less initiators than translators of elite conflicts to the general
public. As for their fall from grace, journalist and opinion analyst
David Gergen has shown that the public continues to hold very
mixed feelings about the media.33 Indeed the criticism to some
degree reflects a more general loss of confidence in social institu­
tions (for which the media, ironically, are often blamed).34 And a
1985 Gallup- 77mes Mirror survey concluded that the public sup­
ports a free press and gives it high marks for credibility, but is
quite critical of journalists’ day-to-day performances.35 Gallup
president Andrew Kohut summarized the findings, “ We believe
and value what [journalists] tell us, even while we also believe they
can be rude, biased, subject to outside influence and prone to other
sins as well.” 36
Even if their rising power and falling popularity are sometimes
overestimated, the national media have unquestionably become a
major force in American life and a lightning rod for political
activists and social critics. It may be hyperbole that “ one corre­
spondent with one cameraman [can] become as important as
. . . twenty senators,” as David Halberstam wrote of Safer’s Cam
Ne report.37 It may be apocryphal that Lyndon Johnson decided
his Vietnam policies were doomed after he watched Walter Cron-
kite reject them. It may be an overstatement that Woodward and
Bernstein toppled Richard Nixon. Yet all these instances of media
impact are not only plausible but widely believed. This in itself
illustrates the enormous strides in social influence the national
media have taken in the past quarter century. Once only a William
Randolph Hearst or a Henry Luce might have been credited with
starting or stopping a war, electing or defeating a president. Now
the focus of acclaim and blame alike has passed from the press
lords to working journalists themselves.
This newfound prominence has its price. Even as journalists
are courted by politicians and feted as celebrities, they are regu­
larly attacked for biased or one-sided coverage. Interest groups at
every point on the political spectrum are well aware that they need
the major media to get their point of view across. So it is not
surprising that they should use sticks as well as carrots in their

17
 T he M e d ia E l it e

efforts to secure a good press. Thus the media (especially televi­

sion) have been criticized as unfair to both business and labor,38
to Israel and the Arab states alike,39 and as tools of capitalist
domination and communist disinformation.40 Many of the darts
are thrown by the political Right, whether in the form of Accu­
racy in Media’s bimonthly barbs41 or Senator Jesse Helms’ dream
for conservatives to take over c b s . Less publicized but equally
entrenched is a leftist school of academic criticism that treats the
media as a tool of establishment hegemony. In this view, journal­
ists’ reformist instincts merely provide a safety valve that protects
the system from the most serious consequences of its internal
contradictions.43
As critics to the left and right of them volley and thunder,
some journalists don the traditional armor of objectivity. Others
admit that total objectivity is impossible but insist that fairness is
their goal. Still others wage a counterattack, asserting that, in a
Wall Street Journal columnist’s phrase, “ media bias is in [the] eye
of the beholder.” 43 There is some truth in all three responses. As
noted earlier, the American media have long aspired to an ideal
of objective journalism. As interpretive reporting has increased in
recent years, fairness has become the current incarnation of the
striving for nonpartisan reportage. Finally, some press criticism
undoubtedly reflects a belief that the media have deviated from a
correct political “ line.”
The problem with these responses from the media is that they
do not go deep enough. It is not only press critics but also journal­
ists whose perspectives may influence their judgment of the news.
Striving for fairness or objectivity cannot eliminate this problem.
At best it narrows the parameters within which personal perspec­
tives operate. Thus the author of Time’s “ Newswatch” column
recently rejected a critic’s suggestion that the press pay more
attention to viewpoints at both ends of the ideological spectrum.
He asked rhetorically, “ But how?” By playing up fears and suspi­
cions that the press itself believes to be exaggerated?” (emphasis
added).44
This comment cuts to the heart of the issue. What do journal­
ists believe, how do they come by their beliefs, and how do these

18
 The Rise of the National Media
beliefs influence the news? These questions will be the focus of
inquiry throughout this work. Our approach is that of the sociol­
ogy of knowledge.45We seek to know whether journalists’ perspec­
tives on social reality are guided by their backgrounds, their be­
liefs, and their inner needs.
This approach, like any other, is only as good as its results. It
is not enough to assume that the news reflects certain perspectives.
One must demonstrate this by examining both newspeople and
their product. That is what this book is all about. Moreover, there
are many other factors at work, among them professional norms,
the culture of the newsroom, and the dictates of the marketplace.
For all this, there is always a place for nuance and perspective in
the news, an opportunity to fill in the blanks. It is just this oppor­
tunity that draws many creative people to the media and exerts
a pull toward more interpretive news formats that let them express
their creativity.
It is unfortunate and misleading that such issues are usually
raised as questions of bias, which suggest calculated unfairness.
We regard them instead as questions of necessarily partial views
of social reality. Our goal is not to expose biases but to identify
the perspectives that inform journalists’ understanding. A side
effect of the debate over ideological bias is that it leads journalists
to oppose any examination of how their attitudes may influence
their work. Hence a Wall Street Journal reporter writes that “ one
needn’t rely on studies here; simple common sense suffices.” 46
On the contrary, serious scientific studies are precisely what
we need either to validate “common sense” or to expose it as
unreliable conventional wisdom. Since individual perspective, un­
like bias, is both unavoidable and infinitely adaptable, no one book
can complete this task. We can only begin to specify the conditions
of journalists’ changing social and psychological situations and
their relation to the news product. This must be an ongoing effort,
one that is too important to be left to partisans.

«9
 “ This business o f us being a bunch o f parlor
pinks, limousine liberals and Harvard-educated
pink-tea types who look down our noses at
anybody who was bom west o f the Hudson River
is a lot o f baloney.”
— James Deakin, White House Correspondent

One premise of this book is that the

A r e t h e m e d ia b ia s e d ?
question is wrongly phrased. Between overt bias and pristine ob­
jectivity exist infinite shadings, subtle colorations, and elective
affinities between personal outlook and news product. The trail
that leads from journalists’ perspectives to the news they report
is often poorly marked. It winds through conscious attitudes,
unquestioned assumptions, and inner motivations. This chapter
examines the first factor in this complex progression, the actual
backgrounds and outlooks of leading journalists.

Who A re the Media Elite?

During 1979 and 1980, we directed hour-long interviews with 238
journalists at America’s most influential media outlets: the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time,
Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the news organiza­
tions at CBS, NBC, a b c , and p b s .1 Within each organization, in­

20
 Group Portrait
dividuals were selected randomly from the news staffs. From print
media, we sampled reporters, columnists, department heads, bu­
reau chiefs, editors, and executives. From television, we selected
correspondents, anchors, producers, film editors, and news execu­
tives. The result is a systematic sample of the men and women who
put together the news at America’s most important media outlets
— the media elite.2
To provide comparisons with a more traditional leadership
group, we also surveyed 216 executives at six Fortune -listed corpo­
rations, ranging from a multinational oil company and a major
bank to a public utility and a nationwide retail chain. They were
chosen randomly from upper and middle management at each
company.3The focus of our inquiry is the media elite. A t appropri­
ate points, however, we will compare their responses to those of
the corporate executives.
Origins and Destinations. In some respects, the journalists we
interviewed appear typical of leadership groups throughout soci­
ety (see Table 1). The media elite is composed mainly of white
males in their thirties and forties. Only one in twenty is nonwhite,
and one in five is female. They are highly educated, well-paid
professionals. Ninety-three percent have college degrees, and a

Table 1— Backgrounds of the Media Elite

White 95%
Male 79
From northeast or north central states 68
From metropolitan area 42
Father graduated college 40
Father’s occupation “ professional” 40
College graduate 93
Postgraduate study 55
Individual income $30,000+ 78
Family income $50,000+ 46
Political liberal 54
Political conservative 17
Religion “ none” 50

21
 T he M e d ia E l it e

majority attended graduate school as well. These figures reveal

them to be one of the best-educated groups in America.
Geographically, they are drawn primarily from northern in­
dustrial states, especially from the northeast corridor. Forty per­
cent come from three states: New York, New Jersey, and Pennsyl­
vania. Another io percent hail from New England, and almost 20
percent were raised in the big industrial states just to the west—
Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Thus, 68 percent of the
media elite come from these three clusters of states. By contrast
only 3 percent are drawn from the entire Pacific Coast, including
California, the nation’s most populous state.
Journalism is a profession associated with rapid upward mobil­
ity. Yet we found few Horatio Alger stories in the newsroom. On
the contrary, many among the media elite enjoyed socially privi­
leged upbringings. Most were raised in upper-middle-class homes.
Almost half their fathers were college graduates, and one in four
held a graduate degree. Two in five are the children of profession­
als— doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so on. In fact, one in twelve
is following in his or her father’s footsteps as a second-generation
journalist. Another 40 percent describe their fathers as business­
men. That leaves only one in five whose father was employed in
a low-status job. Given these upper-status positions, it is not sur­
prising that their families were relatively well off. Nearly half rate
their family’s income as above average while they were growing
up, compared to one in four who view their early economic status
as below average.
A distinctive characteristic of the media elite is its secular
outlook. Exactly half eschew any religious affiliation. Another 14
percent are Jewish, and almost one in four (23 percent) was raised
in a Jewish household. Only one in five identify as Protestant, and
one in eight as Catholic. Very few are regular churchgoers. Only
8 percent go to church or synagogue weekly, and 86 percent
seldom or never attend religious services.
In sum, substantial numbers of the media elite grew up at a
distance from the social and cultural traditions of small-town
middle America. Instead, they came from big cities in the north­
east and north central states. Their parents were mostly well off,

22
 Group Portrait
highly educated members of the upper middle class, especially the
educated professions. In short, they are a highly cosmopolitan
group, with differentially eastern, urban, ethnic, upper-status, and
secular roots.
As in any such group, there are many exceptions to these
general tendencies. On the whole, though, they are rather homo­
geneous. For example, we could find few systematic differences
among media outlets or job functions. Even television and print
journalists differ mainly in their salaries. The proportions of men
and women, whites and blacks, Jews and Gentiles, religious ob­
servers and abstainers are all roughly equal at the networks and
the major print media. Moreover, the family backgrounds of print
and broadcast journalists are similar in terms of national and
ethnic heritage, financial status, parents’ educational levels, and
political preferences.
A New Elite. What do journalists’ backgrounds have to do with
their work? In general, the way we were brought up and the way
we live shape our view of the world. And journalists’ perspectives
on society have obvious relevance to their work. Indeed, this book
is devoted to exploring systematically this basic point.
O f particular concern is the impact of leading journalists’ ris­
ing social and economic status. At the time of our survey, one in
three had personal incomes above $50,000, and nearly half (46
percent) said their family incomes exceeded that amount. As sala­
ries continue to rise, these data understate their current income
levels. By 1982, the National Journal found that well-established
reporters at the Washington Post and the Washington bureaus of
the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time earned from $55,000
to $60,000.4Reporters and editors at the Washington Post are now
required to file financial disclosure statements detailing holdings
in stocks, bonds, and real estate. According to a financial depart­
ment editor, “ it used to be rare that staffers had such investments,
but now that annual salaries average in the mid-forties and two-
worker families have incomes of $100,000 or more, they are more
common.” 5
Moreover, there is sometimes a considerable difference be­
tween salaries and overall incomes. Columnists, investigative

23
 T he M e d ia E l it e

reporters, and television correspondents are all in demand on the

lecture circuit, where they command four- and even five-figure
fees. In a 1986 article entitled “ The Buckrakers,” The New Repub­
lic reported that television anchors command up to $25,000 for
a speech, well-known columnists charge from $12,000 to $18,000,
and Time’s Washington bureau chief recently raised his fee from
$3,000 to $5,000.6Thus columnist Jody Powell recently castigated
his colleagues for potential conflict of interest over speakers’ fees:

Washington correspondents, anchors, bureau chiefs, columnists

and editors are frequent travellers in the lecture circuit too. We
speak to groups that have a definite interest in how we make the
subjective judgments that are an inherent part of our job. And
most of us get paid a good bit more than senators and congress­
men who are limited by law to $2,000 for a speech.7

This is not to suggest that these journalists do not earn or

deserve such incomes. By way of comparison, newly minted law
school graduates may earn over $50,000 annually in major New
York firms and over $40,000 per year in Washington firms. As this
comparison suggests, the figures merely demonstrate that leading
journalists are now solidly ensconced in the upper middle class.
Print personnel are still at the bottom of the media income
ladder. It is television that can make millionaires of journalists.
Anchors at all three major networks now make over $1 million
annually, and six-figure salaries are common among reporters and
correspondents.8Even public television can pay enough to attract
some network stars willing to trade top dollar for increased crea­
tive freedom. For example, correspondent Judy Woodruff joined
p b s ’ s “ MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” for $150,000 a year, half her

former salary at n b c .9 A s James Deakin comments, “ Over the

years, newspapers and magazines have written breathlessly about
the incomes of entrepreneurs and entertainers: John D. Rocke­
feller, Andrew Mellon, the Hunts of Texas, Clark Gable, John
Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor. Now it is the anchorpersons and super-
stars of television news.” 10
The journalist as millionaire celebrity, star of the lecture cir­

24
 Group Portrait
cuit, filer of financial disclosure forms— it is enough to make
Hildy Johnson turn over in his grave. It also makes many cur­
rent journalists uneasy. David Broder, a highly regarded colum­
nist and Washington Post reporter, recently wrote, “The fact is
that reporters are by no means any kind of cross-section. We are
over-educated, we are overpaid in terms of the median, and we
have a higher socio-economic stratification than the people for
whom we are writing . . . . There is clearly a danger of elitism
creeping in.” 11
Note that Broder’s concern goes beyond income level to en­
compass journalists’ new social and educational status as well.
Ironically, not so long ago media critics complained instead of the
profession’s low-status insularity. As journalist turned media
critic Ben Bagdikian writes:

Before World War II newspapering was one of those occupa­

tions that afforded working-class families. . . middle class status
or better. College educations were seldom required and were
often a disadvantage. . . [this] produced a majority of journalists
whose only perceptions of the outside world after they left junior
or high school were what they saw and heard in the newsrooms.
. . . It also provided a simplistic view of society and. . . the strong
strain of anti-intellectualism that characterized American news­
rooms for generations.12

Now the worry is that urbanity and cosmopolitanism bring their

own distortions, or at least limitations, of perspective. Thus, the
Post's White House correspondent, Lou Cannon, complains, “ As
reporters climb up the income scale, their social values change.
. . . The gulf is growing between reporters and working-class
Americans.” 13 Columnist Henry Fairlie gives this line of thought
more bite:

The most certain avenue to celebrity and considerable wealth [in

Washington] is not now in the institution of government . . . .
It is through the intricate networks of the media . . . the people
of the media are today the wheelers and dealers. Point to any
others so skillful at using the machinery of Washington, and so

25
 T he M e d ia E l it e

protected from any public challenge or scrutiny-----The media

have removed themselves from all contact in their daily lives
with the ordinary middle-class life and tastes of the commu­
nity.14

For a modest example of the perspective that worries some

journalists, consider a recent magazine article by syndicated
columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover. The subject is how
reporters survive the rigors of the campaign trail. But the underly­
ing theme is the upper-status cosmopolitan’s scorn for parochial
middle America. The authors’ advice: “ If you’re in some enclave
of civilized conduct such as New York . . . have a few belts in the
Oak Room at the Plaza . . . if you’re in some backwater town like
Columbia, South Carolina, your choice is to eat early. . . and then
find a decent bar__ ” They offer survival tips on various “ uncivil­
ized” cities. Cleveland: “ If you’re going to be in a plane crash in
Cleveland, it’s preferable that it happen going in.” Indianapolis:
“ Pray you don’t have to go here. . . .” Birmingham: “ Never go
there, certainly not overnight. . . .” 15 Such patronizing attitudes
can be viewed as following in the great “boobseoisie” -baiting tra­
dition of H.L. Mencken. But it’s difficult to imagine many of
today’s high-flying columnists choosing to live out their lives in
Baltimore, like the Sage of Menlo Park, far from the civilized
surroundings of the Plaza’s Oak Room.
Another alleged result of wealth and celebrity is a sense of
self-importance that redefines the role of journalists as newsmak­
ers themselves. For example, the naming of a network anchor is
now front-page news in the major dailies. When Roger Mudd was
demoted at NBC, the Wall Street Journal informed its readers that
his “abrupt removal” was one of “ two big stories in the national
news this week,” along with a presidential press conference. The
Washington Post's ombudsman responded tartly, “ With highest
regard for Mr. Mudd . . . it is respectfully suggested that people
paid to convey the news have no business becoming front-page
news themselves.” He noted, however, a colleague’s rationale for
the contrary position: “ They come into your living room. They set
out the complexities of life, like the clergy used to do.” 16

26
 Group Portrait
More serious is the question of how journalists’ enhanced
status has affected their relations with the newsmakers they cover.
Some critics maintain that journalists’ elite status has undermined
their independence or compromised their proper role as public
tribune. In Fairlie’s words, “The very profession that should be
the acid, relentless critic of the affluence and cynicism of Washing­
ton is now the most ostentatiously affluent and cynical profession
in the city.” 17
Others argue the opposite, that the formerly low status of
journalists led them too often to revel in vicarious participation in
the halls of power. Bagdikian criticizes old-school journalists for
their “ habit of close association with formal power which came to
be seen as a natural reward of their occupation.” 18 By contrast,
today’s leading journalists may be better paid and better educated
than the politicians and bureaucrats they deal with. They may
also be even more in demand socially. A publicist for Gray and
Company, the influential Washington public relations firm, says
matter-of-factly, “When we’re putting together a guest list, includ­
ing a journalist is just as important as including a diplomat or a
Cabinet member.” 19
It would not be surprising if many of his colleagues agree with
Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, “ I don’t see any reason why
we shouldn’t consider ourselves on equal footing with those we
cover.” 20The extent to which the tables have turned is illustrated
by an encounter between Senator (and presidential candidate)
Alan Cranston and c b s ’ s Dan Rather during the 1984 New Hamp­
shire primary. The two were having lunch when a c b s aide ap­
proached Cranston to say, “ Senator, Mr. Rather will only have
time for one more question.” 21
If society treats newscasters as more important than senators,
it is unrealistic to expect the newscasters to reject society’s opinion
for long. Nor should we be surprised if journalists make use of
their rising status to wrest control of the flow of information from
politicians and other newsmakers. In keeping with their newfound
status, leading journalists are increasingly likely to see themselves
as professionals who translate the news rather than craftsmen who
merely transmit it.22

27
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Thus, the much-debated adversary relationship between

media and government may be partly a function of reporters’
changing lifestyles as well as their outlooks. They no longer need
defer to the newsmakers they cover. As the late columnist Jo­
seph Kraft wrote in 1981, “ those of us in the media enjoyed an
enormous surge of status and power in recent years. That surge
coincided with the decline of various other groups, to the point
where we could perceive ourselves as the only institutional force
left on a well-nigh devastated plain . . . increasingly the media
are an unrepresentative group— a group that is better educated,
more highly paid, more sure of itself and more hostile to the
system than the average.” 23
Kraft’s analysis concludes that increases in the social, eco­
nomic, and educational status of journalists are linked to liberal
or anti-establishment attitudes. This is an issue our survey ad­
dresses in depth. So let us turn from the demography to the
outlook of the media elite.

The View from the Newsroom

Politics and Perspectives. How do the leading journalists describe
their own political leanings? A majority see themselves as liberals.
Fifty-four percent place themselves to the left of center, compared
to only 17 percent who choose the right side of the spectrum. (The
remainder pick “ middle of the road.” ) When they rate their fellow
workers, an even greater difference emerges. Fifty-six percent say
the people they work with are mostly on the Left, and only 8
percent place their co-workers on the Right— a margin of seven
to one.
These subjective ratings are consistent with their voting rec­
ords in presidential elections from 1964 through 1976. O f those
who say they voted for major party candidates, the proportion of
leading journalists who supported the Democratic candidate
never drops below 80 percent.24 In 1972, when more than 60 per­
cent of all voters chose Nixon, over 80 percent among the media
elite voted for McGovern. This does not appear to reflect any
unique aversion to Nixon. Despite the well-publicized tensions
between the press and his administration, leading journalists in

28
 Group Portrait
1976 preferred Carter over Ford by the same margin. In fact, in
the Democratic landslide of 1964, journalists picked Johnson over
Goldwater by a sixteen-to-one margin, or 94 to 6 percent.
More significant, though, is the long-term trend. Over the
entire sixteen-year period, less than 20 percent of the media elite
supported any Republican presidential candidate. Across four
elections, the Democratic margin among elite journalists was 30
to 50 percent greater than among the entire electorate.
Also consistent with their self-descriptions are the media elite’s
views on a wide range of social and political issues (see Table 2).

Table 2— Media Elite Attitudes and Voting Records

Agree

Economics
Big corporations should be publicly owned 13%
People with more ability should earn more 86
Private enterprise is fair to workers 70
Less regulation of business is good for u.s. 63
Government should reduce income gap 68
Government should guarantee jobs 48
Political Alienation
Structure of society causes alienation 49
Institutions need overhaul 28
All political systems are repressive 28
Social-Cultural
Environmental problems are overstated 19
Strong affirmative action for blacks 80
Government should not regulate sex 97
Woman has right to decide on abortion 90
Homosexuality is wrong 25
Homosexuals shouldn’t teach in public schools 15
Adultery is wrong 47
Foreign Policy
U.S. exploits Third World, causes poverty 56
U.S. use of resources immoral 57
Goal of foreign policy is to protect u.s. businesses 50
CIA should sometimes undermine hostile governments 45

29
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Table 2 (Continued)
Agree
Presidential Elections*
1964
Goldwater 6%
Johnson 94
1968
Nixon 13
Humphrey 87
1972
Nixon 19
McGovern 81
1976
Ford 19
Carter 81

• E le c to ra l p ercen tag es based on th ose w h o rep o rted v o tin g fo r m a jo r p a rty can d id ates.
T h ird p a rty v o te n ever exceed ed 2 percen t.

In the economic realm, over two-thirds agree that the government

should reduce substantially the income gap between the rich and
the poor. They are more evenly divided over the issue of guaran­
teed employment, with a slight majority opposing the entitlement
issue. Most are anything but socialists. For example, they over­
whelmingly reject the proposition that major corporations should
be publicly owned. Only one in eight would agree to public owner­
ship of corporations, and two-thirds declare themselves strongly
opposed. Moreover, they overwhelmingly support the idea that
people with greater ability should earn higher wages than those
with less ability. Most also believe that free enterprise gives work­
ers a fair shake, and that some deregulation of business would
serve the national interest.
There is no contradiction between such praise for private en­
terprise and support for government action to aid the poor and
jobless. These attitudes mirror the traditional perspective of
American liberals who (unlike many European social democrats)

30
 Group Portrait
accept an essentially capitalistic economic framework, even as
they endorse the welfare state.
In contrast to their acceptance of the economic order, many
leading journalists voice discontent with the social system. Almost
half agree that “ the very structure of our society causes people to
feel alienated,” and five out of six believe our legal system mainly
favors the wealthy. Nonetheless, most would reject calls for a
“ complete restructuring” of our “basic institutions,” and few
agree that “ all political systems are repressive.” But they are
united in rejecting social conservatism and traditional norms. In­
deed, it is today’s divisive “ social issues” that bring their liberal­
ism to the fore. Leading journalists emerge from the survey as
strong supporters of environmental protection, affirmative action,
women’s rights, homosexual rights, and sexual freedom in general.
Fewer than one in five agrees that “our environmental prob­
lems are not as serious as people have been led to believe.” Only
i percent strongly agree that environmental problems are exag­
gerated, while a majority of 54 percent strongly disagree. They are
nearly as united in supporting affirmative action for minorities.
Despite both the heated controversy over this issue and their own
predominantly white racial composition, four out of five media
leaders endorse the use of strong affirmative action measures to
ensure black representation in the workplace.
In their attitudes toward sex and sex roles, members of the
media elite are virtually unanimous in opposing both governmen­
tal and traditional constraints. A large majority opposes govern­
ment regulation of sexual activities, upholds a pro-choice position
on abortion, and rejects the notion that homosexuality is wrong.
In fact, a slight majority would not characterize adultery as
wrong.
They overwhelmingly oppose traditional gender-based restric­
tions. Ninety percent agree that a woman has the right to decide
for herself whether to have an abortion; 79 percent agree strongly
with this pro-choice position. Only 18 percent believe that working
wives whose husbands have jobs should be laid off first, and even
fewer, 10 percent, agree that men are emotionally better suited for
politics than women.

31
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Only 4 percent agree that government should regulate sexual

practices, and 84 percent strongly oppose state control over sexual
activities. Seventy-five percent disagree that homosexuality is
wrong, and an even larger proportion, 85 percent, uphold the right
of homosexuals to teach in public schools. Finally, 54 percent do
not regard adultery as wrong, and only 15 percent strongly agree
that extramarital affairs are immoral. Thus, members of the media
elite emerge as strong supporters of sexual freedom, and as natural
opponents of groups like the Moral Majority.
We also inquired about international affairs, focusing on
America’s relations with Third World countries. The majority
agrees that American economic exploitation has contributed to
Third World poverty and that America’s heavy use of natural
resources is “ immoral.” Precisely half agree that the main goal of
our foreign policy has been to protect American business interests.
Two issues dealing more directly with American foreign policy
also elicit a nearly even division of opinion. A majority would
prohibit the CIA from undermining hostile governments to protect
U.S. interests. Just under half would ban foreign arms sales alto­
gether or restrict them to democratic countries. About the same
proportion would supply arms to any “ friendly” country, regard­
less of the regime. Only 4 percent would be willing to sell arms
to all comers. Thus, in several controversial areas of international
relations, the media elite is deeply divided.
In sum, the media elite’s perspective is predominantly cosmo­
politan and liberal. Their outlook reflects the social (rather than
economic) emphasis of what political scientist Everett Ladd calls
the “ new liberalism” 25 of upper-status groups. Leading journalists
criticize traditional social norms and establishment groups; they
are very liberal on social issues such as abortion, homosexual
rights, affirmative action, and environmental protection. Many
endorse an expanded welfare state, but they also emerge as strong
supporters of the free enterprise system. Most describe themselves
as liberals and most support Democratic presidential candidates.
Not surprisingly, these attitudes place them to the left of busi­
ness executives, a traditional conservative elite, on virtually every

32
 Group Portrait
issue the survey addresses.26 On issues ranging from homosexual­
ity and abortion to income redistribution, the gap between the two
groups nears 40 percentage points. For example, 60 percent of the
executives agree that homosexuality is wrong, 76 percent call
adultery morally wrong, and only 29 percent favor government
action to close the income gap between rich and poor. Even jour­
nalists’ substantial support for free enterprise pales somewhat
before businessmen’s overwhelming endorsement. For example,
90 percent regard private enterprise as fair to workers, and 86
percent favor less government regulation of business. These figures
exceed journalists’ support levels by 20 and 25 percent, respec­
tively.
It may seem obvious that corporate executives would be more
conservative than leading journalists. The differences are docu­
mented here in order to establish that the businessmen are indeed
an appropriate comparison group for the journalists. In Chapter
Three we will ask whether these overt ideological differences are
reflected in divergent perceptions and predispositions toward so­
cial reality. (The question of whether journalists are also more
liberal than the general public was answered by a 1985 Los Angeles
Times poll; see page 40).
Journalists on the Media. Some years back, columnist Joseph
Kraft criticized his colleagues for holding such liberal perspec­
tives. He argued that the major media had adopted an elitist and
adversarial perspective on American society that made them com­
batants rather than observers of the political wars. Kraft wrote:

We no longer represent a wide diversity of views. We have

ceased to be neutral in reporting events . . . . The media have
been taken in tow by the adversary culture---- We are skeptical
about established authority . . . . We are sympathetic to the
claims of those with grievances— whether black or brown or
Indian or senior citizens. We tend to favor helping them, even
though the benefits— integrated neighborhoods, school busing,
affirmative action— tend to be paid for by middle America. As
for middle America’s complaints— about gun control, anti­
abortion rulings, abolishing the death penalty, yielding Panama

33
 T he M e d ia E l it e

— we tend to write them off as disconnected single issues. Not

only are we not representative, we are aligned on one side in the
hottest class contention now dividing America.2’

Such criticisms are not new, but rarely have they issued from
such a prominent member of the journalistic profession. Our sur­
vey also asked journalists to evaluate some of these and other
commonly voiced criticisms about themselves: Can journalists be
unbiased when they are emotionally involved with an issue on
which they are reporting? Do they have a liberal bias? Are they
too attentive to minority groups and too critical of the establish­
ment? Alternatively, are they too easily co-opted by the establish­
ment? Should the media play a central role in promoting social
reform?
A surprising number of leading journalists are willing to admit
to problems of bias, at least in principle. At the same time, they
strongly reject more specific criticisms of their practices and prod­
uct. They are almost evenly divided over their role in promoting
social reform; a slight majority agrees that the media should play
a major role. A t the same time, a majority agrees that the media
have a liberal bias, and almost one-third believe that journalists
cannot be impartial when they feel strongly about issues on which
they report.
These findings suggest division within the media elite over
their role in American society. In acting as the public’s tribune
against the powerful, journalists may seek to combine personal
satisfaction with social service. But involvement in social issues
may mean a loss of impartiality. This tension between professional
objectivity and personal involvement in the newsroom will prove
a leitmotif of this study.
However, specific criticisms about news coverage seem to pro­
duce a closing of ranks. Over four out of five reject the allegation
that the media are too attentive to minorities, and an even greater
proportion deny that they are too critical of United States institu­
tions. Only i percent agrees strongly with either of these criticisms,
while the proportions disagreeing strongly are 48 and 60 percent,
respectively. Nor do many give credence to the notion that jour­

34
 Group Portrait
nalists are easily co-opted by government officials. Once again,
fewer than one in four agrees, and about half disagree strongly.
Overall, then, concerns about the media’s political role seem more
likely to be expressed in general terms than on specific issues.
The Big Picture. Thus far we have examined elite journalists’
opinions on the great and small issues of the day. By charting their
responses to numerous social issues, we try to understand their
general perspectives on society and politics. The results, though,
may be deceptive. They create the impression of a broad ideologi­
cal portrait of the media elite without ever asking journalists to
deal with the “big picture.” Their attitudes toward issues like
abortion, affirmative action, and arms sales provide benchmarks
for understanding their outlook, since most people have opinions
on such pressing and hotly debated questions. But they do not
address some of the most basic underlying issues of political life:
What directions should American society take? What groups exert
the most influence over social goals and political processes? How
much influence should be wielded by such forces as business,
labor, minorities, and the media?
These issues are as old as political philosophy. But it is not only
philosophers who grapple with questions like “ who should rule?”
and “ what is the good society?” Most people have answers to these
questions, even if they haven’t consciously arrived at them. Their
answers express basic values that underlie their transient opinions
on current social issues.
The interviews we conducted tried to tap these fundamental
predispositions of political thought. First, journalists were asked
about the goals America should pursue during the next decade.
From a list of eight choices, they selected the most important,
second most important, and least important goal. The list, created
by political scientist Ronald Inglehart, includes:

1. Maintaining a high rate of economic growth

2. Making sure that this country has strong defense forces
3. Seeing that the people have more say in how things get
decided at work and in their communities
4. Trying to make our cities and countryside more beautiful

35
 T he M e d ia E l it e

5. Maintaining a stable economy

6. Progressing toward a less impersonal, more humane society
7. The fight against crime
8. Progressing toward a society where ideas are more impor­
tant than money.

Inglehart classifies these choices as “ instrumental” and “ac­

quisitive” values, on one hand, vs. “ expressive” and “ post-bour­
geois” values, on the other.28 In this list, the post-bourgeois
choices are those dealing with participation, a humane society, a
beautiful environment, and placing ideas above money. Unlike
standard polling items, these choices are not presented periodi­
cally to cross-sections of the American public. So the sample of
business leaders functions here as a comparison group. As arche­
typal representatives of a bourgeois society, they should be ori­
ented toward more conservative “ acquisitive” values.
Substantial segments (though still a minority) of the media
elite endorse the post-bourgeois value orientation that Inglehart
calls a “ silent revolution” transforming the political culture of
advanced industrial society. One in three journalists (33 percent)
deems citizen participation, a humane society, or a society less
oriented toward money as our most important goal— more impor­
tant than either economic well-being or national defense. By con­
trast, only one in eight (12 percent) business leaders picks any of
the “ expressive” values as America’s most pressing concern.
Even among the journalists, a majority (52 percent) favors
economic stability as the most important value. However, almost
half the media elite (49 percent) pick post-bourgeois values as their
second choice, compared to 30 percent of the business elite. Forty
percent of these leading journalists select a humane society as
either their first or second priority, more than double the propor­
tion among business leaders. Conversely, the businessmen list
national defense more than twice as often as the newsmen. Finally,
the journalists are almost twice as likely as the executives (by 39
to 21 percent) to choose acquisitive values as the least important
for America to pursue. Overall, the media elite show a substan­

36
 Group Portrait
tially greater preference for post-bourgeois goals than the business
elite.
For many leading journalists, liberal views on contemporary
political issues apparently reflect a commitment to social change
in pursuit of the good society, as they visualize it. Such a commit­
ment would align them with emerging forces of social liberalism
who are pitted against more established leadership groups. There­
fore, the survey also examined the media elite’s evaluation of its
competitors for social influence.
Beyond inquiring about the direction our society should take,
we asked a more pointed question: Who should direct it? Specifi­
cally, journalists were asked to rate seven leadership groups in
terms of the influence each wields over American life. Then they
were asked to rate the same groups according to the amount of
influence they should have. They assigned each group a rating
from “ i,” meaning very little influence, to “ 7,” representing a
great deal of influence.
The seven groups represent a cross-section of major competi­
tors for social power in contemporary America. They include
black leaders, feminists, consumer groups, intellectuals, labor
unions, business leaders, and the news media. Media leaders see
four of the groups as relatively disadvantaged in the competition
for social power. They rate feminists as weakest, just behind black
leaders, intellectuals, and consumer groups. All four are clustered
tightly together in their ratings, well below the “big three” of
labor, business, and the media. The unions rank third, leaving the
media close on the heels of business leaders, whom they perceive
as the most powerful social group.
When the journalists were asked about their preferences, this
picture changed drastically. They would strip both business and
labor of their current influence, while raising the status of all the
other groups. In the media elite’s preferred social hierarchy, busi­
ness leaders fall from first to fifth position, and unions drop to the
very bottom of the ladder. Feminists move up only slightly, but
blacks, intellectuals, and consumer groups would all have more
influence than either business or labor. Emerging at the top of the

37
 T he M e d ia E l it e

heap, as the group most favored to influence American society, is

the media.
There is a certain irony in the media elite’s choice of itself as
preeminent in the race for influence. The press is traditionally
ambivalent about its power, and journalists often either deny or
decry the notion of a powerful media elite. In a 1976 study of elites
conducted by the Washington Post and Harvard University, the
media leaders were the only group to claim they want less influ­
ence than they already have.29 In fact, one could say the same of
the subjects in our survey, but it would be a deceptive interpreta­
tion. In absolute terms, leading journalists would assign them­
selves a lower influence rating than they now have. Yet they would
assign even lower ratings to other groups, thereby leapfrogging
themselves from second position to the top spot.
The business leaders, by the way, return the compliment. They
perceive the media as far and away the most powerful influence
on American society, with labor a distant second and business
only third, followed by the four emergent groups. Not surpris­
ingly, they would also prefer to sit atop the influence hierarchy,
while burying the media well back in the pack in fifth position
(precisely where the media elite would place business). Indeed, the
antipathy these two elites seem to feel toward each other is note­
worthy. Business leaders regard the media as the most influential
group listed and would reduce the influence of journalists more
than any other group. Media leaders perceive business leaders as
the most influential group and would likewise strip away most of
their influence. One might speculate that these elites view one
another with such mistrust precisely because each attributes great
influence to the other. In the ongoing struggle over social influ­
ence, each appears wary of the other as its strongest competitor.
The media elite is also homogeneous in its politics. We found
only slight ideological differences across media outlets or job func­
tions. To illustrate this, we compared self-described liberals and
conservatives across various subgroups. The Left-Right split is
quite similar among print and television journalists. Fifty-three
percent of those in the print media call themselves liberal, com­
pared to 19 percent of those who choose the conservative label;

38
 Group Portrait
among broadcast journalists, liberals predominate by 56 to 14
percent. Within the press, moreover, reporters and editors hold
nearly identical political self-images. The liberal-to-conservative
margin is 52 to 16 percent among reporters, 51 to 20 percent among
editors. The gap narrows somewhat at the top of the newsroom
hierarchy. Among senior print editors and executives, the margin
closes to 41 vs. 24 percent; among senior television producers and
executives, however, it remains more than two to one (44 vs. 16
percent).
Thus, ideological diversity among leading journalists seems
confined to a relatively narrow band of the political spectrum. By
contrast, no more than 22 percent of the general public have ever
placed themselves to the left of center in Gallup polls conducted
over the past decade. Nor has this group ever equalled the propor­
tion of those who place themselves on the political right. At the
time our survey was conducted, conservatives outnumbered liber­
als by 31 to 17 percent nationwide.30

Old Attitudes, New Freedoms

Surveying the Surveys. There is considerable evidence from other
sources to corroborate our portrait of liberal leading journalists.
No other studies have focused on precisely those journalists we
term the media elite. But a group that overlaps ours in member­
ship and influence, the Washington press corps, has been surveyed
repeatedly. In 1976, a Washington Post-Harvard University survey
of accredited Washington reporters found that 59 percent called
themselves liberal and 18 percent conservative.31 This is strikingly
close to the 54 to 17 margin we found among the media elite four
years later. Moreover, these self-descriptions were reflected in
Washington reporters’ voting preference in the 1972 election. Of
those who voted, 70 percent chose McGovern and only 25 percent
picked Nixon.
The Post -Harvard study also found, as we did, that manage­
ment is less liberal than working reporters but not nearly as con­
servative as the general public. Their companion survey of news­
paper managing editors and t v and radio news directors around
the country revealed a liberal-conservative split of 40 to 17 percent.

39
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Thus, there were fewer self-styled liberals, more moderates, but no

more conservatives in management than among the Washington
reporters. This group was also less Democratic in its voting prefer­
ences, but a slight majority still supported McGovern over Nixon
(51 to 45 percent).
In 1978, the Washington press corps was again surveyed by
Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. He found fewer report­
ers willing to call themselves liberal (42 percent) but virtually no
rise in the proportion of conservatives (19 percent).32 Thus, the
liberal vs. conservative ratio remained greater than two to one,
though less than the three to one margins found elsewhere. (The
difference may be accounted for either by a slightly different word­
ing of the questions or by the low response rate, under 25 percent.)
Hess also found, as we did, that a slight majority of journalists
themselves found a political bias in their ranks. O f those who
considered the Washington news corps biased, 96 percent felt it
was liberal. By contrast, only one percent complained of conserva­
tive bias.
Another well-known study, conducted in 1971, reported self­
descriptions of journalists at “ prominent” news organizations,
including the networks, newsmagazines, and major newspapers.
Among executives, 73 percent placed themselves on the Left and
10 percent on the Right. Among staffers, the comparable figures
were 53 and 17 percent, respectively.33
A more recent study of the politics of journalists was con­
ducted in 1982 by scholars at the State University of California at
Los Angeles. This survey of journalists at America’s fifty largest
newspapers found 50 percent self-described liberals and 21 percent
conservatives.34 The voting breakdown of this group during the
1972 election was McGovern 77 percent, Nixon 21 percent. This
study also reports results for the 1980 election. The newspeople
interviewed gave a slight majority to Carter (51 percent), with the
remainder split almost evenly between Reagan (25 percent) and
Anderson (24 percent). A t about the same time, a group of schol­
ars at Indiana University interviewed a random sample of 1,001
journalists around the country. Among those in “ prominent”

40
 Group Portrait
news organizations, 32 percent claimed a Left orientation and 12
percent a Right orientation.35
The most recent, most thorough, and perhaps most remark­
able survey of journalists was conducted in 1985 by the Los Angeles
Times. 36Almost 3,000 newspaper reporters and editors, randomly
selected at over 600 papers around the country, were polled on
over 100 questions, including some of the same ones we asked.
Equally important, the same questions were asked of a national
random sample of about 3,300 adults. This makes possible direct
comparisons between press and public attitudes.
The results document a wide disparity between the attitudes
of journalists and the general public, with the former consistently
to the left of the latter. On the average, for all questions, the Times
reports a gap of 25 percent between the attitudes of journalists and
their audience. For example, as table 3 shows news staffers are
over twice as likely as their audience to favor government regula­
tion of business and American disinvestment from South Africa,
to oppose prayer in public schools and increased defense spending,
and to disapprove of Ronald Reagan’s performance. (The precise
figures are presented in the Appendix on page 293.)
On several issues we asked about, this massive survey repli­
cates our findings while also demonstrating a gulf between news
producers and news readers. Thus, 82 percent of journalists are
pro-choice on abortion, vs. 51 percent of the public; 81 percent
support affirmative action for minorities, vs. 57 percent of the
national sample; and 89 percent uphold homosexual rights in
hiring, vs. 56 percent of the public. Only 26 percent of the journal­
ists voted for Reagan in 1984, a figure that resembles our findings
from previous elections, as well as the Cal State 1980 results.
Economic issues constitute a partial exception to the overall
pattern. Here the poll finds that journalists are “ slightly, but not
markedly more liberal” than the public.37 They are much more
likely to favor government regulation of business, by 49 to 22
percent. But they are slightly less likely (by 50 to 55 percent) to
favor government action to reduce the income gap between the
rich and poor. The leading journalists we surveyed are more

41
 T he M e d ia E l it e

liberal on this issue, with 68 percent agreeing that government

should close the gap. Still, journalists around the country seem to
echo the media elite’s strong support for private enterprise and
low opinion of business and labor alike. The pollsters conclude, “ It
appears that on questions that affect their interest, as opposed to
purely ideological matters, journalists behave like other high-
status elites.” 38
To return to the ideological self-description we have used as
a benchmark, 55 percent of these journalists call themselves liberal
and 17 percent conservative, a difference of one percent from our
own finding. On the other hand, 24 percent of the general public
term themselves liberal, a figure 31 percent lower than among
journalists. In fact, the pollsters report that newspaper journalists
are also “ markedly more liberal than others of similar educational
and professional standing.” 39 Thirty-seven percent of other col­
lege-educated professionals say that they are liberal, an 18 percent
drop from the press percentage. And 57 percent of other profes­
sional people give Reagan a positive rating, compared to 30 per­
cent of the journalists.
Finally, the pollsters took on the Herculean task of questioning
every news and editorial staff member of the New York Times,
Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Despite a low response
rate at the Post, they completed about 500 interviews at these three
major newspapers. They found that, “The combined staffs of the
two Timeses and the Post would seem, if anything, slightly more
liberal than journalists on other papers.” 40
These results from numerous independent surveys are uni­
formly consistent with our own. Although the number of self-
described liberals varies somewhat, the conservative population
among major media journalists ranges only from 10 to 21 percent
across the various surveys. Thus the liberal to conservative ratio
always exceeds two to one. Similarly, the proportion of Nixon
voters in 1972 ranges from 19 to 25 percent (except among news
managers), about 35-40 percentage points below the level of
Nixon’s support among the electorate that year.
The Los Angeles Times findings on journalists’ issue stands are
also in line with our findings, despite the more elite status of our

42
 Group Portrait
subjects. Indeed, the final portrait etched by the Times pollsters
bears strong resemblance to the media elite: “They are emphati­
cally liberal on social issues and foreign affairs, distrustful of
establishment institutions (government, business, labor) and pro­
tective of their own economic interests.” 41
The New Professionals. Liberal and Democratic sympathies
among journalists are not new. What may have changed more
over the years is the relevance of journalists’ social attitudes to
their news product. When Leo Rosten conducted the first system­
atic survey of the Washington press corps in 1936, he found report­
ers to be mostly Democrats but very much under the thumb of
their superiors. At a time when most newspapers were controlled
by Republican publishers, 64 percent of the reporters favored
Roosevelt in the coming election, and 6 percent favored Socialist
or Communist candidates. Rosten compared these results to a
contemporary Gallup poll showing that only 50 percent of the
public favored Roosevelt, while 2 percent chose left-wing third
parties.42 At the same time, over 60 percent of reporters agreed
with the statement, “ My orders are to be objective, but I know
how my paper wants stories played.” Even more telling, a major­
ity admitted having their stories “played down, cut, or killed for
‘policy’ reasons.” 43
By i960, this situation had changed dramatically. In 1961, jour­
nalism professor William Rivers again surveyed the Washington
press corps. He found that Democrats still outnumbered Republi­
cans among newspaper and broadcast correspondents, by margins
exceeding three to one.44 However, only 7 percent recounted ideo­
logical tampering with their work. In fact, Rivers concludes, “of
all the changes in the Washington press corps during the past
twenty-five years, none is more significant than a new sense of
freedom from the prejudices of the home office.” 4’ He cites one
longtime correspondent who recalled the difference from the old
days: “ the publishers didn’t just disagree with the New Deal. They
hated it. And the reporters, who liked it, had to write as though
they hated it, too.” 46
Seventeen years after Rivers’ study, Hess concludes from his
own survey that “ writing to fit the editorial positions of publishers

43
 T he M e d ia E l it e

[has] simply disappeared as an issue of contention. . . . The near

absence of disagreements over political slant is a by-product of
higher professional standards as well as the passing of the press
‘lords’ . . . who view their publications as outlets for their own
views.” 47 Hess notes further that today’s Washington reporters
initiate most of their own stories, which usually receive little or
no editing. Journalism has come a long way from the days when
Henry Luce could defend Time’s partisan coverage of the 1952
election with the comment, “ it was Time’s duty to explain why
the country needs Ike. Any other form of journalism would have
been unfair and uninvolved.” 48
Our study corroborates the notion of a new era for reporters.
We asked subjects how much influence they generally have over
the content of news stories with which they are involved. They
marked a scale ranging from “ very little” to “ a great deal” of
influence. By far the lowest or least influential scores were re­
corded by executives of both print and broadcast outlets. So it is
not only the press watchers who argue that the influence of report­
ers has increased relative to that of their bosses. This perception
is shared by the journalists themselves.
The new authority structures influence media content only
insofar as they permit different values to shape the news product.
There is little doubt, however, that this has happened. In 1974, Ben
Bagdikian summarized this dramatic shift of journalistic stan­
dards:

There has been a rapid change within news institutions in the

last decade. The received conventions that decade after decade
automatically conditioned each novice journalist to comply
with traditional values are being rejected and reformed. Stan­
dards of “ legitimacy” are being questioned. The primacy of
direction from above is being challenged from below. A different
kind of novice professional has entered the field.4’

The Once and Future Media Elite

How did journalists come to their liberal views? Are they liberal
and cosmopolitan in outlook because their profession makes them

44
 Group Portrait
so, or do the media attract people with ready-made liberal lean­
ings? Many journalists argue that their professional milieu is a
natural source of liberalism. As an Atlanta Constitution columnist
recently wrote, “ Experience impacts attitudes, and journalists
have more of the kinds of experiences that would challenge cozy
conservative assumptions than most folks do. . . . It is far easier
to harrumph in a country-club bar about welfare than it is . . . in
a tenement listening to a welfare mother who can’t pay her winter
heating bill.” 50
This so-called nature vs. nurture question could be answered
with certainty only by going back in time to determine what
today’s top journalists thought and felt at the beginnings of their
careers. Despite the impossibility of securing such information,
there are other ways of gaining insight into this question. First, we
sought to determine whether liberalism related to age among lead­
ing journalists. If their experience in the profession is a liberalizing
factor, one would expect older journalists to be more liberal than
younger ones, who lack experience.
Yet just the opposite occurs within the media elite. We divided
journalists into the old guard (over fifty years old), the mid-career
group (between thirty-five and fifty), and the post-Watergate gen­
eration (under thirty-five). Among the old guard, 43 percent place
themselves left of center, not quite double the 23 percent who pick
the right side of the spectrum, with the rest choosing the middle
of the road. In the mid-career group, the proportion of liberals
rises to 52 percent and that of conservatives drops to 16 percent,
about a three to one ratio. Among the rising generation who joined
the profession in the wake of Watergate, 70 percent are liberals
and only 13 percent conservatives, a ratio exceeding five to one. So
younger journalists, by their own descriptions, are substantially
more liberal than older ones.
Another approach is to look not to today’s journalists but
tomorrow’s. If students at an elite journalism school are already
liberal, it would support the position that liberal journalists are
bom into their profession, not made by it. If, on the contrary,
those about to enter the profession are more conservative than
working journalists, it would support those who see the work itself

45
 T he M e d ia E l it e

as the primary agent of journalists’ liberalism. Interviewing

today’s journalism school students also provides a glimpse at the
future of the profession. By comparing today’s media elite with a
select group of young people poised to enter the field, one may gain
some sense of what to expect from tomorrow’s leading journalists.
The Next Generation. Among journalism schools, one graduate
program stands out as particularly prestigious. The cream of the
crop among aspiring journalists attend Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Journalism. Columbia offers not only excel­
lent academic credentials, but also valuable contacts with the
major New York-based media outlets.
We surveyed a random sample of the school’s 1982 degree
candidates, excluding foreign students (see Table 3). Twenty-eight
students were interviewed, representing one-sixth of the entire
class.51 They answered the same questions asked of the media elite,
as well as a few new ones. The results provide a striking portrait
of some of tomorrow’s potential leading journalists.
The student group is less dominated by white males than
today’s leading journalists. Nearly half are female, more than
twice the proportion of women among the media elite. One in five
of the students comes from minority groups, four times the per­
centage of those already at the top.
In most other respects, though, the students are even more
homogeneous than their elders. They are drawn even more heavily
from the northeast. They are also almost twice as likely to come
from metropolitan areas. Fewer than one in five were raised in
small-town or rural America.
Seventy percent of the journalism students have college-
educated fathers, up from 40 percent of the media elite. A majority
rate their family’s income as above average, and only one out of
nine say they were raised in homes with below-average incomes.
Thus, while the media elite are products of a comfortable back­
ground, the students hail from an even more select and privileged
stratum of society. Like today’s leading journalists, most of the
students are not religiously observant. Nearly half claim no reli­
gious affiliation, and only one in twelve say they attend religious
services regularly.

46
 Group Portrait

Table 3— Backgrounds and Attitudes of Columbia University

Journalism Students
Backgrounds
White 79%
Male 54
From northeast states 71
From metropolitan area 82
Father graduated college 70
Father’s occupation “ professional” 29
Political liberal 85
Political conservative 11
Religion “ none” 46
Attitudes
Economics
Big corporations should be publicly owned 39
People with more ability should earn more 77
Private enterprise is fair toworkers 32
Less regulation of business is good for u.s. 39
Government should reduce income gap 82
Government should guarantee jobs 63
Political Alienation
Structure of society causes alienation 71
Institutions need overhaul 50
All political systems are repressive 36
Social-Cultural
Environmental problems are overstated 14
Strong affirmative action for blacks 67
Government should not regulate sex 93
Woman has right to decide onabortion 96
Homosexuality is wrong 18
Homosexuals shouldn’t teach in public schools 7
Adultery is wrong 78
Foreign Policy
U.S. exploits Third World, causes poverty 75
U.S. use of resources immoral 74
Goal of foreign policy is to protect u.s. businesses 89
C IA should sometimes undermine hostile governments 33

47
 T he M e d ia E l it e

On the eve of their entry into the profession, what do these

young people believe about politics and society? First, an over­
whelming majority place themselves to the left of center. Eighty-
five percent describe themselves as political liberals, while only n
percent consider themselves conservatives. So the journalism stu­
dents see themselves as substantially more liberal than today’s
media elite, and over three times as liberal as the general public.
Moreover, their self-assessment translates into political behavior.
In 1980, only 4 percent voted for Ronald Reagan, compared to 59
percent who backed Jimmy Carter and 29 percent who cast their
ballots for John Anderson.
The students’ presidential choices and self-descriptions are
consistent with their views on a wide range of social and political
issues. They are more critical than today’s media elite toward
business and private enterprise, more alienated from the political
system, and about as liberal as their future colleagues on social and
cultural issues. On economic issues the students are stronger sup­
porters of an expanded welfare state and much more severe critics
of the capitalist system. A large majority views the government as
responsible for both guaranteeing jobs (63 percent) and reducing
income disparities (82 percent). Only one in three students believes
that private enterprise is fair to workers, compared to over two-
thirds of their elders. While almost two of three elite journalists
believe that less regulation of business would be good for the
country, nearly the same percentage of Columbia journalism
school students rejects this idea. Finally, the students are over
three times more likely than the current journalists to advocate
public ownership of corporations. Almost two in five subscribe to
this notion.
The students’ dissatisfaction with the economic order is ac­
companied by pronounced political alienation. While just under
half the media elite view the structure of our society as causing
alienation, over seven out of ten students endorse this criticism.
Similarly, half the students believe that our social institutions need
to be overhauled completely. Although the students far surpass
the media elite in their unhappiness with the economic and politi­
cal order, the two groups are united in their rejection of traditional

48
 Group Portrait
morality and their support for social liberalism. They are almost
equally strong supporters of environmental protection, affirmative
action, women’s rights, homosexual rights, and sexual freedom in
general. The students are more unified than their elders, however,
in criticizing American policies abroad. For example, three out of
four believe the U.S. exploits Third World nations, and almost 90
percent believe the main goal of our foreign policy has been to
protect business.
In sum, these elite journalism school students are at least as
critical of traditional social and cultural mores as today’s leading
journalists. They express greater hostility toward business, height­
ened political alienation, and a more critical view of America’s
role in world affairs. In light of these attitudes, it is not surprising
that they choose post-bourgeois goals for our society in greater
numbers than their elders. A majority of the students, compared
to only one-third of the media elite, selected the post-bourgeois
choices in the survey over instrumental ones. In particular, they
are more likely to favor the goals of community participation and
an idea-oriented society. O f those students who focus on acquisi­
tive goals, most are concerned with economic growth. Finally, the
students rank national defense below all other goals. None consid­
ers it most important, and over two out of five consider national
defense the least important of all goals listed.
To gain a sense of how their views might affect their percep­
tions of the current political scene, we solicited the students’ opin­
ions of several prominent national and international newsmakers.
They could indicate strong or mild approval or disapproval, or
feelings of neutrality toward each. The results show that their
perspectives on leading newsmakers accord with their broader
social outlooks. The most positive ratings all go to prominent
liberal figures. The most popular is consumer advocate Ralph
Nader, followed by feminist Gloria Steinern, Senator Edward
Kennedy, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and economist John
Kenneth Galbraith.
The students’ strongest disapproval is reserved for conserva­
tive groups and individuals. Seventy-eight percent disapprove of
Ronald Reagan, a negative rating exceeded only by their rating of

49
 T he M e d ia E l it e

the Moral Majority. By margins greater than three to one, the

students also reject two Reagan allies, then United Nations Am­
bassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick and British Prime Minister Marga­
ret Thatcher. In fact, they rate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro almost
as highly as Thatcher, and considerably more positively than
Ronald Reagan. Two out of three strongly disapprove of Reagan,
compared to only one in four who feel as negatively about Castro.
Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, a bête noire of the Reagan administra­
tion, are viewed more positively than any of the conservative
figures listed. Forty-one percent approve of the Sandinistas and
only 26 percent disapprove.
Finally, we wanted to know where tomorrow’s news gatherers
get their perspectives on the news. So the students were asked to
rate the reliability of a dozen organs of fact and opinion, including
liberal and conservative journals, as well as avowedly nonpartisan
outlets. They rate the New York Times and the Washington Post
as highly reliable, along with public television. But they also rate
a journal of the intellectual Left, the New York Review of Books,
as highly reliable. Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all weigh in
as moderately reliable. Yet they rate the New Republic and the
Nation, longtime representatives of liberal and left opinion, re­
spectively, as no less trustworthy than Time, a major newsweekly.
They reserve their lowest ratings for two more conservative jour­
nals of opinion, Commentary and National Review, along with TV
network news.
More liberal and cosmopolitan than today’s leading journal­
ists, more alienated from both our economic and political institu­
tions, sympathetic to liberal newsmakers and hostile toward con­
servatives, Columbia “J-School” students may be on the cutting
edge of a new wave in American journalism. However, we cannot
be certain of how their political or professional values may evolve
as they become integrated into their chosen profession. Theirs
may be the “ progressivism” and skepticism of youth, yet to be
tempered by the experiences or responsibilities of age. O f course,
this would mean that integration into the news business is a con-
servatizing experience. We began by considering the opposite hy­
pothesis, which presents journalism as a liberalizing force. So this

50
 Group Portrait
possibility would challenge the notion that today’s media elite
became more liberal over time.52
For the most part, though, one could not expect so liberal a
group as these students to turn very far to the right. Thus, Senator
Daniel P. Moynihan’s prediction some years back may yet come
to pass:

. . . the political consequence of the rising social status of jour­

nalism is that the press grows more and more influenced by
attitudes genuinely hostile to American society and American
government. This trend seems bound to continue into the future
. . . the young people now leaving the Harvard Crimson and the
Columbia Spectator for journalistic jobs in Washington will
resort to the [Lincoln] Steffens [muckraking] style at ever-
escalating levels of moral implication.53

Conclusion: A n Ambivalent Elite

Many leading journalists are uncomfortable with both their newly
proclaimed elite status and any liberal “ do-gooder” self-image.
Thus Washington Post editor Richard Harwood defends his col­
leagues against Moynihan’s charges of elitism with the hypothesis
that they are part of the working class: “An alternative hypotheses
. . . might be that newspapermen are Democrats and liberals
because they see themselves as part of [the] working class . . . .
They are not, after all, ‘professionals’ in any classical or reasonable
sense of the word. They pursue a ‘trade’ or a ‘craft’ for which there
are no entrance requirements. Most of them are members of
. . . a ‘working class’ union . . . .” 5<
This argument against media elitism might not be appreciated
in other contexts. One need only refer to the New York Times'
outrage over a state court decision refusing “ professional” status
to journalists. In opposing the judicial opinion that “a journalist
is not, legally speaking, a professional,” the Times printed a sting­
ing editorial that concluded, “ There is no byline on the court’s
opinion, suggesting that it didn’t deem it worthy of more than
boilerplate. The modesty is appropriate.” ”
In fact, the rapid rise to elite status has produced a deep

51
 T he M e d ia E l it e

ambivalence in many leading journalists. Few people in any pro­

fession are so embarrassed by newfound prominence that they give
back their paychecks and renounce their influence. On the other
hand, the loss of identification with the hoi polloi is a genuine
problem for those who pride themselves on representing the little
guy against the powerful, and standing up for individuality and
idiosyncracy against the gray flannel suit crowd.
In his account of life on the press bus during the 1972 election
campaign, Timothy Crouse quotes Dan Rather as giving voice to
the old and cherished image of the journalist as outsider: “ The
average journalist, including myself, is a whiskey-breathed, nico­
tine-stained, stubble-bearded g u y ... .” 56Crouse suggests that this
represents a triumph of self-image over reality: “ Rather was wear­
ing a beautifully tailored blue suit and he gave off the healthy glow
of a man who has just emerged from a hotel barber shop. I had
never seen him smoke and I doubt whether, on a typical day, his
strongest exhalation could budge the needle on a breathalyzer.’’
Tom between an emotional commitment to an older profes­
sional image and the obvious advantages of a newer one, today’s
leading journalists would not be the first to try to have it both
ways. A similar kind of denial often operates when journalists
have to choose between the self-images of Menckenesque cynic
and committed social reformer. Our survey found that a majority
of leading journalists do see social reform as a major role of the
media. On some level, many probably identify with David Halber-
stam’s recollection of his youthful motives in becoming a journal­
ist: “ I believed deeply th at. . . journalism had a crucial role as the
societal conscience of last resort.” 57
Yet this image conflicts with another powerful persona— the
journalist as the cynical outsider, the man in the trenchcoat, Bo­
gart in the first reel. As James Deakin recounts,

Most journalists do not like to talk about [their] public-service

motive. They are hard-boiled, realistic, worldly. It does not fit
their self-image. In some strange way, they think it makes them
vulnerable. Reporters tend to regard their idealism as sex was
formerly regarded. It is embarrassing. The subject comes up

52
 Group Portrait
only rarely. When it does, someone usually introduces a distrac­
tion. Another drink is suggested.51

Despite disclaimers and inner conflicts, the basic sociological

profile of journalists at national news outlets is clear. They are a
largely homogeneous group that is cosmopolitan in background
and liberal in outlook. And they are an elite in terms of economic
status, public perception, and social influence. As Stephen Hess
writes, “ Being described as an elite disturbs many reporters. But,
of course, they are.59
Yesteryear’s ragtag muckrakers, who tirelessly championed
the little guy against powerful insiders, have become insiders
themselves. Newsmen have long cherished the vantage point of
the outsiders who keep the insiders straight. But now, leading
journalists are courted by politicians, studied by scholars, and
known to millions through their bylines and televised images. In
short, the needs of a post-industrial society increasingly hungry
for information have contributed to the rise of a national news
network. These journalists are anything but the low-lifes and am­
bulance chasers mythologized in The Front Page. Instead, they
constitute an elite that competes for influence alongside more
traditional leadership groups representing business, labor, govern­
ment, and other sectors of society.
Their rise to prominence has hardly gone unnoticed. Some hail
them as the public’s tribunes against the powerful, as indispens­
able champions of the underdog and the oppressed. Others decry
them for allegiance to an adversary culture that is chiseling away
at traditional values. The crucial task that remains is to discover
what relationship, if any, exists between how these individuals
view the world and how they present that world to the public.

53
 “ We shall give a correct picture o f the world.”
— James Gordon Bennett, New York Herald

T here are few ideologues in major media newsrooms. The

American press has a longstanding tradition of fairness and non-
partisanship, and journalists whose news judgments stem bla­
tantly from their politics are unlikely to survive long in main­
stream news organizations. They may have productive careers as
columnists or at journals of opinion from the National Review to
the Nation. Or they may move into positions that combine jour­
nalistic skills with partisan temperaments, as press secretaries,
speechwriters, or public relations executives. Those who remain
in the mainstream usually accept the necessity to overcome one’s
biases as the hallmark of the journalistic profession.
Yet this cannot be the whole story, because news judgments
are no more “ value free” than social science judgments. A major­
ity of the journalists surveyed believe their work should be a force
for social reform. It is hardly surprising that people in this profes­
sion should hope that their work might, in some way, help bring
about a better world. But the kind of world one desires, and how
to attain it, underlie all ideological divisions.
The media uphold two conflicting ideals that cannot always be
reconciled. The reformer’s social commitment coexists uneasily
with the cool nonpartisanship of the objective observer. This is a

54
 Whose News?
dilemma that even the best journalists rarely face head-on. For
example, Walter Cronkite was once asked whether journalists
were “ liberals,” biased against established institutions. He replied
that this was not the case; they merely tend “ to side with humanity
rather than authority.” 1 This statement cuts to the heart of the
issue; it is not a matter of conscious bias but rather of the necessar­
ily partial perspectives through which social reality is filtered. If
the world is divided into authority and humanity, then naturally
one sides with humanity. But is the world always divided that
way? Who is assigned to each side? In what circumstances does
one take a stand for one side and against the other? Such judg­
ments are anything but self-evident.
We all reconstruct reality for ourselves, but journalists are
especially important because they help depict reality for the rest
of society. They do so through the everyday decisions of their
craft: What story is worth covering? How much play should it get?
What angle should it be given? What sources are trustworthy and
informative? The unavoidable preconceptions journalists bring to
such decisions help determine what images of society are available
to their audience.

Searching for Sources

Thus the problem is not simply to subjugate bias to ideals of
objectivity and professionalism. More broadly, it is to recognize
the inevitable role that values and perspectives play in shaping
news judgment. To probe these matters, which are infinitely more
subtle than ideological bias, our interviews included some hypo­
thetical questions and psychological tests. The most straightfor­
ward of these concerns the use of sources. We asked journalists
where they would turn for reliable information on four different
topics. These were broad topics that had been both controversial
and newsworthy for several years— welfare reform, consumer is­
sues, pollution and the environment, and nuclear energy.
For each topic, subjects could mention as many sources as they
wished. The key question is whether these journalists’ thoughts
turn spontaneously to sources whose perspectives accord with
their own. Or alternatively, do their professional instincts lead

55
 T he M e d ia E l it e

them to balance liberal and conservative sources on each topic? O f

course, it might be argued that the most reliable sources on a
particular topic line up on one side of the political spectrum. In
this case, an ideologically balanced listing might be artificial. But
this, too, is a matter of judgment that may be influenced by one’s
own perspective. To provide a baseline for comparison, therefore,
the business leaders produced their own lists of reliable sources.
Thus, journalists’ responses can be gauged against those of a more
conservative and traditional leadership group. The responses of
both groups are shown in Table 4.
Welfare Reform. Since welfare reform has received attention and
legislative proposals from liberals and conservatives alike, we
questioned whether leading journalists would turn equally to both
camps for sources. The individuals and groups they mention range
across the entire ideological spectrum. After excluding govern­
ment agencies and officials, however, a large number of sources
can be reliably assigned to either the political left or right.
Liberal sources cited include such journals of opinion as the
New Republic and Mother Jones; organizations like the National
Welfare Rights Association, the Urban League, and Reverend
Jesse Jackson’s PUSH; and individual activists, such as former
congresswomen Barbara Jordan and Bella Abzug. On the conser­
vative side are such organizations as the American Conservative
Union, the Hoover Institution, and the U.S. Chamber of Com­
merce, and individuals like William F. Buckley. After some delib­
eration, we also included Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in this
group. A t the time, Moynihan was viewed widely as a neo-conser­
vative critic of the welfare system who had promoted a welfare
overhaul as a member of the Nixon administration. In addition to
these liberal and conservative groupings, other sources mentioned
frequently include federal executive agencies, individual federal
officials, state and local agencies, and nonpartisan media sources
like National Journal, Congressional Quarterly, and Facts on File,
How do journalists regard the sources at either end of the
ideological spectrum? Their choices are weighted heavily toward
the liberal end. Three out of four journalists mention at least one
liberal source. In sharp contrast, fewer than one in four cites a

56
 Whose News?

Table 4— Types of Sources Cited as Reliable

Media Business
Welfare Reform
Liberals 15% 17%
Federal Regulatory Agencies 51 25
Federal Officials 38 25
Conservatives 22 22
State and Local Agencies 16 30
Consumer Protection
Ralph Nader/Nader Groups 63 33
Federal Regulatory Agencies 46 28
Consumers Union 44 30
Other Activist Groups 41 26
State and Local Agencies 36 40
Business Groups 22 49
Pollution and Environment
Environmental Activists 69 25
Activist Federal Agencies 68 56
Business Groups 27 34
Liberal Activists and Officials 24 8
Other Federal Agencies 19 11
Nuclear Energy
Anti-Nuclear _
55
Technical Magazines 40 —
Federal Regulatory Agencies 39 —
Other Government 37 —
Pro-Nuclear 32 —

N o te : E x c lu d e s n o n p artisan m ed ia so u rces a n d ca tego ries m en tion ed by few er th an 15

p ercen t o f a ll su b jects.

conservative source. In fact, avow edly liberal individuals, groups,

and journals constitute by far the largest sources o f information
on which these journalists would rely. The disparity between lib­
eral and conservative sources would be even greater if M oynihan
w eren’t classified as a conservative in this context. He alone is
mentioned by 12 percent o f all journalists, the largest total for any
individual on this topic.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

How do these results compare with the responses of business

leaders? The business group gives the more ideologically balanced
response, with conservative sources outweighing the liberal ones,
but only by a five percent margin (22 to 17 percent). Among the
media elite, liberal sources predominate by 53 percent (75 to 22
percent), better than a three to one margin.
Consumer Protection. On consumer issues, there is no clear-cut
split between a conservative and liberal approach. But we were
interested to see whether journalists would attempt to balance
their reliance on consumer advocacy groups with business-related
sources. Another question was whether greater attention would be
given to an organization of relatively narrow focus, such as Con­
sumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, or to activist
groups with broad social reform agendas, such as the various
Nader groups. Third, would journalists look more to government
regulatory agencies or to nonprofit organizations, such as those in
the public interest movement?
One finding stands out. When the media elite deal with con­
sumer protection, their thoughts turn to Ralph Nader. Nearly two
out of three mention Nader or one of his allied organizations, such
as Congress Watch or Public Citizen. One out of five cites Nader
himself, the most mentions given to an individual on any of the
four topics. No other category gamers a majority of mentions, but
three are clustered just above 40 percent. One is federal regulatory
agencies, particularly the more activist agencies like the Occupa­
tional Safety and Health Administration.2 The other two catego­
ries are nonprofit groups, ranging from the Consumer Federation
of America and Common Cause to social activist groups like the
American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for Democratic
Action.
The paucity of business-oriented sources is also notable. Some
journalists try to balance their reliance on Nader groups and
liberal activists with such sources as the Better Business Bureau,
Chamber of Commerce, and industry trade associations. One
would even turn to “ lobbyists for big industries.” Overall, though,
only 22 percent cite some such business-related source of informa­
tion.

58
 Whose News?
Once again, there is a great gulf between journalists and busi­
nessmen. Almost half the business leaders mention a business-
related source. Only one in three cites the Nader network, making
them only about half as likely as journalists to rely on Nader. They
are also substantially less likely to cite other activist groups. Of
course one could hardly expect the business community to flock
to Ralph Nader, an adversary of long standing. But neither is it
self-evident that Nader still epitomizes the now far-flung con­
sumer movement to the extent that journalists’ responses might
suggest. Nor would one automatically associate consumer protec­
tion with such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and
Americans for Democratic Action. So these very different patterns
of responses illustrate how these different occupational groups,
with their different perspectives on society, diverge drastically in
their search for reliable information.
The fact that businessmen would turn to different sources does
not mean their sources are necessarily better or worse than those
of journalists. It is just a reminder that news stories are not chosen
randomly. They reflect the inevitable choices that journalists con­
tinually make as they put their stories together. Journalists’ reli­
ance on Nader groups is also a reminder of the rapid ascendance
of public interest groups as sources of information about social
issues. Twenty years ago such groups existed only as isolated
organizations, promoting particular causes. Today they constitute
an influential network, dispensing information and providing liti­
gation on a variety of causes ranging from consumerism to civil
rights to environmentalism. That their names now rest on the tips
of journalists’ tongues attests to their success in helping reshape
the news agenda.
Environmental Issues. In light of leading journalists’ preferences
for information on consumer issues, their preferred sources on
pollution and the environment come as no surprise. The largest
number, over two out of three, select environmental activist
groups and individuals. These groups include the Environmental
Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and Natural
Resources Defense Council, as well as local organizations like
Pete Seeger’s Clearwater anti-nuclear group. Individual activists

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

range from Robert Redford to Barry Commoner. Nearly as many

mention the activist (at the time) federal regulatory agencies, such
as the Council on Environmental Quality ( c e q ) and Occupational
Health and Safety Administration. These activist public and pri­
vate-sector groups eclipse all others as favored sources of informa­
tion.
Again the question arises: Are these the “ obvious” choices that
anyone would make? It helps to note potential sources that receive
short shrift. For example, fewer than one in five among the media
elite mention any other federal bodies with responsibilities in this
area, such as the Energy Department, National Academy of
Sciences, and National Institute for Occupational Safety and
Health. Similarly, only one in fourteen mentions non-activist
groups (again, at the time), such as the National Wildlife Federa­
tion and the Wilderness Society. Even fewer would rely on scien­
tific or technical journals, such as Science, Nature, or Scientific
American.
All these subsidiary information sources were overshadowed
by a category called liberal activists and officials. One in four
journalists cites groups or individuals not primarily associated
with environmental issues. These include Jane Fonda, Ralph
Nader, and Tom Hayden, and such elected officials as senators
Edward Kennedy and Gary Hart, and then-Govemor Jerry
Brown of California.
The number of these liberal sources is roughly equalled by the
totality of all business-related sources, including organizations
like the Edison Electric Institute and Business Roundtable and
publications ranging from Business Week and Nation's Business
to Forbes and Fortune. It may be that some journalists seek to
balance liberal sources with business-oriented perspectives on the
environment. But this does not include the great preponderance
of activist environmental groups cited, most of which have often
locked horns with industry over pollution and related issues.
Businessmen are far less likely to view the latter groups as
reliable sources. Only one in four selects any of them, compared
to two out of three journalists. Just as predictably, businessmen
are only one-third as likely as journalists to mention liberal acti­

60
 Whose News?
vists or officials, and most who do so focus on nationally promi­
nent politicians. Names like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda do not
spring to mind among the business elite. On the other hand, a
majority of business leaders also cite activist federal agencies like
the Environmental Protection Agency ( e p a ) and c e q . The key
difference between the two groups lies in journalists’ willingness
to accept the reliability of environmental activists in the public
interest movement.3
Nuclear Power. Finally, in a follow-up mailing soon thereafter, we
asked journalists to write down any sources of information on
nuclear energy that they considered reliable.4 Then we compared
the number of responses citing pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear
sources, along with sources that didn’t fall into either camp. Pro-
nuclear sources cited include industry trade associations and pub­
lic utilities, such as the Atomic Industrial Forum, Babcock and
Wilson (a reactor supply firm), and Con Edison; utility trade
publications; and a few pro-nuclear scientists, including Edward
Teller and Hans Bethe. The anti-nuclear sources are much more
diverse. They include anti-nuclear groups like the Union of Con­
cerned Scientists, Environmental Action, and the Clamshell Alli­
ance, along with such publications as Critical Mass Journal and
the Progressive. Also included are many individual activists, such
as Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda, in addition to those with scien­
tific credentials, among them John Goffman, Henry Kendall,
Barry Commoner, and Helen Caldicott. There are also many
oources not clearly aligned with either the pro- or anti-nuclear
side.
There is no contest; anti-nuclear sources far outstrip their
pro-nuclear opponents, who finish behind the pack. A majority of
those listing reliable sources mention an anti-nuclear group or
individual. No more than 40 percent would turn to a scientific
journal, a federal agency, or other government body. Even fewer,
less than one in three, select any pro-nuclear source. This leaves
a 23 percent margin of difference between anti- and pro-nuclear
sources cited (55 vs. 32 percent).
To summarize, journalists’ responses to all four issues fall into
the same general pattern. Where do the media elite turn for

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

reliable information? On welfare reform, liberal sources predomi­

nate over conservative ones. On consumer issues they look to
Ralph Nader, the public interest movement, and liberal activist
groups. On pollution and the environment, they select activist
environmental groups and, once again, liberal leaders. On nuclear
energy, anti-nuclear sources are the most popular. In short, their
responses tend to coincide with the perspectives catalogued in
Chapter Two.
To be sure, the business executives predictably select more
conservative, business-oriented sources. That is precisely the
point. People gravitate toward sources whose perspectives accord
with their own. Differences between the two groups are statisti­
cally significant at .001 for each of the topics.* The extent of this
tilt should not be overstated. Journalists by no means depend
exclusively on liberal viewpoints. They cite a mixture of public and
private, partisan and non-partisan, liberal and conservative
sources. But the liberal side consistently outweighs the conserva­
tive.
This does not imply a conspiracy to exclude conservative
voices, but merely reflects the human tendency to turn more often
to those you trust, and to trust most those who think most like
you do. This presents a special problem for journalists. A large
portion of their craft rests on the ability to sift through various
sources and viewpoints and pass them on to their audience. As
columnist Joseph Kraft wrote, “ The occupational weakness of
those of us in the news media should be obvious.. . . We are not

*For readers unfamiliar with the concept of statistical significance, it

expresses the probability that a given difference could result from
sheer chance or sampling error. The lower the significance level, the
greater our confidence that differences found among random samples
express true differences between the populations from which the
samples are drawn. Thus a significance level of .001, or p =.001 (read:
probability equals .001) expresses a difference that would occur by
chance only one time in a thousand. By convention a significance
level of .05 is normally the highest acceptable, although levels below
.10 may be said to “ approach” an adequate level of significance.
Unless otherwise noted, the significance levels cited are based on the
chi-square statistic.

62
 Whose News?
scholars or even experts. We cannot, accordingly, be original
sources of light. We depend heavily, if not entirely, on what other
people tell us. Our professional skill is in judging sources, and in
fitting bits and pieces of evidence into coherent patterns.” 5

Reconstructing Reality
The difficulty in judging sources extends to a broader issue. Social
perspectives may unconsciously color the very way journalists
perceive the news itself. This might strike psychologists as a very
mild hypothesis, almost an axiomatic principle.6Why should jour­
nalists be any less prone to selective perception than anyone else?
Yet the way they perceive the news is tremendously important,
because it determines the kind of stories they transmit to the rest
of us.
In addition, we have argued that the major obstacle to objec­
tivity in contemporary American journalism is not unyielding
partisanship but unavoidable preconceptions. Therefore we would
expect the media elite to process information mostly in a straight­
forward fashion, but with occasional evidence of selective recall.
When such slippage occurs, however, it should tend to be consist­
ent with their overt attitudes, which can act as perceptual filters.
To examine the estimations of reality that underlie news judg­
ments, we created several news stories. The stories deal with con­
troversial current issues ranging from offshore oil drilling to affir­
mative action. They variously contain primarily liberal or
conservative cues or balance opposing perspectives. During the
interview, each subject looked briefly at the stories, handed them
back to the interviewer, and then attempted to summarize each
story in a single sentence. We were interested not in whether a
summary contained the “correct” interpretation, but whether the
media and business groups would give somewhat different read­
ings of the same material, corresponding to their different perspec­
tives on society.
After the interviews were completed, each summary was ex­
amined separately by two scorers, neither of whom knew the
study’s purposes or the identities of the participants. The scorers
simply grouped anonymous summaries into the categories

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

described below. (This method of “blind” scoring was a standard

procedure for the psychological tests.) The fact that the scorers
agreed over 90 percent of the time suggests that their classifica­
tions are quite reliable. Finally, we compared the response pat­
terns of the two groups. Each story is reprinted here in its entirety,
so that readers can judge its content for themselves.
Affirmative Action. The first example concerns the heated debate
over affirmative action measures and their impact:

In the wake of the Bakke decision, a growing number of white

males are fighting back against affirmative action programs that
favor women and minorities in employment and university ad­
missions. Steelworkers in Louisiana, firemen in Pittsburgh, and
teachers in Detroit are all raising their voices in protest.
The chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Com­
mission says that this backlash places affirmative actions pro­
grams in “ severe jeopardy.” Conservative forces, he warns, are
trying to exploit this reaction against “ reverse discrimination”
and throttle all efforts to bring women and racial minorities into
the economic mainstream.
A white male teacher recently rejected for tenure in favor of
a female colleague disputed this, saying, “ It’s all right to talk
about eliminating discrimination, until your ox is gored. Then
it brings the issue into focus.”

Majorities of both groups (62 percent overall) summarize this

story either in straightforward, neutral language (e.g., “ it’s about
the controversy over affirmative action” ), or in balanced terms,
mentioning both sides in the debate. Typical of the latter is an n b c
producer’s recollection:

“ Blacks tend to feel that if affirmative action is to make up for

many decades of disadvantage, it must include specific goals,
something akin to quotas, but a good many whites are now
challenging this on the basis that disadvantaged whites should
not be forced to make all the concessions.”

The remaining responses are divided almost equally between

those mentioning only the pro-affirmative action argument (18

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 Whose News?
percent) and those confined to the reverse discrimination side (20
percent). But the answers of journalists and businessmen are not
evenly distributed among those two groups. Among those remem­
bering only the affirmative action side, journalists outnumber busi­
nessmen by 62 to 38 percent. Conversely, businessmen predomi­
nate on the reverse discrimination side by 58 to 42 percent. These
differences are significant at the .01 level.
Most pro-affirmative action responses focus on the danger that
anti-discrimination measures might be undermined. A New York
Times reporter’s summary is typical: “The decision in the Bakke
case appears to be resulting in further discrimination on minori­
ties.” Likewise, a Time correspondent states, “ the Bakke decision
has had a backlash effect that is jeopardizing affirmative action
programs for women [and] minorities.” A Washington Post re­
porter concurs, “The Bakke decision has set off a wave of reverse
discrimination cases that threaten the advances made in earlier
equal opportunity decisions.” Among the smaller number of jour­
nalists who stress the other side of the argument is an n b c pro­
ducer who writes, “ . . . given a choice of an ‘A ’ student or a ‘C
student let into school to prove a point, I’d rather let in the ‘A ’
student.”
Business Bribery. The next story focuses on businessmen them­
selves. It concerns a law prohibiting American businesses from
bribing foreign officials to secure overseas clients. This time the
story leads with the business viewpoint, while including some
opposing material:

Not long ago Congress passed a tough law that prohibits bribery
of government officials in foreign business dealings. Many
American executives are now complaining that, as a result, they
have lost sales worth millions of dollars to competitors. In their
view, the new morality has compounded America’s balance of
payments deficits and raised the cost of goods to consumers.
The president of a major company complained, “ American
businessmen are operating with both hands tied behind their
backs. What’s business all about, anyway?— to make money.
You pay a commission to make a deal, you make a profit,
everyone’s happy.”

65
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Government spokesmen counter that Americans will not

stand for a double standard in business ethics at home and
abroad. Nevertheless, a widespread feeling persists that Ameri­
can business is being hurt.

This time 69 percent of responses could be classified as neutral

or balanced. O f the remainder, those criticizing business tactics
almost double those defending them, by 20 to 11 percent. Once
again, the two groups gather on opposite sides, to a statistically
significant degree (p < .01). Journalists account for 68 percent of
those recalling only criticisms of business ethics, while business­
men make up 64 percent of those recalling the necessity for bribery
to compete abroad.
Journalists in the first group often come down hard on busi­
ness for double standards and unethical behavior. For example,
an AB C executive accuses American businessmen of “ . . . trying
to rationalize unethical means to do business.” A U.S. News re­
porter asserts: “ There is no possible legitimate reason for
American businessmen to operate under double standards of
business ethics . . .” And one a b c producer seizes the opportu­
nity to pass judgment on domestic business practices: “Who
said bribery wasn’t always the way in American business to
begin with . . . under the table deals have always been the way
of life in America.”
Journalists who recall the other side of the argument tend to
be more straightforward, often carefully attributing it to the
“ complaints” of businessmen. For example, in a U.S. News re­
porter’s summary, “American industry is complaining that it’s
hard to do business overseas under U.S. regulations which pro­
hibit bribery of foreign officials.” This contrasts with the much
more pointed comments of businessmen in this group, who tend
to employ phrases like “fighting a battle with one hand tied be­
hind you.”
Race and Income. A story on the economic gap between blacks
and whites produces another split between media and business
leaders. This story leads with the view that racial discrimination

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 Whose News?
continues to hinder black achievement. However, it also presents
an affirmative view’ that black economic achievement is rising.

The economic gap between blacks and whites is widening, ac­

cording to a report released by a major civil rights organization.
According to the report, the black-to-white family income ratio
has fallen sharply, while black unemployment has increased
more rapidly than that of whites.
These findings challenge recent studies claiming that eco­
nomic achievement by blacks is on the upswing, and that the
current plight of blacks is better accounted for by class differ­
ences than by racial discrimination. Proponents of this view
argue that increased and improved education has made blacks
more competitive in the job market, while government-
mandated minority hiring programs have had little effect.
A spokesman for the civil rights groups calls this a “danger­
ous misconception” that increases white resistance toward
efforts to bring about racial equality. He warned that a slacken­
ing of such efforts would produce renewed urban unrest.

This story elicits some of the strongest sentiments recorded.

The cue of the civil rights report proved strong enough to out­
weigh even the neutral and balanced responses. They account for
only 42 percent of all subjects. A majority of 52 percent recalls
only the argument that the racial economic gap is widening. That
leaves only 7 percent w’ho refer solely to the contradictory claims
from the story’s second paragraph. Nonetheless, a familiar divi­
sion of perceptions appears along occupational lines. Journalists
account for two-thirds (66 percent) of those reciting summaries
about an increasing income gap, while businessmen represent an
even greater portion (69 percent) of those who reject this notion
or attribute it to class rather than racial factors. This pattem of
differences is significant at the .001 level.
Some journalists not only affirm the notion of a widening
gap, but also debunk the contradictory’ position. Thus, an A BC
correspondent castigates whites for unsupportable optimism:
“ the white perception that blacks are making major progress in

67
 The M e d ia E l it e

achieving an equal economic status with whites is simply untrue

or incorrect.” Others stress the warning that any slackening of
efforts to decrease the gap would engender unrest. A New York
Times reporter puts this view in stark terms: “ The notion that
blacks are better off is an illusion which whites had better take
note of or run the risk of seeing more racial disturbances in the
big cities.” Still others attribute the faltering economic condition
of blacks to pervasive racial discrimination. In the words of a Post
reporter, “ The problem of class distinction within the black race
is being used to overshadow the continuing racial discrimination
problems of the day.”
A few journalists reaffirm a declining income gap or attribute
economic differences to class rather than racial factors. A public
broadcasting administrator even asserts, “ the annual income of
blacks has increased and is beginning to surpass that of the aver­
age white income.” And an a b c executive offers a rebuke: “Just
a continuing offense on the part of the civil rights groups. Positive
strides have been made in the past 20 years— sometimes a great
deal of paranoia tends to exist among civil rights groups__” Such
responses, however, are the exception. More typical is an indepen­
dent producer’s contention that, “ There’s always been and will
always be a broad gulf between black and white due to racial
discrimination.”
The Politics of Energy. The last story deals with a strug­
gle between consumers’ groups and the oil industry over off­
shore drilling:

The House Rules Committee will vote today on a bill designed

to provide a more orderly development of offshore oil and natu­
ral gas reserves.
The bill has been passed by the Senate, and supporters had
thought House passage was secure. But under intense lobbying
pressures from the oil industry, which contends that the mea­
sure would slow development o f offshore energy, several com­
mittee members have withdrawn earlier expressions of support.
The director o f a consumer group said, “ The bottling up of
this bill would be an unconscionable power play by the oil
industry to prevent urgently needed reforms.”

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 Whose News?
Industry lobbyists, however, tried to play down their pan in
today’s vote. The head of a local lobbying group said, “ We’ve
played a very minor role. We are just trying to point out that
the bill hurts the little companies.”

A slight majority (52 percent) of the summaries are neutral or

balanced. Most of the remainder (40 percent) criticize the oil
industry or lobbyists in general. Only 8 percent support the indus­
try’s position that the bill would not be in the public interest.
These one-sided responses fit a familiar pattern, but to a lesser
degree. Journalists make up 58 percent of the anti-industry com­
ments, and businessmen recall 57 percent of the pro-industry' sum­
maries. For the first time, however, the magnitude of these differ­
ences isn’t great enough to attain statistical significance. This
apparently reflects a widespread distaste for lobbyists that is
shared by journalists and businessmen alike. A network film edi­
tor’s comment is typically succinct: “ Lobbyists are sleazy and
that’s the crux of it.” This is not so different from an oil company
executive’s more prosaic lament that, “ Lobbying often has a detri­
mental effect upon legislation designed for the common good.”
Surely, many journalists dispute the coupling of corporate and
national interest. As a Post reporter puts it, “ . .. [the] oil industry
has influenced [Congress] to take action that would benefit the
major oil companies to the detriment of the country.” But others,
like a CBS producer, remember just the opposite message: “The bill
. . . would badly affect the industry and the country.”
Although the differences in the responses on this final story are
slight, the dominant pattern remains clear. For stories dealing
with racial income disparities, affirmative action, and bribery in
business practices, the media and business summaries differ to a
statistically significant degree. After reading the same stories, the
media group is more likely to recall a rising racial income gap and
the business group to remember a declining one; the journalists
differentially tend to see threats to affirmative action where the
businessmen observe reverse discrimination; members of the press
more often perceive a lack of business ethics where the industrial­
ists find unfair standards. Finally, the media subjects are slightly

69
 T he M e d ia E l it e

(but not significantly) more critical of the industry position on

offshore drilling.
The magnitude of these differences should not be overstated.
The percentage differences between the two groups on individual
categories were often small, reaching a maximum of 22 percent on
the racial income gap story (where 62 percent of journalists gave
a “ liberal” response, compared to 40 percent of businessmen).
Indeed, one might regard the findings as testimony to the profes­
sionalism of leading journalists, since the majority of all responses
fell into the neutral or balanced categories. This may also reflect
more general patterns of perception, since the businessmen were
slightly more likely than the journalists to produce such responses.
Still, the overall pattem of responses should not be under­
estimated. This was an artificial and highly structured situation in
which participants knew they were being tested in some way.
Nonetheless, statistically significant differences appeared on three
of the four test items (i.e., the stories). And in every case the
direction of slippage was consistent with the differences in the two
groups’ social attitudes.
Moreover, when the responses are summed across all four
stories, the group differences stand out more sharply. To create an
overall index, we treated the first response in the dichotomies
summarized above (pro-affirmative action, criticism of business
ethics, etc.) as a “ liberal” perception, and the second (reverse
discrimination, unfair standards hurt industry, etc.) as its “ con­
servative” counterpart. Neutral and balanced responses were con­
sidered nonpartisan. By this measure, 56 percent of the journalists
produced at least one liberal response, while only 38 percent pro­
vided a conservative answer. By contrast, only 44 percent of the
businessmen gave one or more liberal summaries, but 62 percent
produced conservative perceptions. These group differences be­
come sharper if we take into account the total of each individual’s
liberal or conservative responses across all four stories. For exam­
ple, nearly half the sample produced two or more summaries tilted
in either the liberal or conservative direction. O f this subgroup,
journalists account for two-thirds (66 percent) of those with two

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 Whose News?
or more liberal responses, while businessmen make up three out
of four subjects (74 percent) with at least two conservative sum­
maries.
Finally, we created an overall index of selective recall by sub­
tracting the conservative responses from the liberal ones. Thus,
the higher an individual’s score, the more his or her liberal re­
sponses outweigh the conservative ones. The net results, shown in
Table 5, demonstrate a consistent and statistically significant
(p < .001) relationship between occupation and perception. The
businessmen make up two-thirds of the group with the most con­
servative perception; the journalists account for nearly three-quar­
ters of those with the most liberal perceptions.
Thus, when leading journalists confront new information, they
usually manage to process it without interjecting their own view­
points. A t the same time, some selective recall seems inevitable.
When this does occur, the net result is to push their perceptions
of the news somewhat in the liberal direction. In sum, these
findings suggest that journalists are neither strangers to selective
perception nor its prisoners. How could it be otherwise? This
confirms that they are not ideologues, but also that they are only
human. It recalls one newspaper ombudsman’s response to our
survey: “ They are professionals, but there is bound to be slippage.
The problem is that the slippage may be mostly in one direction.”

Pictures in Our Heads

Thus far the psychological probes have been rather straightfor­
ward and closely related to journalists’ daily work. What sources
do they trust? What angle do they spontaneously give to a story?

Table 5— Liberal Perceptions o f News Stories

Low Medium High

Media 34 51 73
Business 66 49 iZ
100% 100% 100%

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

Their own responses to these questions suggest that their social

perspectives cannot be divorced entirely from their news judg­
ments.
We sought to probe more deeply still into the media’s collec­
tive mentality— to uncover the underlying personality tendencies
that guide perceptions and judgments. To measure these, the in­
terview included a personality test called the Thematic Appercep­
tion Test ( t a t ). The t a t consists of several pictures of social
situations that can be interpreted in many different ways. For
example, one picture shows an older man talking to a younger
man in an office. The older man could be comforting the younger
man, giving him advice, or criticizing him. The “ test” is to write
a fictional story about the people in the picture.
The t a t ’ s underlying assumption is like that of the Rorschach
“ ink-blot” test. When people use their imaginations to structure
an ambiguous situation, they inadvertently reveal what is on their
minds. Such stories reveal a good deal about inner needs and
motivations that people may not even realize they possess. Thus,
the t a t is intended to tap imagination and creativity and, with it,
one’s fantasies and projections. It allows access to the underlying
fantasy life that helps shape our understanding and expectation of
social reality. If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, the
t a t at least provides a poor man’s path.

Initially we chose this test to measure basic psychological

dispositions, such as the need for power, the need for achievement,
and the capacity for intimacy. There is a long history of social
psychological research on such key personality traits. The findings
in these areas are presented in Chapter Four. However, many of
the themes and images also had a social or political cast. So, we
also employed a system, devised by Eileen McColgan of Columbia
University, to score t a t stories for social and political imagery.
Each subject was shown five pictures and asked to write a story
about the characters depicted. Because the pictures were origi­
nally chosen to measure personality traits rather than politically
relevant fantasies, the majority of stories did not convey such
concerns. O f those that did, however, we asked once again
whether the responses of the media and business groups differed

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 Whose News?
significantly in ways corresponding to their differing social per­
spectives.
Four of the pictures produced socially relevant themes. We
will discuss each in turn with examples to convey the flavor of the
responses. The examples are reproduced verbatim from the ques­
tionnaires. Our underlying goal is to show which aspects of ambig­
uous situations journalists pay the greatest attention to, and how
they structure social reality for themselves.
Men in Uniform. The first picture (see fig. i) shows two uniformed
men flanking a third, who wears a different uniform. Their posi­
tioning and expressions suggest to many subjects that the man in
the middle is subordinate to the others or even at their mercy. As
a result, this picture sometimes produces stories about authority
relations. However, such stories are coded as socially relevant only
if the characters’ individual behavior is connected to that of a
larger institution or organization, such as the police or military.
In these cases, a story’s portrayal of institutional authority is
scored as positive if the authority figures or the institutions they
represent are portrayed as helping an individual or otherwise
producing beneficial outcomes. Stories are scored as negative
when authority figures, acting as representatives of their institu­
tion, are portrayed as punitive or arbitrary, or otherwise produce
detrimental outcomes.
How do the two groups differ in the fantasies they create about
authority and its effect on the individual? About one story in five
(19 percent) could be coded for such themes. Journalists make up
two-thirds (65 percent) of those who create anti-authority tales,
while businessmen account for 58 percent of the pro-authority
plots, a statistically significant difference (p < .05).
About one in five journalists sees the two authority figures as
policemen and the man in the center as their prisoner. A recurring
theme is that of the innocent victim facing his captors. Thus he
is variously described by a Time reporter as “ unfairly put in jail
for robbery,” and by a Newsweek reporter as “ the quite innocent
victim of some Kafkaesque persecution.” This theme is sometimes
overlaid with visions of social oppression. A p b s staff member
portrays a farmer who “ has been involved in activities that are

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Figure i

considered subversive. He is a socialist in the 1950’s and his way

of thinking is very unpopular__ He is concerned about what will
happen to his family and farm if he doesn’t sign the loyalty oath
the policemen want.” In a Washington Post editor’s story, the
young man is a “ farm labor organizer” about to be arrested be­
cause he “ is engaged in a campaign against agricultural producers
. . . to estáblish minimum wages and working conditions. . .
Such prisoners often face a rough ride from the authorities. An
independent producer tells of an innocent man who “ hasn’t a
chance . . . with no money for proper legal defense.. . . They will
try to get him to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.” A p b s
administrator uses the first person technique to convey the pris­
oner’s plight. “ After the escape from prison, I ran into a field
where I spent the night.. . . When I awoke two authorities were

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 Whose News?
standing over me with guns pointed at my face. . . . They began
to beat me.”
So for some journalists this picture provides an opportunity to
identify with the prisoner as the often innocent victim of intimida­
tion or police brutality. More often, though, their complaints are
against a different institution— the armed forces. Three out of four
depict a military setting, and their descriptions of military life are
shot through with sarcasm and depictions of punitive behavior.
Several journalists portray the man in the middle as a scared
recruit at the mercy of two superiors. A Washington Post reporter
writes, “This young man was inducted, probably against his will.
He may abhor military life and the regimentation it entails, but
he has little choice.” A more concrete version of this theme, by
a PBS staffer, has two sergeants tell a recruit, “There are eighteen
tons of horseshit out in that field, son, and you’ve got one week
to pick it all up.” Faced with this unpleasant task, he goes a w o l
and escapes to Canada. Eventually he takes a journalist’s revenge:
“ He later writes a tough honest novel about army life and wins
a Pulitzer prize.”
In addition to identifying with the victim, these journalists
often express anger against those who abuse power. Thus a p b s
production staffer describes the two authority figures as “ faceless
brutes . . . smugly complacent in their authority,” while an a b c
reporter complains of their “arrogance that comes with power
over the powerless.” A Newsweek reporter speculates that “ the
commanding ofiicer . . . may even enjoy inflicting punishment,”
and a Time reporter alludes to “ the sadism of army non-coms.”
A CBS correspondent even provides a psychological sketch of the
compensatory function of bullying. His career Marine officer is
“ . .. a real son of a bitch. He’s a man who’s grown frustrated with
his lack of progress. He takes out his aggression on recruits, enjoys
the fear he can see on their young faces just by raising a fist.”
The threat of sadistic aggression occasionally becomes an actu­
ality. According to one Wall Street Journal reporter, two Marine
drill instructors “are trying to figure out a way to shit-can the
recruit, to drum him out of the corps... . After repeated punches
to the stomach his Adam’s apple will be squeezed, he will be

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gouged. . . . He will crack up . . Even this graphic description

falls short of a New York Times reporter’s story, which carries the
theme of authoritarian brutality to its grisly conclusion: “ The
guard with the gun will shoot the young man in the head and
the other will kick his body.”
Several stories are peppered with derogatory comments about
the armed services. A good example of how anti-military and
anti-authority themes are interwoven is a Washington Post re­
porter’s story, which begins, “ Once again— the military. America
never escapes i t . . . never escapes the faces of the military which
— incidentally— never change. . . an ordinary soldier. . . has gone
a w o l . . . . He is captured by two officers. They are predictably
the stereotypical bully types. . . relishing their task.” Another Post
reporter expresses resentment more succinctly: “ the superior offi­
cers are enjoying the authority they can exert, just because they
are in the military,” while a New York Times reporter asserts that
“ the [military’s] goal is order not justice.”
The pro-authority stories invert most of the themes stressed
above, upholding military authority and its institutional ethos.
For example, an n b c producer justifies the rigors of Marine Corps
boot camp: “ Certain people can use this type of experience [for]
its help in molding character.” A Post editor legitimizes military
authority relations by introducing that stock character, the out­
wardly tough sergeant with a tender heart: “ Sgt. Breitenback
would like to see the recruit make good . . . deep down he sympa­
thizes with the recruit’s difficulties, and he feels committed to the
Marine ethic ‘the Marine Corps builds men’. . . the tough m p Sgt.
will help him in quiet ways to get over his fear of the military.”
Overall, however, journalists create over four times as many anti­
authority themes (by 17 to 4 percent), with stories of the “ little
guy” being badgered, beaten down, or brutalized by malevolent
authorities.
Boxers. This picture of two boxers (see fig. 2) might seem an
unlikely candidate to produce social imagery. It shows one man
in the foreground with another silhouetted in the background. The
man in the foreground apparently is staring into space; the other
seems to be training or sparring.
 Whose News?

Figure 2

Just as some journalists treat the first picture as a cue to

criticize authority, they differentially use this opportunity to write
about boxers as social underdogs. The journalists are significantly
more likely than the businessmen to identify one o f the boxers as
black, to see them as fighting against poverty, or to portray them

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as exploited by higher-ups such as crooked managers. Moreover,

contrasting subplots often emerge in the stories about underdogs
fighting against a hostile world. The businessmen tend to echo
Horatio Alger themes, portraying the boxers as successful in their
quest for victory, a championship, and fame and riches. The jour­
nalists tend to end their stories on a downbeat note, concluding
that these underdogs will lose their struggle, both in the ring and
in life.
One writer in three (33 percent) infuses his or her story with
such social relevance. Among those who see the fighters as social
underdogs, journalists predominate by 69 to 31 percent. Con­
versely, Horatio Alger themes are usually the province of busi­
nessmen, by 62 to 38 percent. These differences are significant at
the .001 level.
Several journalists carry the theme of race or racism into their
stories. A recurring theme pits a black boxer against a “ great
white hope.” These stories deal with the effects of racism on the
characters. An NBC correspondent tells a story about an aggressive
young redneck from Mobile, Alabama, who is “ gonna fight a
black man no less from Detroit in his first fight for money. His first
fight with a black man since [Viet]Nam.” But the bout won’t go
well for him. “ He’s going to get the cockiness beaten out of him
— and by a black man.” The upshot? “ Billy’s going to do his
fighting for the Klan.”
Other subjects have their characters strike a blow against rac­
ism. An independent producer writes that boxing taught Tony, his
protagonist, “ the fundamentals of self-control and friendship.
. . . His feelings toward other minorities, once hardened by racism,
have softened into respect.” And a CBS producer spins a tale about
the triumph of principle over ambition. His white fighter rejects
the “ great white hope” hype surrounding him. “ He would like this
fight to be fought strictly on its merits without any racial over­
tones. He makes up his mind that he will call off the fight until
it can be held without stigma of racism. It means the end of his
career but he feels he has indeed won a greater fight.” Here it is
irrelevant whether the background boxer is “ actually” black or

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white. The ambiguity is itself the message. It allows some subjects
to give rein to their concerns about racism in American society.
Other journalists’ characters are poor and downtrodden, and
likely to remain so. A Wall Street Journal reporter notes that
“boxing has long been a road of advancement for the unskilled and
uneducated young man in our society.” His protagonist “is typical
of these . . . the oldest brother of a large, poor New York family.
His favorite movie is Rocky and he sees himself advancing to the
top ranks of the pros.” But the promise will likely prove false.
“Already the pounding is starting to take its toll and . . . he may
end up poor and punch drunk.”
Journalists tend to forecast such failure and misery for their
struggling young strivers. A CBS executive foresees that “ both will
continue to fight and in the end will wind up broke and unem­
ployed.” And in a Time reporter’s forecast, “ they will sustain
more beatings in the ring. Eventually they will wind up on some
skid row as punch-drunk has-beens.” Sometimes failure is at­
tributed to personal or social exploitation. In a Washington Post
reporter’s story, two poverty-stricken boxers aim at the title fight
that will bring them money and “ a reputation.” But “ they will not
get it because they will be exploited.” Who does the exploiting?
Usually an avaricious manager, as in his Post colleague’s story:
“his manager asks him to take a dive and split the winnings of a
big bout.” A producer of p b s documentaries lays out the whole
no-win scenario. His boxer “ took a dive, got hurt and dumped by
his promoters. Unable to work— started drinking— pulled himself
together— trying to make a comeback.. . . He will fight and lose.
He will have a final revelation . . . and realize he can’t win.”
For these journalists, then, the picture of two boxers does not
bring to mind thoughts of Rocky triumphant, of overcoming the
odds to win victories or championships. Instead, they ruminate on
racism, poverty, exploitation, and the ultimate failure of the
downtrodden. The controlling metaphor comes less from Rocky
than The Grapes o f Wrath.
Office Scene. This picture (see fig. 3) shows two men talking in
an office. One man is middle-aged or older, the other much

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younger. The office is well appointed and the men are well dressed.
These are the bare facts, the stage scenery. The rest is up to the
viewer’s imagination.
Stories are coded for social imagery only if the characters are
portrayed in the context of an institutional role, such as business­
men making a deal or lawyers preparing a legal case. If the men
are portrayed in a highly complimentary fashion or are shown

Figure 3

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contributing to the good of society, they are coded as positive. If
the characters intend or commit some illegal, unethical, or other­
wise clearly objectionable act, they are coded as negative. Such
stories must go beyond a passing positive or negative reference to
make a strong judgment about the characters.
Most subjects see the figures as businessmen, while the remain­
der identify them mostly as lawyers or politicians. If the occupa­
tions portrayed are similar, though, the plots are sharply varied.
One story in eight (13 percent) builds a plot around the two men’s
occupational functions. Journalists make up over three-quarters
(78 percent) of those who portray the characters’ behavior as
corrupt or otherwise objectionable. However, journalists also con­
stitute 62 percent of those who praise the characters’ behavior.
Nonetheless, the journalists’ portrayals are significantly more neg­
ative (p = .001) than those of the business group.
How can this be so? The apparent paradox results from the
small number of pro-authority stories— only 5 percent of all re­
sponses. So even though journalists account for the majority of
this small group, they still produce twice as many negative as
positive stories (13 vs. 6 percent of all journalists’ stories, respec­
tively). Businessmen write fewer codeable stories overall, and
these are split evenly between positive and negative stories, with
4 percent in each category. Thus the media elite portray crooked
or venal businessmen, deceitful lawyers, and self-serving politi­
cians over three times as often as the business elite (13 vs. 4
percent).
A Washington Post editor creates a scenario that might have
led to an airline crash: “The setting could be McDonald-Douglas
[sic], the aircraft corporation, on the verge of deciding to go into
production of the DC-10 transport. The older man has learned that
the design tests show a serious, systemic flaw that will almost
certainly cause crashes.. . . The younger associate is deciding that
the arguments of his associate are not sufficiently compelling to
risk the loss of status and prospects for advancement. He is on the
verge of selling out.”
Similarly, a Newsweek reporter tells of a hard-nosed chief
executive pulling his faint-hearted subordinate into line: “ Look at

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me, I personally kicked families out of houses for ten years before
my dad brought me into the front office. Bill, you’ve got to go out
there and foreclose on that [housing] project. You know the bun­
dle we’ll make when they put the office tower up on their place.
Don’t give me any crap about it not being really legal.” And
according to a senior editor at the Washington Post, “ the older
man is explaining to the younger why it is more important for the
company to bribe an Iranian official to get a contract and keep the
stockholders happy than it is for them to live up to the letter of
the American law that prohibits foreign bribery.”
Sometimes tales of corporate skullduggery spill over into more
direct statements on the motives and mores of the business world.
A high-level editor at U.S. News and World Report bypasses plot
lines entirely in favor of an essay on business ethics: “ Corporate
greed and graft are a way of life to many who live in the Executive
Suite. Sometimes it is a style passed from father to son, often to
the disbelief of the younger person. Whatever happened to
honesty, he may ask. But wealth prevails.”
Businessmen are not the only target of the media elite’s criti­
cism. Lawyers are castigated for deceitfully protecting their cli­
ents, to the public’s detriment. One editor portrays a young Wash­
ington lawyer who is reprimanded for being too “ honest and
straightforward” in representing “ a big defense contractor” before
a congressional committee. Eventually he learns “ to play along
and be a member of the team” in order to “ make money with a
big law office, with a big house in the suburbs.”
Politicians fare even worse. A Post reporter’s story holds the
State Department responsible for Uganda’s notorious Idi Amin:
“ The younger man by the window is the U.S. ambassador to
Uganda in 1970. The older man is the department chief for Africa
at the State Department. A decision has been made to mount a
coup to bring Idi Amin to power. The older authority figure is
convincing the younger and more honest-looking figure that the
U.S. should not oppose the coup. He prevails, Idi Amin comes to
power, but the policy backfires as Amin runs amok---- The older
man retires, becomes a combatant for South Africa, and the strug­
gle for influence continues.”

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In sharp contrast are stories that portray positive authority
figures or actually praise the business community. These are in­
variably blander than the more sharply etched negative stories.
Typical is an n b c producer’s scenario: “A senior executive at a
large corporation is addressing a bright, ambitious young execu­
tive. He’s explaining why it’s necessary to make an unpopular
decision. The young man feels it’s important to avoid the decision.
. . . The unpopular decision is made, the young executive eventu­
ally discerns that it was the correct and proper thing to do.”
Rarely does the theme of business having social benefits become
an integral part of a journalist’s story. Thus, an a b c producer sees
the two businessmen as benefiting the larger community: “ In pri­
vate industry an opportunity to grow and refine one’s theories is
to compare them with those of others . . . the body of common
business knowledge will expand. As business refines itself the
consumer and economy will prosper.”
More often, though, journalists portray these establishment
figures as slavishly pursuing personal profit or narrow self-inter­
est at the public’s expense. One n b c producer even offers a pre­
ferred alternative in his story about a father “ trying to get [his
son] to consider a ‘proper’ business career.” The son “wants to
do his own thing, doesn’t consider the family business all that
exciting and doesn’t give a damn whether he winds up a million­
aire.” The denouement? “ He’s going to tell his father no thanks,
he would rather be . . . a public interest lawyer working with
Ralph Nader.”
Adult and Child. The picture of a black male adult and child (see
fig. 4) summons up many of the same themes as the boxer picture,
with some intriguing variations. Almost one-third (31 percent) of
all stories contain socially relevant themes. Although nothing in
the picture suggests they are poor, poverty is a fairly common
theme. Racial themes also appear in many guises, including stories
about discrimination, racial pride, and minority advancement in
white society. Journalists are significantly more likely than busi­
nessmen to apply themes of racial or social disadvantage. They
comprise 62 percent of such stories, with the businessmen furnish­
ing only 38 percent, a difference significant at the .01 level.

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Figure 4

One recurring motif is the effort to overcome racial discrimina­

tion. Some stories concern past discrimination. A reporter for
Time writes, “ He was 40, a black from Atlanta, and all the old
crimes of the past stayed with him. He remembered the time his
daddy tried to take his family to a Holiday Inn, only to be turned

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 Whose News?
away by the old we’re-all-filled-up routine and being forced to
spend the night in the tacky Blue Midnight down the road, the
only motel around that slept blacks. He felt obligated to tell his
young son of his travails, travails that the boy would never experi­
ence because of the roads paved by his father.”
Other stories deal with the lingering residue of racism. In a
Post reporter’s version, a father tells his son that “despite recent
gains in human relations and equal opportunity . . . he must
always remember that he is black, which carries with it a special
burden and a special heritage.” And a Newsweek reporter’s story
raises the issue of current racial images in mass culture. Here a
teacher tries to explain why the comic books “ always show Super­
man as a white dude.” The boy complains, “ But he’s so powerful
. . . why can’t he be black once in a while?” The teacher replies,
“ I know, and the whites are always seeming too strong too. But
that’s the heritage of 400 years of slavery and segregation in this
country. We got blacks coming on strong now too. It’s going to
take time.”
Occasionally such racial pride is equated with “black power”
and opposition to white society. One editor tells about a son
rejecting his father’s advice: “ the father wants him to do better so
he can ‘succeed’ and become an ‘Uncle Tom.’ The boy will rebel at
being forced to enter a middle-class, white, achievement-oriented
society. He will join his own people and work for black power.”
And a reporter ridicules the adult character as “ a black teacher
teaching a black boy in a white man’s school” and complains, “ Ido
not associate black men sitting down with their youngsters— being
as I am abeliever in the black matriachal society.”
For most journalists who write socially relevant themes,
though, this picture evokes a less polarized message. Blacks can
“ make it” if only they are afforded freedom from discrimination,
access to positive role models, and the opportunity for educa­
tional advancement. Thus a CBS producer imagines that this “ fa­
ther and son had heard Jesse Jackson speak . . . . Jackson had
urged both the parents and their children to work hard in school
stressing education is the key. . . . The Jackson speech had made
a tremendous impact on both father and son. Both had decided

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that if the boy wanted to go to college, he’d better start working

now.”

In sum, journalists are consistently more likely than businessmen

to uphold social underdogs and criticize authorities. Figures of
authority differentially evoke journalists’ fantasies about the abuse
of power, whether by greedy businessmen, conniving politicians,
intimidating policemen, or bullying military superiors. Con­
versely, they more often portray the average man as a victim of
malevolent higher-ups or an uncaring or unjust social system.
These differences are only relative. There is no correct response
to this test, and no one theme or image is more proper than
another. Moreover, the differences only represent group tenden­
cies, which certainly do not hold for every journalist interviewed.
Only a minority responded to each t a t picture with a socially
relevant story that fit our scoring categories.
On the other hand, the group differences on all four pictures
are statistically significant. The consistency of these findings sug­
gests that occupational differences do exist in the fantasies the t a t
pictures evoke about social relations. Moreover, when media and
business responses are totaled across all four pictures (following
the procedures used for the news stories, some sharper overall)
distinctions appear. To make this comparison, we classified anti­
authority and social underdog themes as liberal and pro-authority
and Horatio Alger themes as conservative. To create a single
continuum, we then added together each subject’s liberal themes
and subtracted his or her conservative themes from the total.
The net results, shown in Table 6, confirm that journalists
make up nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of those with the most

Table 6— Liberal Them es In t a t Stories

Low Medium High

Media 37 56 73
Business J >3 44 iZ
100% 100% 100%

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liberal t a t imagery, while businessmen account for the bulk (63
percent) of the most conservative themes.7These results are within
a few percentage points of the earlier index of liberal and conserva­
tive story summaries (see Table 5). So the different outlooks of
these two groups are reflected almost equally in both their percep­
tions and their apperceptions— the distinctive mindsets through
which they experience the world.
The crucial point is quite simple. Journalists’ source selections,
summaries of news stories, and t a t themes tend to be consistent
with the social attitudes they express. This suggests that their
conscious opinions are reflected to some degree in the ways they
subconsciously structure reality. It also suggests that total objec­
tivity is impossible to attain, since the conscious effort to be objec­
tive takes place within a mental picture of the world already
conditioned by one’s beliefs about it. This is a truism to social
psychologists, but one that journalists are understandably not
eager to endorse. After all, it implies that dealing with the effects
of personal perspective on news coverage may call for more than
individual effort. It may require a heterogeneous newsroom where
competing views of all stripes lessen the chance that any one
perspective will be taken for granted.
It is probably impossible to deal with the world around us
without some paradigm or worldview informing our approach to
reality. On the basis of our upbringings and life experiences, we
all make judgments about which facts are important and whom
we can trust. Journalists and social scientists alike try to approach
objectivity by developing self-awareness and by using techniques
that minimize this natural and unavoidable partiality. But the
pressure-packed environment of working journalists makes it es­
pecially difficult to attain a critical distance from the very news
judgments on which they must depend.
New York Times editor Bill Kovach recently gave eloquent
expression to this problem. In his words, “ we are all prisoners
within our own skins and there are values attached there that we
are not even aware o f . . . these values that we carry in our heads
every day are the worst and most insidious because we don’t
recognize them.” 8

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Whose Values? It is not only journalists, however, who tend to

minimize the role their values play in news coverage. An impor­
tant school of thought among social scientists holds that journal­
ists’ personal beliefs are unimportant, because their stories are
shaped mainly by the needs of commercial news organizations. As
Leon Sigal puts it, “ The assumption . . . is that organizational
pressures and bureaucratic politics account for much more of
news content than, say, the political proclivities of individual
newsmen.” 9
This organizational perspective encompasses two lines of argu­
ment. The first stresses the importance of constraints like those of
time, money, and competition in shaping the news product. The
second holds that editorial control overrides any bias by reporters,
or that conservative editors, acting as agents of management,
provide a check on liberal reporters.10 Several influential books
that appeared during the 1970s developed variations on these argu­
ments as counterweights against charges of media bias by conser­
vatives.11 Indeed the authors sometimes invoked Spiro Agnew as
representative of the perspective they rejected.12
By emphasizing the social context of newsmaking, organiza­
tional perspectives provide a needed corrective to crude conspir­
acy theories of the news. However, they also contain some limita­
tions. First, social control in the newsroom is not what it used to
be. Dramatic changes in the journalistic profession have signifi­
cantly weakened the ability of senior management to reshape
reportage, especially at national media outlets. Moreover, the po­
litical distance between reporters and editors is often overstated.
We found little difference between the two groups, and a recent
national survey of journalists found virtually identical ideological
orientations among supervisors and news staffers.11
Second, organizational theorists lean heavily on the method of
participant observation to prove their case. This method consists
of visiting news organizations to observe journalists at work. The
observation can last for months and include interviews with the
newspeople under study. Such research may yield significant in­
sights into journalists’ behavior, but the insights will always reflect

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the impressions of the observer, and hence the perspective he or
she brings to the research.
This does not invalidate such insights, but it does highlight
their subjectivity. Participant observation can show how news
values commonly attributed to personal perspective might instead
reflect organizational imperatives. But it cannot preclude the im­
pact of personal values, because it does not test for them in any
reliable and systematic fashion.
Finally, after downgrading the direct effects of personal per­
spectives on the news, organizational theorists often bring them
in through the back door. For example, Edward J. Epstein wrote
News from Nowhere to show that “the news presented on network
television is fixed to a large extent by organizational require­
ments.” 14 But he notes that within these organizations,

controls tend to be disregarded when executives, producers and

correspondents all share the same view and further perceive it
to be a view accepted by virtually all thoughtful persons. News
reports about such subjects as pollution, hunger, health care,
racial discrimination, and poverty fall in this category. On such
consensus issues, correspondents are expected by executives
openly to advocate the eradication of the presumed evil and even
put it in terms of a “crusade.” 15

How such problems should be presented is not a “consensus

issue,” but a matter of heated debate all across the political spec­
trum. Inevitably, then, “ crusading” news reports on these issues
will generate controversy. Even if such crusades end once they
become widely disputed, their cumulative effect will push the news
in the direction of the media’s conventional wisdom, i.e., the view
of “ all thoughtful persons.”
This problem shifts attention to the intellectual milieu of the
national media. To the degree that this milieu is distinctive and
homogeneous, it will put its stamp on the news agenda, quite apart
from the conscious intention (or even recognition) of individual
journalists. To deal with this problem, theorists who stress the role

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of organizations introduce the notion of a consensual news judg­

ment— the “ latent news values” that are, in Bernard Roshco’s
phrase, “ the relatively unrecognized, and often unintended, biases
that shape news content.” 16But this “ solution” admits that shared
perspectives provide the tracks along which the news agenda runs.
As Herbert Gans remarks, “ Values enter the news most perva­
sively in the form of reality judgements, the assumptions about
external reality associated with the concepts which the journalists
use to grasp it.” 17
Thus, to maintain the primacy of organizational imperatives,
it becomes necessary to claim that journalists’ reality judgments
are either nonpartisan or reflect the news audience’s own values.
Proceeding in this vein, Gans argues that,

The beliefs that actually make it into the news . . . are neither
liberal nor conservative but reformist, reflecting journalism’s
long adherence to good-government Progressivism. . . . Thus,
when the news is about unusually high oil-company profits
. . . the journalists are being neither liberal nor conservative in
their news judgement but are expressing the reform values of
their profession. . . . many [of these values] are shared by the
rest of the audience. They are called motherhood values . . .*•

This argument brings the debate full circle. Even in the organi­
zational model, journalists’ values turn out to be important in
shaping the news. They allegedly have no partisan effect, because
news judgments are rooted in popular or consensual values. The
only problem with this conclusion is that there is no scientific
evidence for it. Like the other theorists cited here, Gans relies on
his own impressionistic participant observation. Thus, he qualifies
his listing of “values in the news” by noting, “ The methods by
which I identified the values were impressionistic. . . . Since I
undertook no quantitative analyses, [the list] does not suggest
which values appear most frequently.” 19 He concludes that jour­
nalists’ personal value systems are those of progressivism, that
these are the values that inform news coverage, and that they are

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 Whose News?
also the values of most Americans. Yet none of these propositions
is supported by systematic empirical evidence.
To cite some obvious counter-examples, neither tum-of-the-
century progressive values nor contemporary national polls would
predict the attitudes journalists expressed toward abortion, affir­
mative action, homosexuality, gun control, school prayer, or
South African disinvestment, in the Los Angeles Times' survey.
Nor do they account for the different ways journalists and the
public evaluate news coverage. For example, a survey conducted
for the Associated Press Managing Editors Association asked
both newspaper journalists and the general public to evaluate
coverage of various groups. Journalists who criticized current
coverage tended to rate news about police as “too favorable,” and
news about blacks, hispanics and communists as “ not favorable
enough.” None of these evaluations was shared by the public.20
On the other hand, these responses accord with what is vari­
ously called upper-status liberalism, the “ new liberalism,” or, in
our own phrase, a liberal cosmopolitan perspective. Thus, where
Gans sees the influence of “ small-town pastoralism” in the news,21
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Theodore H. White worries
about the “breach in American culture” between the Manhattan-
based national media and the heartland: “ We came here, or were
chosen to come here, because somehow we were ahead of the
common thinking. . . . My point is, right now are we too far
ahead?” 22
More broadly, what journalists believe, what values their cov­
erage reflects, and the relationship between the two are all ques­
tions of fact. In order to answer them, the impressions generated
by participant observation or other qualitative research must be
subjected to empirical tests that yield replicable results. The fail­
ure to do so leaves competing schools of interpretation in lieu of
generally accepted explanations. The organizational approach has
added greatly to our understanding of the news process. Neverthe­
less, the role that the personal element plays is still an open
question.
Our finding that journalists’ attitudes seem imbedded in their

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perceptions of social reality poses the question even more ur­

gently. As Leo Rosten wrote in 1937, “ Since absolute objectivity
in journalism is an impossibility, the social heritage, the ‘profes­
sional reflexes,’ the individual temperament, and the economic
status of reporters assume a fundamental significance.” 23 This
chapter has shown how journalists’ reality judgments are consist­
ent with their social and political perspectives. We turn now to the
link between individual temperament and professional behavior.

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 INSIDE THE M EDIA MIND

“ The relationship between personality and

journalism may be the most promising field of
study for explaining why news is as it is.”
— Stephen Hess, The Washington Correspondents

“ W hy do I have this feeling? I don’t know. Dr.

Freud may know but he’s not around to
answer.”
— Morton Mintz, Washington Post reporter

W h o KNOW S what newsmen want? This may seem a strange place

to paraphrase Freud’s famous query about women. Don’t we all
know what journalists want? They want to get the story. They
want to “ score a beat.’’ They want to make the deadline. In the
long run, they want to win a Pulitzer, see history in the making,
right some wrongs, watch their memoirs make the bestseller list.
Like most people, they would probably choose fame and fortune,
but settle for the chance to do some good, have an interesting job,
and earn the respect of their peers.
But is it really so simple? Are journalists’ personalities inter­
changeable with those of accountants or lawyers? Or arc the media
elite in some ways a breed apart, driven by needs and motives

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distinctive to their demanding profession? The excitement of hav­

ing a ringside seat at historic events, the never-ending chase for
the story, the Damocles sword of the deadline— all these factors
might tilt the profession toward a collective personality style, by
weeding out the timid, the meek, and the self-conscious. Consider
CBS producer Susan Zirinski’s description of life “on the ragged
edge of disaster” : “ When I first started working, I was panicked
all the time. I even went to a psychiatrist. But then I thought,
maybe it’s better to be nervous. It gives you an edge.” 1
In the words of James Deakin, for many years White House
correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

It is the motivation that is important— because it determines the

results. For the majority of journalists, the prime motivations
remain sheer curiosity and the belief that communicating infor­
mation and explanations is a public service. For others, the chief
spur is reform. And for some, it is fame, power and $i million
a year. It is permitted to be in more than one category.2

If Deakin is correct that motivation determines results in jour­

nalism, how does the merely curious reporter differ from the
reformer? In what ways does the ambitious reporter, the one who
yearns for riches and fame, get different results from his colleague
who is just performing a public service? O f course it is not so
simple, as Deakin’s teasing closer admits. Some reporters may
want to satisfy their own curiosity, explain things to their readers,
stir up reformers against injustice, and become wealthy and influ­
ential, all at once. Occasionally very good and very lucky reporters
from Henry M. Stanley to Woodward and Bernstein may even
succeed on all fronts.
But who is to say these are all the fronts? People continually
outflank themselves, projecting their inner lives onto their daily
struggles, carrying out agendas they hide from others and even
from themselves. What are the inner drives that direct men and
women toward the high-pressured, hectic, but often rewarding
and glamorous life of the media elite? Let us rephrase our original
question. How can we know what journalists want? How can we

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understand their underlying motivations in a way that is system­
atic, not impressionistic?

Probing the Psyche

The Thematic Apperception Test provides a tool for just such a
scientific approach to understanding motivation, t a t results in
Chapter Three showed how journalists perceive the world in ways
consistent with their social and political outlooks. When they were
shown ambiguous pictures, they filled in the blanks with plots and
relationships that meshed with their own values.
The social world journalists created from the t a t pictures,
peopled by brutal soldiers, corrupt businessmen, and struggling
underdogs, tells us something about how they view the world
around them. But it doesn’t tell us much about their emotional
worlds, the inner drives and conflicts that may express themselves
in behavior. A person may see authority as corrupt, but whether
he becomes a reformer, an anarchist, or a hermit will depend on
many other factors, both within and without. It it is just such
deeper emotional factors that the t a t was designed to explore. It
is time we put this test to its earlier (and most powerful) use, to
probe the collective psyche of the media elite.
The psychologists who created the t a t wanted to probe below
the “ social derm of personalities” to reach the “covert springs of
fantasy and action.” 3 They sought out the emotional wellsprings
of such surface desires as social reform and personal influence.
Their test provides a means to find out what makes journalists
tick, what their underlying motivations really are, even those they
may not recognize themselves. The basic rationale behind this
method was stated by the test’s creators in 1938: “ the subject
reveals some of his innermost fantasies without being aware that
he is doing so.” 4
Psychologists have developed objective scoring systems for
TATs, by isolating phrases and themes that indicate the presence
of specific needs or motives. By applying these scoring systems,
which are coded “ blind” by trained professionals, researchers can
prevent their own biases or expectations from coloring their inter­
pretations of the test. David McClelland, the pioneer in scientific

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tat analysis, once used a t a t picture of a man at a drawing board

to illustrate the kinds of stories produced by people with strong
needs for power, on one hand, and for personal affiliation, on the
other.5 The latter story reads, “ George is an engineer who is
working late. He is worried that his wife will be annoyed with him
for neglecting her . . . . He seems unable to satisfy both his boss
and his wife, but he loves her very much and will do his best to
finish up fast and get home to her.”
Compare this overriding concern for human relationships with
the power-oriented story: “ This is Georgiadis, a famous architect,
who wants to win a competition which will establish who is the
best architect in the world. His chief rival, Bulakrovsky, has stolen
his best ideas, and he is dreadfully afraid of the disgrace of losing.
But he comes up with a great new idea, which absolutely bowls
the judges over, and wins!” Here, of course, the emphasis is all on
winning and losing, the rivalry for fame and fortune, the desire for
prestige and victory. The other person in the story functions only
as an impediment to the hero’s advancement.
The different themes addressed by these two stories are readily
intuited. But how do they reflect the different ways people live
their lives? The answer is based on the accumulated evidence of
experimental and social psychologists over the past thirty years.
These researchers have discovered that people driven by a desire
for power are likely to write stories in which one character seeks
to control another, to impress others, or to build up his prestige
or reputation. By contrast, people motivated by a need for friend­
ship are more likely to write about needing people, to express
concerns for friends or relatives, and to inject feelings of love or
loneliness into their stories.
Equally important, this body of research shows that people
who write certain types of t a t stories behave in ways that seem
to reflect the concerns arising in their stories.6Consider the exam­
ple of power motivation, which these psychologists refer to as “n
Power” (i.e., the need for power). Experiments show that in day-
to-day living, a high n Power t a t score successfully predicts
patterns of self-assertiveness and instrumental behavior toward
others. Such behavior includes participation in competitive and

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contact sports, impulsive aggressive activity (such as public argu­
ments), sexual aggressiveness, and unstable dating and marital
relationships. Power-oriented people are also attracted to symbols
of prestige. With the effects of class differences taken into account,
n Power predicts ownership of sports cars and a large number of
credit cards.7
These findings are reinforced by experimental studies of small
groups. They show that people who write power-oriented stories
tend to be argumentative, manipulative, and competitive in deal­
ing with others. Psychologist David Winter sums up the results
of these studies:

n Power is related to having smooth relationships with those

who make up one’s inner circle or power base, but having a
competitive or hostile stance toward those of higher status or
power who are outside the immediate group . .. high n Power
people attack established leaders of high status.*

Such measures were developed and tested by psychologists

who wanted to use the TAT material for the scientific study of
social groups. They created scoring systems to identify statistical
differences between groups of people. Their tests should not be
used to probe the personalities of particular individuals. Likewise,
we intend to explore psychological differences between groups of
media and business leaders.
Journalists’ and businessmen’s t a t stories were scored for
several key personality dimensions, including the need for power,
fear of power, need for achievement (n Achievement), capacity for
intimacy, and narcissism. How did the two groups compare? The
journalists scored higher on the need for power, fear of power, and
narcissism, while the businessmen scored higher on the need for
achievement and the capacity for intimacy. All these differences
except the last were statistically highly significant (p < .001). The
group difference on the intimacy measure approached but did not
attain a conventionally acceptable level of significance (p <.io).
How large were these differences? A more complex statistical
analysis provides a more specific indication of their magnitude. A

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procedure called discriminant analysis allows researchers to pre­

dict from each person’s t a t scores whether he or she belongs to
the media or business group by knowing nothing about them
except their levels of narcissism, power needs, and other psycho­
logical scores. The more the two groups differ, the easier it is to
guess (from their test scores) each individual’s true group. On this
basis, one can correctly identify two out of three men (67 percent)
and three out of four women (78 percent). So the t a t reveals that
these journalists and businessmen have very different motivational
profiles. But what do these scores really mean? What kinds of
stories do the two groups write, and how do they differ? We will
illustrate each motive in turn, beginning with the need for power.
Power motivation. This personality trait is scored when a charac­
ter in a t a t story wants to control or influence others or is
concerned about his reputation or prestige.9 What kind of stories
do typical “ power-oriented” journalists write? The picture of two
men in an office (see fig. 3) brought forth considerable power
imagery, revolving around office politics. Thus a Wall Street Jour­
nal reporter describes an authority conflict between a worker and
his boss:

This appears to be an employee being lectured by his superior.

He appears unhappy or resentful. . . . The man being lectured
to has probably done something to draw his superior’s anger.
. . . Resentment by the employee; anger by the superior. The
employee probably wants to argue back but will not. The supe­
rior wants an apology or a promise that the employee won’t
repeat his mistake. The employee will likely apologize or do
what is requested of him.

Similarly, a p b s staffer stresses the interplay between decision­

making and personal ambition:

These are two men who work for the same company. The
younger man is in power; the older man is trying to convince
him on a point of action. The older man has usurped his respon­
sibility. . . . The younger man is convinced that the older man
is right, but that he mustn’t jeopardize his own authority. The

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older man wants to prove he knows what he’s doing. The older
man will continue, frustrated, as a has-been but capable under­
ling.

Power relationships need not have negative consequences to be

scored for n Power. The struggle for fame or influence can be
presented in a positive or neutral light as well. The darker side of
power themes is captured by the Fear of Power scoring system.
Fear of Power. This is scored when someone reacts to power with
feelings of doubt, conflict, irony, or deception. It is also scored
when characters seek power for themselves ostensibly to benefit
others. In effect, it measures the ambivalence of being drawn to
power and repelled by it. Winter and Stewart call this response an
“aversive attraction” to power:

This aversive attraction involves an unusual sensitivity to power

and awareness of power relationships in the world, coupled with
a negative feeling about them. That is, an individual high in Fear
of Power is interested in power in order to avoid the appearance
of having power oneself... research evidence suggests that Fear
of Power derives from the experience of powerlessness. . . .
Power is experienced as both outside the self and inescapable.10

High scorers in Fear of Power behave in ways that suggest they

are fearful of other people gaining power over them. They are
suspicious of others, anxious, and very concerned to establish and
defend their personal autonomy. Individuals strongly motivated
by Fear of Power mistrust other people and institutional authority
and are very concerned with protecting their own independence.
Thus, they seem to desire power to protect themselves against
other people, whom they perceive as seeking power over them.
Ironically, their very fear of power generates a defensive need to
feel powerful. These tendencies are reminiscent of a syndrome that
psychoanalyst W.W. Meissner terms the “ paranoid” style.11
Power relations are associated with conflict, fear, and punish­
ment in a New York Times reporter’s response to the picture of
men in uniform (see fig. i). He sets his story in World War II

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Germany. An army recruit, Franz, gets fed up with the Nazis and
tries to escape. He is caught by soldiers who suspect he is an
American spy. The story concludes, “The future for Franz looked
bleak. Whatever he did— confess the reality or contrive to deny
the accusation— would lead to the same end— execution.”
This story illustrates several facets of the fear of power. The
authorities are real brutes— Nazis. The outcome of the power
relationship will be the protagonist’s death. And a sense of irony
contributes to the despairing tone. Either the truth or a lie, for
different reasons, will produce equally dreadful consequences. Re­
member, the author could have had Franz escape or lie his way
out of the dilemma. His future needn’t have been so bleak in a
story less pervaded by Fear of Power imagery.
Even the picture of an adult and child (see fig. 4) stimulated
some writers to produce Fear of Power motifs. Thus, a Washing­
ton Post reporter describes an apparent supportive relationship
that is grounded in guilt rather than affection:

The executive father is a busy man who worries about neglecting

his family. He feels guilty enough to set aside a few hours each
week to relax with his heir and attempt to motivate him. The
executive-father wants his son to have the same drive as he did
to raise himself up from his bootstraps and “ make it” . . . . The
executive-father will have some of his guilt assuaged after spend­
ing a couple of hours lecturing his kid. The kid will feel op­
pressed and go about his lazy way.

This is a good example of an attempt to influence someone for

one’s own purposes (assuaging guilt) under the guise of altruism.
Note too that the activity has a negative effect on its recipient. The
child feels oppressed and is not motivated to change. On both
counts the author characterizes ambivalence within the power
relationship he describes.
Finally, one t a t picture provides some commentary on sexual
politics (see fig. 5). The only picture not described in Chapter
Three, it shows an apparently unclad woman lying in bed. Stand­
ing above her is a man burying his face in an upraised arm.

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 Inside the Media Mind

Figure 5

This picture sometimes brought out tabloid tales of assault, rape,

murder, and suicide. Take an n b c executive’s brief soap opera
scene:

“ Oh my God, what have I done?“ he cried as the limp form of

the lovely woman lay lifeless on the bed. Hadn’t she led him on,
forcing him, yes forcing, to believe that she could be his for the
asking? Then all hell had broken loose. She resisted to the end.
And the end it surely was as he had crushed the life from the
lovely body. A ll that remained was suicide. And that would
surely follow.

The theme of a physical assault that brings pain and unhappiness

is the darkest side of the power relationships scored for Fear of
Power.
Need for Achievement. Power is only one of many themes that
have been explored by psychologists using the t a t . In fact, the

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first and most thoroughly researched topic to attract attention was

the need for achievement. This motive is scored when a character
shows concern over performing well in relation to a self-defined
standard of excellence. It stands in contrast to situations in which
activity is structured by external rewards. Many studies have
shown that high levels of achievement imagery predict moderate
risk-taking and entrepreneurial or managerial success, even in
noncapitalist societies.12
In The Achieving Society, David McClelland showed that
achievement imagery in children’s readers was related to national
rates of economic growth. On the basis of this and other evidence,
he argued that achievement motivation is central to a character
structure suited to promoting industrial development. In fact,
drawing on Max Weber’s celebrated formulation, he suggested
that it is the motivational link between the “Protestant” work
ethic and the spirit of modem capitalism.13
Despite the relatively low scores of journalists, there are
enough examples to convey the flavor of story lines scored for n
Achievement. The boxer picture (see fig. 2) was a source of a few.
An a b c producer writes of two fighters who train together:

Two boxers who have trained together for three years practice
daily, hoping to perfect their style. The boxers, although as­
signed to different weight classes, use each other as a measure
of their own prowess. Naturally the aim o f both men is to win
fights. But to win, one must perfect the art of defense and
offense. They are given the opportunity by training together and
watching each other progress. The end result, hopefully, will be
success for each.

These characters need not be Zen-like in their devotion to their

craft. But the successful performance is paramount, not the exter­
nal rewards that winning brings. The key is what a CBS corre­
spondent calls his protagonist’s “ keen desire . . . to excel.”
Intimacy. Thus far we have considered only motives that have
little to do with concern for other people, except as objects of
manipulation. To measure the need for close personal relation­
ships, we turned to psychologist Daniel McAdams’ method of

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scoring t a t s for the capacity for intimacy. He defines this as a
concern to create relationships characterized by openness, caring,
and reciprocity. The coding scheme is related closely to Harry
Stack Sullivan’s “ collaborative relationship” and Martin Buber’s
“ I-Thou” encounter. McAdams’ research shows that people scor­
ing high in intimacy prefer egalitarian, nonmanipulative relation­
ships characterized by reciprocal and noninstrumental dialogue,
openness, and concern for the welfare of others. They perceive
good interpersonal relationships as convivial and enjoyable in
themselves.14
Most of the relatively few intimacy themes among journalists
were written about the black adult and child. A typical example
is by a public broadcasting executive, who portrays a student being
helped by a volunteer teacher’s assistant:

Each is enjoying the other’s company, and is pleased with a

relationship which is pleasant, comfortable, and useful. Each
feels a sense of fun and company from the other, and enjoys a
quasi-familial relationship. The boy will go on, but stay in
touch. The man will continue to volunteer, and build up a
network of such “sons” for whom he will provide a life-long link
to special caring.

Similarly, a Wall Street Journal reporter stresses reciprocal

intimacy between father and son: “Jim appreciates his Dad’s at­
tention and willingness to listen. To his father, Saturdays are a
chance to grow closer to his oldest son . . . [They] have a warm,
easy relationship and enjoy doing things together.”
Narcissism. A t the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from
the concern for intimacy lies narcissism. Adult narcissism is an
ever-fluctuating reservoir of self-esteem that forms the basis of the
individual’s experience of oneself and the world. Healthy narcis­
sism is an adequate basis of positive self-feeling, which enables the
individual to weather life’s ups and downs. But narcissism also has
a dark side that is responsible for its popular association with
selfishness and egotism. People who lack confidence in themselves,
who suffer what psychologists call “ narcissistic deficits,” often

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rely on egocentric mechanisms to enhance their self-esteem and

maintain a sense of identity. This leads to behavior that commonly
is termed narcissistic.15
One such means of raising self-esteem is a distorted self-per­
ception that produces a wishful or grandiose self-image. Typical
narcissistic defenses include denying the presence of undesirable
qualities in oneself and projecting these threatening traits onto
others. This devaluation of other people also protects one against
envy. In general, the narcissistic person uses others primarily to
regulate his or her own self-esteem, rather than treating them as
separate individuals with their own needs and identities.
The scoring system we used, developed by clinical psychologist
Jennifer Cole, tests separately for self-centered imagery and
devaluation of other individuals.“ Journalists outscore business­
men on both measures, with each difference significant at .001.17
Self-centered orientation probably comes closest to the every­
day meaning most people attach to the term “ narcissistic.” It
measures a writer’s use of the t a t story to gratify exhibitionistic
needs rather than addressing interpersonal issues. This category
is scored when the author seems to be showing off, calling atten­
tion to him- or herself, and ignoring interpersonal relations.1*
The boxer picture evokes some exhibitionistic imagery, as in
this composition by a public broadcasting executive:

“ Hell of a way to make a living,” thought Joe— “ boxing in a

moving train for the entertainment of newly arrived zoo ani­
mals? Crazy bastards— just because those particular bears were
used to being based next to an army camp in Djakarta doesn’t
necessarily mean that they can only be made happy by having
more of the same here. Christ! Why not give them movies to
watch? Or make them face the fact that they’re in a new country
now— too much pandering to their needs,” he said, hoping
against hope that someone would catch the pun.

This story touches all the bases. There is the unlikely setting
(a moving train filled with animals), the use of some mild obsceni­
ties to catch the eye, and a totally internalized focus on Joe’s
reactions. Neither the second figure in the picture nor any other

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person is mentioned. In closing, the author urges readers to “ catch
the pun,” for fear we might miss his humor and creativity if we
weren’t nudged. In short, this story ignores the opportunity to
develop a plot line or characterization in favor of calling attention
to the author as a witty and creative fellow.
A hallmark of self-centered imagery is a willingness to ignore
the picture’s obvious areas to explore more flamboyant possibili­
ties. The picture of a man and woman, which offers perhaps the
most titillating cues, attracts some of the most narcissistic imag­
ery. A Time reporter is the most succinct writer to exploit its
potential shock value: “ Either boy has just banged his sister and
it was no good. Or he finds himself impotent and doesn’t like it.”
Themes of sex and violence are fairly common reactions to this
picture. But incest qualifies as an eye-opener (presumably a cal­
culated one) even in this context. Moreover, the themes of incest
and impotence are introduced and dropped with equal abruptness.
Once he has utilized their shock value, the author has no other use
for them. They serve no function in terms of plot or character
development. They just say, “ look at me.”
Narcissistic attribution concerns a writer’s tendency to attri­
bute narcissistic qualities to his or her characters. It is scored
when characters are portrayed as exploitative, haughty, manipula­
tive, grandiose, cold, ruthless, or hollow. This reflects the narcis­
sistic individual’s tendency to project a negative self-image onto
other people, and to build oneself up by denigrating others as
egotistical and Machiavellian.
Journalists’ t a t stories are filled with such narcissistic people,
especially those occasioned by the pictures of uniformed men (fig.
i) and the well-appointed office (fig. 3). A brief reprise should
suffice: Various characters are described as “ conniving,” “ notori­
ous,” “ greedy,” “smug,” “ complacent,” “ vacuous,” “ weak, “ ar­
rogant,” and “ sadistic.” Where simple adjectives fail, nouns tell
a similar tale. From the “ no-account playboy” and the “ stuffy
imbecile” to the “ faceless brutes” and the “ sons of bitches,” char­
acters run the gamut from incompetence to malevolence. As if
what they are weren’t bad enough, what they do is worse yet. The
least of them “ mouth stuffy platitudes,” “ prefer confrontation,”

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and “ make asses of themselves.” The really bad apples “ sell out,”
“ practice skullduggery,” “ operate by greed and graft,” and even
“ destroy someone else’s life.”
A more extended version, from the boxer picture, is a Post
reporter’s portrayal of unhappy lovers:

Two homosexuals are discussing their relationship. The fellow

in the background . . . may be a heroin addict. . . . The more
aggressive man in the foreground is thinking he can never hold
onto a relationship for long. But that is his nature. The fellow
in the background is feeling sorry for himself.

It is probably a moot point whether or not the author considers

homosexuality to be a negative characteristic. More telling is the
apparently gratuitous mention of possible heroin addiction, as
well as the men’s emotional incapacities. One is aggressive and
incapable of long-term relationships; the other feels sorry for him­
self. Neither is concerned about anyone’s interests other than his
own. This is the emotional milieu of the narcissistic personality.
The picture of a man and a woman (fig. 5) is especially interest­
ing in this regard, since it offers ample cases for both power-
oriented and affiliative themes. A male producer offers the classic
portrait of an unfeeling seducer who loses interest in his prey once
he has succeeded.

It has taken him six months to get Larry’s wife into bed. Six
months of cajoling, soft words, good wine, and, finally, words
o f love. Words unmeant but believed. Now it was all over.
. . . And, he wondered, how the hell will I ever get rid of her.

Another example is notable for its emotionally flat tone and

casual indictment of every character in a lovers’ triangle. It be­
longs to a PBS staffer with a clipped prose style and a penchant for
apostrophes:

They are having an affair. Man and woman. The private police
and the woman’s husband enter. She’s high on drug’s . . . . The
lover pay’s off the private cop’s. The wife become’s a lesbian.

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To summarize the patterns of personal motivation revealed by
the Thematic Apperception Test, the media elite scores signifi­
cantly higher than the business group in their power needs, fear
of power, and narcissism. The businessmen have significantly
stronger achievement needs and a slightly greater capacity for
personal intimacy. In less formal terms, leading journalists appear
more likely to want to be the center of attention and to feel
important and influential. They seem more fearful that others may
gain control over them. These concerns are more salient for them
than for business executives. Conversely, the need to meet an
internal standard of excellence or develop warm personal relation­
ships seems somewhat less salient to the journalists than the busi­
nessmen.
To provide an independent check on our findings in these
categories, random samples of thirty businessmen and thirty jour­
nalists were selected for further study. Dr. Jennifer Cole analyzed
their t a t stories and wrote clinical portraits based on what she
found. She knew nothing about either the nature of the study or
the professions of the subjects. Nonetheless her clinical portraits
mirrored the statistical findings. In general, she described the
journalists as people with rich emotional lives who were, however,
highly narcissistic and conflicted. In fact, she hazarded the guess
that they were “ artists” of some sort. By contrast, the businessmen
seemed to her emotionally “ flat” or self-controlled, but also more
at ease with themselves.
This is not to say that all leading journalists are power-hungry
and narcissistic, or that any journalists are motivated exclusively
by such inner needs. We all share needs for power and achieve­
ment, intimacy and isolation, mutuality and dominance. Yet the
balance of these fundamental and ubiquitous human needs differs
from one individual to another. Indeed, this is in large part what
makes us individuals. But such individual variations may also
produce aggregate differences between groups of individuals. That
is why we tried to probe the collective psyche of the media elite
by comparing them to corporate executives.
Statistical differences between these two groups do not per­
mit inferences about particular individuals. The test reveals

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achievement-oriented journalists, power-oriented businessmen,

and others who go against the general trend. Nor do we know how
either group stacks up against the general population. For exam­
ple, the t a t literature suggests that both journalists and business
managers tend to have higher power needs than other occupa­
tional groups, such as lawyers, doctors, teachers, and clergy.19 In
addition, the only study to compare journalists with a matched
control group of educated professionals and managers found that
the journalists scored significantly higher in both n Power and the
“ self-assertive” expression of power needs.20
The divergent motivational patterns of these two competitors
for social influence may have significance for the future develop­
ment of the American civic culture. We have seen that the na­
tional media represent a new elite with increasing impact on the
public agenda. By contrast, corporate executives have been a
linchpin of America’s traditional network of elites. The widely
noted antipathy between these groups partly reflects basic con­
flicts over America’s intellectual and cultural milieu, which both
seek to shape. Daniel Bell has argued that America’s economic
and cultural elites represent different sensibilities, with the former
more oriented toward achievement and the latter toward self-
expression.21 Our findings suggest that such differences may ex­
tend to the level of personal motivation.22

D o Motives Matter?
What difference do leading journalists’ unconscious needs and
motivations make in their work? Can such information really help
explain the news product? Or is this just engaging in the academic
parlor game called psychiatric labeling? Does this study aid the
enemies of a free press by tarring its practioners with tags like
“ power-hungry” and “ narcissistic” to no good purpose? Such
concerns are good arguments against “ pop” psychology. But this
is the first study to apply social scientific procedures and estab­
lished psychological tests toward understanding the psychody­
namics of the media elite. The real question is not whether such
information might be used in the “ wrong” way, but whether it
might lead to new insights about the behavior of journalists and

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 Inside the Media Mind
their social impact. These psychological findings could provide
fertile ground for just such advances in understanding the news
process and its relation to society.
We would like to begin this effort by considering some notable
features of contemporary journalism in terms of the personality
needs our survey identified. In the absence of clinical case histories
and national statistical norms for t a t motive scores, this account
is necessarily speculative. It may be likened to Weber’s use of
“ ideal types” to reconstruct historical processes.23 That is, if one
assumes that the t a t results do identify a motivational syndrome
distinctive to leading journalists, might this shed new light on the
meaning and import of their behavior? What follows, then, is an
inquiry into the role that personal style may play in contemporary
journalistic practice.
In his 1981 study of the Washington press corps, Stephen Hess
remarks, “There is a personality type in journalism.” 24 Like other
observers, however, he can only speculate about just what traits
are involved at all but the surface level. The t a t findings focus
attention on the effects of a heightened if ambivalent concern for
power, strong narcissistic needs, and a relatively low need for
achievement and concern for personal intimacy. These traits seem
highly relevant to several aspects of contemporary major media
coverage. They range from the emphasis on power, competition
(including the electoral “ horse race” ), and the adversarial style
increasingly adopted by journalists, to the negativism and resist­
ance to criticism that many attribute to the profession.
Hyping the Horse Race. The media elite’s power needs may un­
derlie the tendency of many journalists to attribute great impor­
tance to power relationships. The news business is highly competi­
tive in many ways. The journalist competes daily with colleagues
to get the story and file it first, even as he competes with news­
makers to control the nature of the story. For example, a Time
article on a b c White House correspondent Sam Donaldson con­
cludes that his job of “jousting with Presidents” perfectly suits his
aggressive temperament. In Donaldson’s words, “ I love this busi­
ness. Every day it is victory or defeat, and you do not have to wait
to see which.” 25

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

This heightened sensitivity to winning and losing, while func­

tional for journalists, may find its way into their reportage. An
obvious example is their tendency to concentrate on the “ horse
race” aspects of political campaigns. Academic and other press
critics almost universally agree that coverage of the race itself
drives out coverage of substantive issues and candidates’ qualifica­
tions to a degree that poorly serves the public.
Television is a particular target of such criticism, since the
nightly newscasts contain a fixed amount of time that cannot be
expanded to accommodate both horse race and issue coverage.
Yet the media continue to concentrate on the candidates’ chances
for victory, their relative position in the polls, and the success or
failure of their strategies for victory. As Michael Robinson and
Margaret Sheehan note in their book on the 1980 campaign, “ no
systematic study of any national medium has ever uncovered a
campaign in which the modem press, during the course of an
election year, emphasized anything more than it emphasized
‘horse race’. . . . ‘Horse race’ permeates almost everything the
press does in covering elections and candidates.” 26
The situation looks similar from the inside. Indeed, some jour­
nalists take a fatalistic view, as if the primacy of horse race cover­
age were a fact of nature. In the wake of campaign ’84, Washington
Post columnist Haynes Johnson admitted, “ Try though we in the
media did to rein in our ‘who’s ahead’ reportorial instincts, they
triumphed as always in the end.” He noted a lengthy article that
appeared in his newspaper on election day, headlined: “ Hopefuls
Hit the Road— for ’88; Presidential Race Seen Wide Open in Both
Major Parties.” Johnson could only comment plaintively, “ So
much for a temporary respite from the horse race. Buckety-buck,
away we go, galloping off again.” 27
The Primacy of Power. O f the many possible reasons for this
nonideological bias in reportage, one may be that it is simply what
journalists respond to most strongly. To the extent that their inner
lives emphasize power themes, they will find it personally gratify­
ing to concentrate on this aspect of the world around them. The
inside dope on the latest shift in campaign strategy (particularly

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 Inside the Media Mind
if it’s an exclusive story) is simply more alluring than poring over
a candidate’s position papers.
Similarly, the candidates’ standings on any given day seem
more interesting than their thinking. Although journalists tend to
attribute this to the quality of politicians’ thought processes, it
may reflect their own preferences as well. In Deakin’s words,
“ Most reporters are simply intrigued by the human activity
known as power; they like to observe it and describe its . . .
effects.” ” So they focus on who has power, who is trying to get
it, and what the prospects are for the various power seekers.
To take but one example from campaign coverage, consider
the reporting of presidential debates. These events provide the
voters with their only opportunity to compare directly the two
main contenders for the presidency as each tries to set forth his
campaign agenda and rebut that of his opponent. Presidential
debates are heavy on substance, as the candidates seek to demon­
strate their mastery of the issues and reveal the flaws in one
another’s positions. Yet the media’s focus in reporting such de­
bates is not on what we learn about the candidates’ positions and
abilities. Instead, the first question asked in headlines and telecasts
is “ who won?” The next question is, how will the outcome of this
particular battle affect the overall campaign? The candidates’ pre­
sentations are then assessed in terms of their contribution to vic­
tory or defeat.
As we have seen, it is a short step, though a crucial one, to
move from focusing on certain elements of an event to creating
those elements with a bit of poetic license. Thus, Clancey and
Robinson argue that in 1984, with no horse race in sight, the
networks actually tried to create one. They conclude that, “jour­
nalists did little things to produce a horse race when none seemed
to exist [their emphasis]. Out of impishness, they played games
with the news agenda, or even the spin, hoping to make the race
tighten.” ”
The inclination to concentrate on power relations has many
implications beyond campaign coverage. Indeed, the point
might be extended to political reporting in general. Journalists

in
 T he M e d ia E l it e

internalize a definition of “ news” that emphasizes conflicts among

powerful people. This leads them to overlook underlying struc­
tural changes in society that may be related only indirectly if at
all to the more portentous struggles among elites. David Paletz
and Robert Entman note in Media Power Politics, “ Prime news
generally involves prominent, powerful people in action or, more
desirable from the media’s point of view, in conflict. . . . Stories
emphasize the surface appearances, the furious sounds and furious
sights of battle---- Underlying causes and actual impacts are little
noted nor long remembered.” 30 O f course, journalists might well
argue that they cover the sound and fury precisely because it is the
stuff of news. The drama of the battle, the tactics of the generals,
the victory or defeat are newsworthy, even if the quieter long-term
changes prove more historically significant.
There may be something to this argument, but it also begs an
important issue. After all, how does anyone know what the news
is? Journalists notoriously are resistant to systematic inquiry on
this point. They prefer to trust their instinctive feel for news,
which is informed by their experience in the news business. But
where does this feel come from? It may have something to do with
what the news audience wants, but playing to the audience is more
characteristic of the tabloids than the prestige press. Washington
Post reporter Robert Kaiser probably reflects the consensus of his
peers when he writes, “ ‘giving them what they want’ is an abdica­
tion of journalistic responsibility. . . . Journalism is not a passive
exercise; human beings have to decide what they think is impor­
tant, what readers or viewers ought to know or worry about.” 31
For all their dependence on the Nielsen ratings, even the network
news departments continuously struggle against corporate pres­
sures to water down their product and make it more entertaining.
If audience tastes were truly omnipotent, the network newscasts
would have adopted the “ happy talk” format and soft news orien­
tation of so many local stations.
Serious journalists are probably even more resistant to market
research as a factor in news decisions than they are to abstract
theorizing about the nature of the news. That leaves them to
depend on their instincts about what the news is on any given day.

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But instinct is largely a catch-all term for the internalized values
of the news organization and the common culture of the news­
room. This point has been noted often by outside observers. For
example, social scientist Leon Sigal argues that news decisions are
partly the product of the journalists’ creed, which includes a “ set
of conventions for choosing which information to include in the
news and which to ignore . . . however, conventions are rarely
subject to conscious scrutiny by newsmen; they are just the way
things are done around the newsroom.” 32
Analysts like Sigal and Edward J. Epstein have stressed the
external dictates of the journalists’ creed, especially those of the
news organization.33 But students of bureaucratic politics have
mostly ignored the internal factors that impinge on journalists’
news decisions. It is considerably easier to chart processes of
decision-making in the newsroom than in the anteroom of the
journalist’s consciousness. That is the contribution we hope to
make, by exploring some uncharted recesses of the media mind.
A journalist’s instincts are not only internalized imperatives of an
organization. They are also the external manifestations of his or
her own inner world.
From this perspective, journalists may not focus on competi­
tion and conflict between powerful people solely because they are
taught to do so, or because that is what their audience wants to
learn about, though both factors definitely play a role. Journalists
may also be drawn to such themes because their own inner needs
are gratified by the sense of involvement with powerful forces and
the contest for high status. By describing the struggle for power
from close quarters, they partake of it. They gain a surrogate
feeling of self-importance by virtue of sheer proximity. Simultane­
ously, politicians and other would-be newsmakers become depen­
dent on the journalist to get their message out. This provides the
latter with a more direct sense of personal influence.
In this way, partly unconscious conceptions of the news may
gratify journalists’ needs for power and narcissistic gratification,
even as they are rationalized as part of the unquestioned set of
conventions. The point is not that underlying motivations produce
the outward consensus over news decisions. Rather the internal
 T he M e d ia E l it e

(psychological) and external (organizational) factors may interact,

and sometimes reinforce each other, to bring about certain atti­
tudes and behavior. The news can serve an expressive function for
journalists, even as it is shaped by organizational requirements.
The Adversary Appeal. The potential match between journalists’
power motives and their professional emphasis on power and
competition shows how the news product can express the needs
of those who produce it. This is a rather simple and direct example
of the psychic baggage journalists may carry with them. Yet the
expression of a particular motive is only the tip of the iceberg.
More interesting is the way underlying motives interact or conflict
with each other to produce unexpected outcomes of behavior. For
example, we found not only relatively high power needs among
the media elite, compared to the business elite, but a relative
ambivalence toward power as well. This combination may suggest
the presence of conflicts over acquiring and exercising power.
People with this motivational pattern both want power and are
afraid of it. One way of dealing with these contradictory feelings
is to attack others who are perceived as powerful. Such attacks
may be rationalized as serving some good cause or public duty.
Some rationalization in terms of the public good is crucial to ward
off feelings of guilt. It allows one to experience power while deny­
ing (to oneself most of all) the personal satisfaction of aggressive
activity.
This process is familiar to those who study personality from
a psychodynamic perspective. Consider how well it might explain
some aspects of the journalists’ relationship to the political world.
In fact our data bear a remarkable similarity to the speculative
psychological portrait of Washington reporters sketched in Leo
Rosten’s classic study half a century ago:

The energies which lead men into newspapers a re . . . the desire

to startle and expose; the opportunity to project personal hostili­
ties and feelings of injustice on public persons under the aegis
of “journalistic duty” ; inner drives for “ action” plus inner anx­
ieties about accepting the consequence of action. The last is
particularly important. There is a sense o f invulnerability at­

H4
 Inside the Media Mind
tached to newspaper w ork.. . . The Washington correspondent
outstays presidents and cabinets. He is, as it were, self-sufficient
in the small world of his newspaper organization. His first
vested interest is his status as a privileged observer. He can
attack senators at their most vulnerable point— the reading pub­
lic. Not even the president can claim immunity from him.34

While Rosten wrote in the print era, contemporary complaints

about adversarial journalism tend to focus on television corre­
spondents who skewer politicians and other luminaries nightly.
But we find no significant differences in the t a t scores of print and
broadcast journalists. This suggests that, as a group, they may
share the same urge to confront the powerful, to stand up to those
in authority. As Dan Rather puts it, “ When I am gone, the best
someone could say about me to my children would be: ‘He did not
buckle. Not before President Johnson, not before President Nixon.
He stood his ground.’ ” 35
Disdain for politicians as unprincipled power-seekers perme­
ates the national media. Columnist Richard Reeves expresses his
distaste this way: “ Politicians are different from you and me. The
business of reaching for power does something to a man— it closes
him off from other men until, day by day, he reaches the point
where he instinctively calculates each new situation and each
other man with the simplest question: What can this do for me?” 36
And New York Times reporter James Naughton offers the suc­
cinct dictum, “ You should never place your trust in a politician.” 37
This opinion is so widespread that professional advancement
is enhanced by a macho approach to reportage— doing the
“ toughest” interview or story. The Atlantic correspondent James
Fallows writes, “The true lesson of Watergate is the value of hard
digging, not only with scandal but everywhere else. The perceived
lesson of Watergate in the White House pressroom is . . . that a
surly attitude can take the place of facts or intelligent analysis
. . . one sees reporters proving their tough-mindedness by asking
insulting questions.” 31 This passage reflects the indignation of a
one-time presidential speechwriter. But the phenomenon is recog­
nized widely within the profession. During the 1984 presidential

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

campaign, Washington Post columnist Tom Shales criticized the

“ aggressive” and “ contentious” style of interviewing candidates.
He asked a b c ’ s Sam Donaldson whether reporters “ try to out-
macho one another, to be tougher than their competition.” Don­
aldson agreed that, “ some reporters, being human, have that
attitude.” 39
Being human implies that anyone might have this sort of
motive. But some people are more macho than others. The real
question is, are journalists more susceptible to such tendencies
than people in other professions? If so, it would help explain the
disparity between many journalists’ self-image as champions of
the people and the public’s tendency to see journalists as rude,
callous and disrespectful. The journalistic justification of public
service may be crucial to the inner dynamic we have hypothesized.
Journalists are in a continual struggle for control over the news
product. In effect, they are engaged in a power struggle with
politicians, interest groups, flacks, and others to set the public
agenda by controlling the flow of information. Every day, for
example, the White House has an idea of what central message
and pictures it wants television to convey to the public. Producers
and correspondents are well aware of this, and they strive mightily
to communicate their own version of what the “ real” story is.
Television journalists have various options in fighting back.
They may seek to undercut a politician’s game plan by focusing
on only a small bit of his or her speech, thereby stressing a point
the speaker was trying to downplay. They may suggest to the
audience that a politician is either abusing the medium by sub­
stituting slick images for substance (a persistent criticism of Ro­
nald Reagan) or is inept in using the medium, hence a poor
communicator (the rap against Walter Mondale). The treatment
of Reagan’s and Mondale’s communication skills during the 1984
campaign illustrates how both good and bad television perfor­
mances can expose a politician to media criticism.
Another technique is the instant rebuttal, in which a filmed
report is negated by the correspondent’s closer. For example, on
the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada, CBS covered
an emotional speech in which Ronald Reagan paid tribute to a

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soldier who was killed in the battle. In closing, the correspondent
noted that Reagan did not tell his audience that the young man
was killed by “ friendly lire.” That is, he was mistakenly shot by
American forces. The effect was a jarring denial of the emotion
produced by the preceding film clip.
This brings to mind Michael Robinson’s thesis, discussed in
Chapter Five, that journalists attack incumbents and leaders in
election campaigns. He notes that, “ Reporters simply feel that
they have a special mission to warn Americans about the advan­
tages any incumbent has.” Reagan’s 1984 election coverage was
especially negative because, “ When the press knows that this is the
last shot voters will have— against a front-runner, no less— getting
out the bad press becomes a near messianic mission.” 40
Yet the voters were hardly crying out for the press to rip off
the president’s alleged Teflon coating. But it was also the
media’s last shot at a Reagan campaign. Is it not possible that
their sense of “mission” derives from a desire to unmask the one
contemporary politician who seems impervious to attacks from
the fourth estate? This would certainly accord with Robinson’s
own view of media campaign criticism as “ a last minute effort to
get the bad news out before it was too late, with Reagan likely to
go scot free. . . .” 41
Private Needs and Public Interests. Many observers may see this
behavior as a power struggle between two elites (media and politi­
cians) for control of the news. But many journalists do not see it
tnat way at all. Instead they regard their concerns as expressions
of the public interest. As New York Times correspondent Steven
Wiseman puts it, “ the press is not simply a purveyor of news, but
a kind of surrogate for the public, questioning Presidential per­
formance and, to some degree, holding the President accountable
for his statements and actions.” 42 The problem with this self­
definition is that many in the public do not accept the press as their
surrogate. Thus journalists were caught by surprise when the
public did not share their overwhelming outrage at being excluded
from covering the Grenada invasion. Wiseman reports with cha­
grin, “The Administration’s negative view of the press seems to
be shared by much of the public.. . . Many Americans apparently

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view the problem of withholding access as a defeat for the press,

with little concern for the loss of information to the public.” 43
The journalist’s response to such setbacks is usually similar to
that of a defeated politician: we must not have explained our case
to the public well enough. The notion that the public might under­
stand and still reject this patronage rarely is considered. One
reason for this is that the journalists’ self-image as public tribunes
serves important psychological functions. It permits them to en­
gage in power strivings without having to acknowledge the nature
of the striving. It allows them to behave in ways that might
otherwise give them pause (asking rude questions, intruding on
private emotion at times of sorrow or tragedy, sometimes hiding
their true identities, etc.), under the aegis of performing a public
duty.
Here again, such feelings may have long been commonplace
among journalists. Rosten writes that “ one of the most seductive
phases of the reporter’s life is the sanction which his calling re­
ceives from society. He is above the law in a sense. . . . ” Rosten
tells of a reporter who signed another man’s name to a telegram
to get an exclusive story. The reporter wrote later that, “ my
conscience was untroubled. . . . I was living up to the standards
of my fellows__ I was exultant, not ashamed.” Rosten notes, “ It
was not merely the exultance of having scored a journalistic tri­
umph, it also contained the pleasure of breaking a taboo serene in
the knowledge that society forgives much ‘in the line of their
duty.’ The reporter’s business is often to get secrets and tell them.
Any vestigial guilt about this practice is defended by the statement
‘that’s the job of a newspaperman.’ ” 44
Much has been written of some journalists’ tendency to be­
come “ First Amendment ideologues,” i.e., to justify any journalis­
tic practice as an expression of First Amendment freedoms. In
former CBS News president Fred Friendly’s words, “ If you say [to
reporters]. . . ‘you didn’t report that story . . . very well,’ they’re
offended. Suddenly you’re fighting the First Amendment.” 45 The
journalistic justification of public service is even more significant
psychologically because it protects its upholders from within
rather than from without. If a questionable news practice is legal,

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it is only permissible. But if it is a public duty, it is a badge of
honor. This is not to say that journalists are hypocrites who create
such justifications for public consumption. The fact that ideas
serve one’s interests makes them easier to believe. Nor is this
merely a mask for private interest. The journalist’s sense of public
patronage has a truth-value that transcends the motivations be­
hind it. It must be evaluated on its own terms.
Here, however, we are seeking to understand the functional
significance of a sense of mission. This notion may also play a role
in maintaining the delicate internal balance required by an ambiv­
alence toward power. The self-image of journalist as public tribune
alleviates psychic tension. It permits one to strive after and enjoy
the experience of power while denying that this experience colors
one’s behavior. Again, the public justification is not merely a cloak
for personal aggrandizement. The two go hand in hand, just as all
behavior expresses a welter of competing internal and external
drives and constraints. For example, media consultant Tony
Schwartz cites CBS correspondent Bill Moyers’ self-image as a
teacher or entrepreneur of ideas. But he adds,

At the same time, television provides Mr. Moyers an arena in

which to serve more personal needs. “ I own and operate a
ferocious ego,” he acknowledges, and through television he has
gained not only a national forum but a considerable measure of
celebrity. By approaching his work as a form of public service,
he can enjoy both— the wide exposure and the applause— in
good conscience. He is quick to enumerate the people in high
places and the everyday viewers who have written in praise of
his “Journal”— but always in the context of being “ useful,” of
“ having an impact.” 44

Schwartz is mainly sympathetic to Moyers. Indeed it is no

criticism of a journalist’s abilities to say that he has a “ ferocious
ego.” This passage simply illustrates the way, in political scientist
Harold Lasswell’s phrase, private motives can be displaced onto
public objects.47 If journalists engage in this displacement more
than other people, it is because their work carries them regularly
into the public arena.
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Should journalists’ claims to serve the public interest be

treated with more reverence than similar claims voiced by repre­
sentatives of business, labor, or self-described public interest
groups? All claim to serve the public as a whole, while treating
the claims of their competitors as partial at best. The public has
learned to accept most of these claims with skepticism, just be­
cause competing conceptions of the public interest tend to favor
private or professional interests as well. Therefore, journalists
should perhaps be less surprised by public reluctance to accept
their claims at face value. After all, the head of General Motors
was long ago laughed off the public stage for voicing essentially
the same claim for his company. Why, dien, should people auto­
matically agree that what’s good for the media is good for
America?
Thin-Skinned Critics. The reluctance of many journalists to ac­
cept this verdict may provide a clue to a related psychological
dynamic. We have argued that inner ambivalence toward power
may be displaced outward as antagonism toward the seekers and
holders of power. By opposing those in power, the journalist
protects against an inner striving for power, which can produce
decidedly mixed feelings. This inner struggle against aggressive
desires is displaced onto the external world, and negative feelings
toward oneself are projected onto politicians and the high and
mighty in general. The notion of the press as public tribune pro­
tects journalists against the guilt that would otherwise result from
making personal attacks in the line of duty.
Narcissistic mechanisms may produce an analogous dynamic
that protects one’s self-image and fends off criticism from within
and without. In their t a t stories, journalists differentially display
a self-centered orientation and tend to attribute negative traits to
other people. According to psychoanalytic theory, such efforts to
inflate one’s self-importance and devalue others are probably bom
of insecurity. They represent efforts to shore up a shaky founda­
tion of self-esteem. Such people will be resistant to criticism, even
to the point of self-righteousness. This is not because they have a
good opinion of themselves; quite the reverse. The internal criti­
cism is so searing that it is turned outward onto others. Thus,

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external criticism must be rejected because it threatens to open a
Pandora’s box of self-doubt or worse.
Such an account, if applicable, could help explain the siege
mentality journalists often display in response to outside critics.
Some journalists readily admit to this tendency in their profession.
One is former Fortune editor Louis Banks. He writes, “ most of my
friends who write, edit, publish or broadcast the news work behind
. . . a shield of righteousness, defensiveness, and self-protection
which blocks other elements of our world.” 48Another who chided
his colleagues for not countenancing critics was Edward R. Mur-
row, perhaps the most widely respected of all television journal­
ists. In a recent interview, former CBS News president Fred
Friendly recalled, “ Ed Murow used to say that newspeople don’t
have thin skins— they have no skins. They believe that people are
ganging up on them.” 4’
Since media criticism has become a growth industry in recent
years, journalists have had ever more opportunities to circle the
wagons. Indeed the upsurge of negative feedback has engendered
great resentment in many newsrooms. When the Janet Cooke
scandal broke, and the Washington Post reporter was stripped of
her Pulitzer Prize for fabricating a story, famed investigative re­
porter Seymour Hersh complained that the ensuing criticism was
“ wildly out of focus. The White House can put out an absolutely
fallacious statement and everybody says that’s the way the world
works, but we hold ourselves to incredible standards.” 50
The strongest backlash, however, is reserved for critics on the
political right. Some eminent journalists argue that a conservative
conspiracy is at the root of public disaffection with their profes­
sion. Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post writes, “ there has
been a deliberate attempt to portray the press as the agent of
America’s problems, the enemy within. . . the political zealots, the
hard-eyed haters and the lunatic conspiracy theorists have com­
bined with public figures to poison the well about the press.” 51
Longtime Washington correspondent James Deakin goes even
farther. He concludes his recent memoir, Straight Stuff, with
a warning: “There are people in the United States who very
much want the public to believe the worst about the nation’s

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journalists.” These people are the “ far right,” and they are trying
to create “ the gravest possible distrust of the news media.” Why?
Because “ the extreme right hopes to take the American nation as
deeply as it can into authoritarian regions and absolutist doctrines
. . . But the news media are standing in its way” (author’s empha­
sis). He concludes, “The ancient spirits can be summoned from
the vast deep, and they will come. Nixon summoned the old
ignorances, suspicions, and dreads. And they came. And they have
stayed. . . . ‘The dead,’ wrote Aeschylus, ‘are coming to slay the
living.’ If we let them.” 52
Despite this rhetorical flourish, it seems unlikely that right-
wing opposition is responsible for a decline in popular support for
the press. After all, polls show that public confidence in journal­
ism was higher fifteen years ago, in the days when Spiro Agnew
and other Nixon associates were marshalling the political clout of
the White House against the media.
It is understandable that journalists might overlook a less
palatable explanation. As ordinary people come to perceive them
as wealthy and influential in their own right, populist reactions
against the major media have begun to match similar sentiments
against big labor, big business, and big government. It is a sign of
the times that David Halberstam’s popular work on national
media organizations is titled The Powers That Be.
Resentment is the Janus face of envy. The same public that
grants celebrity status to what used to be called the “ working
press” also relishes the chance to take this new elite down a notch.
Time's 1984 cover story on the press notes that, “The failings of
journalists have been compounded in the public’s mind by the
perception that as their power has increased, so has their presump­
tion of self-importance.” Among the complaints listed: “ They are
arrogant and self-righteous, brushing aside most criticism as the
uninformed carpings of cranks and ideologues.” 55
It is ironic that such criticism mirrors the response that many
journalists themselves have toward the powers that be in other
sectors of society. One can well understand their failure to appre­
ciate this irony, if our inferences from the t a t findings are correct.
The same narcissistic mechanisms that may lead journalists to

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relish a prosecutorial role would also make them vigorously resist
the role of defendant.
Narcissism and Negativism. Some journalists have come to simi­
lar conclusions about their profession. Economic columnist Rob­
ert Samuelson recently published a kind of mea culpa New Year’s
resolution that includes the following observations: “ The press’s
most offensive characteristic is its obsessive self-righteousness,
which can border on nastiness . . . Instinctively, I fixate on what
I think are others’ mistakes. . . .” 54
The late Joseph Kraft went even further, complaining of a
“ new narcissism” in his profession: “ those of us in the media have
enjoyed an enormous surge in status and power in recent years
. . . But while we have acquired confidence and self-assertiveness,
there is no security. We are driven to keep moving forward, and
in an adversary way. We are thus prone to the disease of the times
— narcissism. The narcissism of the journalist, of course, is not
mere conceit. It consists in the belief that because we describe
events, we make them happen.” 55
The end of this passage refers to a traditional narcissistic grat­
ification of this profession— the journalist’s association with mov­
ers and shakers. To be with those who make history is to feel
important. One absorbs a sense of self-esteem by sheer proximity
to the powerful. Former New York Times editor Clifton Daniel
illustrates this feeling in his recent memoir:

There have been 40 presidents of the United States since our

Constitution was adopted in 1789, and, although I am barely in
my dotage, I have known one-quarter of them. That doesn’t
necessarily mean that they knew me. However, five of them
called me by my first name, and one of them, through absolutely
no fault of his own, became my father-in-law.56

Few journalists will ever marry a president’s daughter (in this

case Margaret Truman), but many are on a first-name basis with
would-be “ great men.” And they would hardly be unique in feel­
ing nearly great for being near the great.
Journalists not only go where the action is, they get there

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before the rest of us. Another ego salve is the feeling of being there
first, knowing the inside story, living the privileged life of the
inside dopester. Timothy Crouse rhapsodizes over “ the methe-
drine buzz that comes from knowing stories that the public could
not know for hours and secrets the public will never know.” 57
Yet these traditional ego-feeders pale in comparison to the
narcissistic feasts of recent years. Members of the national media
need no longer depend on associating with the powerful. Sud­
denly, many have become wealthy and influential public figures
themselves. In the words of Joseph Kraft, “ We have advanced
almost overnight from the bottom to the top; from the scum of the
earth . . . to the seats of the high and mighty. We have become
a kind of lumpen aristocracy in American society, affiliated, as
priests at least, with the celebrity culture. . . . [Thirty years ago]
being a newsman had a certain raffish quality. But nobody could
have been attracted by the thought of becoming rich, or impor­
tant, or powerful. Fame was not the spur. It is now.” 51
As Kraft’s earlier comment indicates, though, the media elite’s
new status has hardly eliminated narcissistic needs. They have
simply found a different outlet. Thus Sander Vanocur, a longtime
network correspondent, criticizes his colleagues for accepting “ the
idea that the interviewer is at least as important as the person
being interviewed.” 59 This notion can lead to reporting that calls
attention to the reporter rather than the newsmaker. Former NBC
News president Reuven Frank cites instances like Roger Mudd’s
request for a Teddy Kennedy imitation from presidential candi­
date Gary Hart. Frank comments, “ These interviews are point­
less. Nobody ever remembers the answers. All anybody ever
remembers are the questions.” 60
Calling attention to oneself is only one side of the narcissistic
coin. The flip side is knocking other people down, which brings
to mind the phenomenon of media negativism, the tendency for
negative stories to drive out the positive ones. In its own assess­
ment of the media, Time comments on “ the suspicious attitude
among reporters [that] leads to a negativism in news coverage.
. . . One key cause of this kind of error: a tendency among younger
reporters to believe the worst, to see a potential Watergate, hence

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their fame and fortune, in almost every story.” Time quotes one
editor who complains, “ Every kid I get out of journalism school
wants to have some major exposé under his byline. Sometimes
they cannot accept the fact that something is not crooked.” 61
Negativism is not only expressed in suspicions and accusa­
tions. It can also be a matter of adopting a constantly critical tone
that finds ineptitude everywhere. An example is one Washington
Post columnist’s nonpartisan assessment of the 1984 election after-
math:

While the Democrats go off to the U.S. Virgin Islands to ponder

their future, without, of course, any sign o f agreement either on
the problem they face (if in fact they even recognize that they
have a problem) or its solution, the Republicans demonstrate
that they are the party of ideas— crazy though some of them
may sound.62

A colleague provides a pithier example, in summing up the

second Reagan-Mondale debate: “ It was even in negative terms.
Both candidates seemed equally lacking in stature.” 65 Or consider
a few front-page headlines culled randomly from the Post: “ Senate
Fritters Day Away Over Rights Impasse” ; “ Congress Lifts Debt
Limit, Flees Town” ; “ Making of a Diplomatic Debacle.” 64 In
cases like these, it is not simply a matter of conveying bad news
faithfully, but of choosing verbiage that almost gleefully puts the
worst face on things.
More systematic evidence is available on this point. In their
study of 1980 presidential campaign coverage, Robinson and Shee­
han find that television news gave every candidate more negative
than positive coverage. Overall “ the ratio of bad press to good
press for principal candidates was two-and-a-half to one . . . ” 65
They argue that television’s critical tone is borrowed largely from
the prestige press, such as the New York Times and the Washing­
ton Post. Finally, they link negativistic campaign coverage to
increasing public dissatisfaction with political institutions:

Probably the one “ political” dimension in which [the] networks

have sought to achieve a purpose has been the area of public

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cynicism. Network reporters do seem to want to make the pub­

lic more aware of the frailties and inadequacies of their elective
leadership. The networks have succeeded. If there is one clear-
cut example of media power in the age of television news it must
be the networks’ contribution to our increasing political mal­
aise.“

Whether or not one accepts this as a consequence of media

negativism, the phenomenon itself has been noted widely. What
Robinson and Sheehan call reporters’ “ fear of flacking” is a logical
outgrowth of their ambivalent, sometimes adversarial relationship
to politicians and others who wield power. In the last analysis,
they would rather be mistaken for prosecutors than press agents.
As Richard Reeves puts it, “ If there’s anything good about the
guy, f— it, the press officer will get it out.” 67
The Dogs That Didn’t Bark. We have concentrated on journalists’
narcissism and power concerns because the t a t results highlight
these needs. But what about the personality traits that are less
salient to them? Like the newsworthy item that is not reported,
the motives that are missing may be more telling than those that
are heightened. For example, a somewhat diminished capacity for
personal intimacy may be highly functional in a profession that
must treat tragedy and human suffering as opportunities for sto­
ries rather than occasions for empathy— hence the often heard
complaint about reporters’ intrusiveness at moments of personal
grief or tragedy. The necessity to observe and report rather than
intervene or assist is a hard lesson, one that to be fully learned may
require a certain predisposition.
Occasionally, this professional norm is pushed to the limit, as
in the aftermath of a 1983 terrorist attack on U.S. Marines in
Lebanon that killed 239 soldiers. CBS News filmed and broadcast
the moment when one victim’s family was notified of their son’s
death, while n b c decided not to show a similar scene. In another
widely criticized incident, a crew from a local television station
filmed an attempted suicide by self-immolation. They let the cam­
eras roll to record the event before stepping in to put out the

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flames. The hard-boiled or cynical persona adopted by many jour­
nalists may be seen as making a virtue of necessity. You’re not
likely to score a beat by stressing the virtues of courtesy and
restraint. Nor are concerns for harmony or humanitarianism the
most useful tools of a highly competitive trade.
Even more intriguing and potentially far-reaching is the lack
of achievement motivation we measured among journalists. This
does not mean that they lack the desire to do good work or attain
professional prominence. The issue is not whether one wants suc­
cess but why. What are the rewards that propel journalists for­
ward? The t a t results suggest that efficient performance is not its
own reward for the media elite. Measuring up to an internal
standard of excellence may help corporate executives to meet
quotas, but it is not where journalists get their satisfaction. These
are not people who value the chilly virtues of efficiency and
delayed gratification. Instead, they seek out the stimulation of new
sensations, the excitation of experience. As Stephen Hess writes of
Washington correspondents, reporters live “ at the cutting edge of
the moment . . . in a business of instant gratification, variety,
excitement.” 68Each day brings new stories, new dramas in which
journalists participate vicariously. Theirs is a life centering around
activity and immediacy. Its appeal lies at least partly in what
Rosten calls “ the remorseless vitality of the moment . . . the
exhilarating chase after the Now.” 69
A half century ago a Baltimore Sun correspondent offered a
paean to this world of heightened experience. “These are men
predestined from their mother’s womb to regard this world as a
garish, outlandish and somewhat bawdy, but infinitely amusing
and thrilling show. . . . They yell more, sweat more, hiss more,
start more tears and goose flesh in the course of their lives than
a dozen ordinary men. They have a helluva good time.” 70
Timothy Crouse described the same stimulation in his account
of life on the press plane during the 1980 presidential campaign.
His stories of illicit drugs, alcohol, sex, and various hijinks aboard
what he calls the “ zoo plane” seem calculated to produce apo­
plexy among the straitlaced.71 To illustrate this point in a less

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contentious fashion, consider his description of a typical campaign

stop, beginning with the plane’s arrival at the airport:

There were greetings, new stories, fresh rumors, a curious de­

light at seeing these familiar faces in a new city. . . . Everyone
would dash for the buses, which were waiting in a row. Then
the motorcade would start off, with motorcycles roaring and
police sirens screaming, and the buses would slice through the
traffic of some great city; nobody would admit it, but it was more
fun than riding a fire engine. There was all the noise, pomp, and
license that only a presidential candidate could generate, and it
was these things that gave the press the energy to survive the
eighteen hour days.72

From Moment to Moment, Granting that journalism lures its

practitioners more with the prospect of stimulating experiences
than with notions of efficient performance for its own sake, how
might this motivation shape the news? Perhaps by encouraging
the very type of reportage that journalists profess to abhor. If there
is one criticism that journalists will allow, one complaint that is
heard throughout the profession, it is the constant condemnation
of shallow, superficial reportage. Reporters bemoan the lack of
willingness to really dig, to follow through, to get beneath the
surface. In part, this is a limitation of the genre. Daily deadlines
rarely encourage depth of intellectual analysis. It would be diffi­
cult to improve on Rosten’s description of life on a deadline:

The Washington correspondent lives in a twenty-four hour

cycle of time. He must make “ snap decisions.” This tyranny of
the immediate makes it difficult to achieve perspective, or apply
. . . “ the long view.” Each day the newspaperman is faced with
new challenges and fresh sensations. Each day presents a dead­
line which must be met. This telescoping of crises into a daily
cycle stamps tension and obsession into the behavior of the
journalist.73

It’s enough to push you into a more leisurely job, as a few

joumalists-tumed-professors would no doubt attest. But there are

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also those who thrive on the superheated atmosphere, the constant
confrontation with “the iron moment of the deadline” that “in­
volves the crisis of an internalized drama.” 74 There must be some
mesh between the thirst for immediacy and a willingness to accept
its constraints. In short, the very traits that attract many reporters
to journalism— the need for excitement, variety, constant stimula­
tion— also militate against the reflective temperament required to
gain distance and perspective on the day’s events. There will al­
ways be the exceptions, of course— the Walter Lippmanns, the
I.F. Stones. But they may always be just that— exceptions in a
profession that welcomes and shapes a quite different personality
type.
New York Times columnist Tom Wicker recently argued that
more thorough and insightful reporting can only come about
through the cumulative efforts of individual journalists to “ do
better.” He calls for “ more and more people in the press [to]
sincerely try to do a better job.” 75 But this hope ignores the reality
that good reporters might make bad archaeologists. A disposition
oriented toward speed, action, and variety may be badly suited to
endless digging, no matter how priceless the artifact buried far
below. No less a pillar of the profession than Dan Rather speaks
for many of his peers: “ When it gets down to the choice of action
or reflection, I’ll probably take the action. I am from a school,
professionally, that says, ‘Damn it, grab a pencil and get out of the
office’ . . . journalism is not a haven for philosophers, intellectuals,
academics.” 76 So one should not be too surprised at Hess’ assess­
ment of the motivations that impel the Washington press corps:
“ One might expect that those covering the national government
would have a deep interest in political ideas. Instead . . . the
attraction perhaps is to excitement and powerful personalities.” 77

Conclusion: The Media Mentality

For most observers, the journalistic mentality starts and stops
with the belief systems and the norms and restrictions journalists’
organizations impose upon them. This chapter has tried to probe
deeper into some underlying and perhaps unrecognized motiva­
tions of the media elite. It has tried to show how their shared

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personality traits might subtly shape the process and the product
of their unending search for news.
Compared to successful businessmen, leading journalists are at
once relatively power-oriented and ambivalent toward power.
They are relatively narcissistic, needing to build themselves up at
the expense of others. In the same comparison, the journalists
score differentially lower in achievement motivation, and (to a
slight extent) the capacity for intimacy. This collective personality
profile can shed light on the allure of their profession and the ways
they practice it. The media elite move in a world of excitement,
variety, stimulation, and quick gratification. They enjoy proximity
to famous and powerful people and are privy to inside informa­
tion. Recently they have even gained the opportunity to become
wealthy and influential in their own right.
Many people attracted to this milieu are fascinated by mach­
inations for power, by struggles among those who seek and hold
it. Indeed, the spotlight they place on the race and the prize may
dim their awareness of events and processes that take place outside
its glare. News of the battle drowns out consideration of its causes
and effects, partly because journalists are so fascinated by the thrill
of battle itself.
A t the same time, the media are increasingly willing to enter
the fray themselves, eager to unmask the hypocrisy and puffery of
the combatants. This more aggressive style of reporting provides
several internal rewards. By deflating the claim of all sides that
their own selfish interests represent the public interest, journalists
can demystify politics, laying bare the struggle for power and
preventing politicians from using them as unwilling flacks to de­
lude the public. They can also reclaim control over the news
product, telling the truths that newsmakers try to hide. Finally,
they can establish themselves as the final repository of the public
interest, the only actor without an axe to grind. All this can
produce a gratifying self-image as guardian of the little guy against
the establishment, the truth against flackery, the common good
against partial interests.
Thus political journalism, at its pinnacle, can offer the oppor­
tunity to play at politics while looking down on politicians, to

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become the public’s tribune while patronizing the “boobseoisie,”
and to engage in aggressive behavior with confidence that the ends
are worthy. Ideally, the media elite can live the insider’s life while
holding onto the outsider’s self-image. Indeed, it can be argued
that good, tough, unyielding journalism is fostered by just the
mentality we have described. An orientation that makes one both
outwardly critical and sensitive toward incoming criticism may be
just the driving force needed to pry stories loose from recalcitrant
sources, while offering protection from dangerous self-doubt.
Similarly, an ambivalence toward power may help to sustain a
productive adversarial relationship with entrenched interests who
have something to hide.
In this scenario, good reporters don’t give anyone the benefit
of the doubt. Nice guys get scooped. Former New York Times
investigative reporter Sidney Zion argues, “ The press understands
that the government must by definition be the adversary.. . . The
press is most effective when its reporters write about someone they
don’t like— Nixon, say, or Begin— and can play the adversary role
to the hilt.” 7*
Yet this temperament can also have its costs, in the quality of
the news that it generates. When journalists consider themselves
to be the public’s proxy, they may brush off criticisms of reportage
as threats to the public interest. Meanwhile, a sometimes inflated
sense of self-importance may express itself in self-referential re­
porting that shifts the focus from the news to the reporter as
celebrity or crusader. This self-importance may also contribute to
an approach that treats the news gatherer as the newsmaker’s
competition in a struggle for the public’s attention and affection.
All this suggests that the media’s collective mentality may
have both positive and negative effects on the news product. In­
deed, some effects may be viewed as either positive or negative,
depending on one’s perspective. The larger point is that personal­
ity can influence a journalist’s work, in both direct and indirect
ways, no less than ideology or social structure. The news is a genre
whose changing character reflects the requisites of large organiza­
tions, the conventions of a profession, and, not least, the drives
and desires of honorable and fallible human beings.
 THE RASHOM ON PRINCIPLE

“ Our business is truth as much as news.”

— Bill Moyers, cbs

T h e r e l a t i v i t y of all reportage was beautifully expressed by the

Japanese film Rashomon, which presents a single event as ob­
served by several different characters. The story changes as the
viewpoint shifts, leaving the audience to decide what really hap­
pened, or to ponder over our inability to ever be sure. An equally
important question raised by the film is why each witness portrays
a different picture. It is not a defect of the eye but of the ego. Each
tells the tale in a way that reflects best on himself. Even a dead
man, who tells his story through a medium, has his reputation and
memory to protect.
It is time to turn our gaze from the teller to the tale itself. The
media elite are a group apart— urban and cosmopolitan in back­
ground, liberal and skeptical in outlook, self-involved and aggres­
sive in personal style. But does it all make any difference in the
end, in the final product that rolls off the presses or appears over
the airwaves?
We began by describing the media elite— their upbringings,
their beliefs, their wants and needs. The “ Rashomon principle”
operated in their choice of sources, their summaries of news sto­
ries, the stories they created from t a t pictures. This helped ex­
plain who journalists are, what they think, what they want, who

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they trust. What does it really tell us about the news they produce?
So far, we have explored only speculative similarities between
leading journalists’ personalities and their propensity for certain
themes such as horse race stories and negative news. In the re­
mainder of this book, we will pull apart the news and sort out its
components, to try to discover the ways it may bear the marks of
its creators. But first we must explain just what we intend to do
and why it is necessary.
In this chapter, therefore, we will first discuss the problematic
relationship of news to reality, using examples drawn from na­
tional media outlets. Then we will describe a scientific method of
examining the news and the role it will play in our study of the
media elite. Finally, in Chapters Six through Eight, we put this
method to the test.

W hat’s the Story?

News from Nowhere? If the news were either the bare facts or the
whole truth, there would be no need to study the people who
report it. So it is not surprising that journalists sometimes find it
convenient to treat the product of their labor as reality unadorned
by man-made garb. In the words of former c b s president, Frank
Stanton, “ What the media do is to hold a mirror up to society and
try to report it as faithfully as possible.” 1 Similarly, a New York
Times piece defended media coverage of racial riots against con­
gressional critics with the argument, “ Congress, one would hope,
would not conduct an examination of a mirror because of the
disquieting images it beholds.” 2 CBS correspondent Morley Safer
even suggests that news judgment consists of reality revealing
itself to the reporter: “Journalism is erratic. It’s often irrational.
It’s the way certain facts fall into place. There is no process.” 3
According to these practitioners, the news has little to do with
journalists. Aside from this perhaps reflexive defense against criti­
cism, however, journalists usually recognize that the news is nei­
ther the truth pure and simple, nor a perfect reflection of reality.
News is like a prism that breaks a single object into multiple
images. The image we perceive depends equally on the object, the
eye of the beholder, and— not least— the prism itself.

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This is most easily demonstrated by comparing cases where

images diverge. Consider America’s two leading general-interest
dailies, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Take a
straightforward event covered by both papers, the release of a
scientific report on the theory of a “ nuclear winter.” The Times
headlined its story, “ ‘Nuclear Winter’ Is Seen as Possible.” The
lead sentence reads, “ A panel of scientists told the federal govern­
ment today that despite great uncertainties there was a ‘clear
possibility’ that a major nuclear war would generate enough
smoke and dust to blot out the sun in the Northern Hemisphere,
causing severe drops in temperature.” The story goes on to stress
the “ enormous uncertainties” involved, and later quotes the
panel’s chairman as saying, “ There’s great uncertainty. . . but it’s
not impossible.” 4
Now turn to the Washington Post's treatment of the same
event on the same day. The Post's headline reads, “ National
Academy of Sciences Backs Nuclear Winter Theory.” The lead
sentence begins, “ The National Academy of Sciences, the nation’s
most prestigious body, gave its seal of approval today to the
controversial theory that a nuclear war could drastically alter the
earth’s climate---- ” The term “ uncertainty” does not appear until
the twenty-second paragraph of the story, and then only to be
rebutted: “ Although the panel stressed that there were many un­
certainties in its calculations, Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford Univer­
sity ecologist, said that this was almost irrelevant in terms of
nuclear winter’s effect on life.” 5The article notes that Ehrlich was
not a member of the committee but had “ written extensively” on
the issue. Finally, the story features a bold-faced insert of a state­
ment by the theory’s main proponents, claiming vindication.
What does this comparison tell us? Both news organizations
had access to the same report, the same press release, and the same
sources. But Times readers learned that a controversial theory
was “ not impossible,” though the jury was still out. On the other
hand, Post readers learned that the verdict was in— the scientific
community had endorsed the theory. And readers of both papers
were left to puzzle over why the news this day resembled a fun-
house mirror casting such inconsistent reflections.

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 The Rashomon Principle
Consider another example, even briefer and more straightfor­
ward. W hat could be more factual than a simple listing o f cases
on the Supreme C ourt docket for the com ing term? In the Times
we read,

The Court is to decide the constitutionality of a Tennessee law,

similar to laws in 23 other states, that authorizes the police to
use deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect. In Tennessee vs.
Gamer, a Federal appeals court ruled that the law violated the
Fourth Amendment by not requiring the police to have grounds
for believing that the suspect was armed and dangerous.6

Com pare this straightforward, rather terse account with the

Post*s rendering o f the same case:

In Tennessee vs. Gamer, the justices are to consider the consti­

tutionality of a Tennessee “ fleeing felon” law. The law was used
to justify the police shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old as he
attempted to flee an unoccupied house from which he had stolen
two $5 bills and a small ring. The case has drawn the attention
of the naacp, which claims that black suspects are dispropor­
tionately victimized by police shootings allowed under such
laws.7

In the nuclear winter story, it seemed that at least one o f the

accounts must be wrong, or at least misleading. Here both ac­
counts may be equally true, but the stories are very different. This
illustrates the impact o f “ fram ing” a set o f facts with additional
information. The Times story tells us the constitutional issue but
not the specific facts o f the case. The Post presents the facts in a
way that engages the reader’s emotions against the law. Instead
o f a “ fleeing suspect,” it presents a very sympathetic figure. We
read o f a young boy who posed no threat to the public (unarmed,
he fled an unoccupied house). M oreover, his punishment far out­
weighed the crime (petty theft). Finally, there is the suggestion o f
racism in the n a a c p ’s claim. The implication is that the law is
unjust, or at least had unjust consequences in this case.

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Which item is closer to the truth? The Times is more factual,

less interpretive. The Post adds an interpretation and point of
view, which may either illuminate or obscure the legal and social
issues before the court. The two images intersect and diverge. The
reader learns something different from each, without either neces­
sarily being wrong.
Our final pairing is drawn from the increasingly popular realm
of the background story. It is considered news and not editorial
content. Yet it is intended to be more interpretative than the
typical account of the day’s events, to go beyond the “ who, what,
when, and where” to explain the “ hows and whys” that underlie
those events.
This example concerns a letter on the U.S. economy that the
Roman Catholic bishops released just after the 1984 elections. The
letter criticized many Reagan administration policies and en­
dorsed economic practices associated with New Deal liberalism.
Both the Times and the Post ran an interpretive piece marked
“ news analysis” alongside their more straightforward recounting
of the bishops’ proposals. But the analyses themselves differed
dramatically.
The Post’s story is aptly summed up by its headline, “ Bishops
Review Proposals Abandoned as Unworkable, Too Costly.” The
thesis, elaborated at considerable length, is that the bishops’
recommendations “ have been tried and abandoned as unworkable
or too costly even by many liberal economists and politicians.”
The point-by-point refutation that follows consists mainly of
variations on a stock criticism: “ virtually no economist, liberal or
conservative thinks . . . all but ignoring the virtual consensus in
the economics profession. . . approaches [advised by the bishops]
have been tried extensively during the past two decades with
minimal results . . .” 8
Now consider the Times counterpart, headlined, “ A Call for
Economic Change Based on Moral View.” The writer calls the
report “ eloquent” and asserts, “ Though the Federal budget seems
overstrained, it appears there would be room for a greater effort
on social programs if the nation willed it.” After dismissing the
report’s critics, he concludes that, “ Many economists [will agree]

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 The Rashomon Principle
the bishops have brought together competent economic analysis
and a clear-eyed view of actual conditions in the United States and
other countries. They will applaud the bishops for hitting so hard
and challenging the nation to rethink its policies in the name of
the well-being of its people.” 9 Whether most economists would
agree or disagree, it is clear where this reporter’s sympathies lie.
It seems equally clear that this “ news analysis” must be partly the
product of his own beliefs about economics and social policy, no
less than for his Post counterpart who voices the opposite conclu­
sion.
The point of these comparisons is not to ridicule two major
newspapers simply because they sometimes differ in their versions
of events and their significance. If anything, one might argue that
they differ too little. If uniformity were the only goal, the vehicle
would be a single national newspaper, using the vast resources of
the government to ensure the most authoritative version of each
day’s events— a “ solution” that already exists in many countries.
It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union’s official news organiza­
tion is named Pravda, the Russian word for truth. The American
approach is quite the opposite, presuming that the truth is more
likely to emerge from the welter of many independent voices
competing for attention. But this takes for granted that each voice
is necessarily partial. The most informed consumer of the news
product is the reader or viewer who partakes of many different
news sources while understanding the partiality of each.
As much as most journalists subscribe to this approach in
theory, they are understandably less enthusiastic about exploring
the partiality of their own work. Hence the occasional defensive
identification of their product with reality, as well as confusing the
goal of impartiality with its attainment. By comparing the above
stories from the Post and the Times, we simply show how two
news outlets, equally committed to impartial reportage, can por­
tray the same event in a quite different light. The fact that they
differ shows how each can tell part of the truth while differing in
their news agenda, use of sources, and interpretation.
These pairings also illustrate several unavoidable choices for
journalists, which push their stories in one direction or another,

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always moving closer to one part of the truth at the cost of pushing
another part aside. By understanding some of the problems facing
journalists, readers can better evaluate the ways the news both
expands and limits their own information about the world around
them.
Observers and Participants. Our starting point is the ineradicable
tension between the journalist’s role as impartial observer, on one
hand, and social critic or reformer, on the other. American jour­
nalists have perched on the horns of this dilemma for roughly a
century, since the ideal of news as impartial information began to
replace the earlier tradition of a proudly partisan press.10 By the
early twentieth century, the profession’s new standard-bearers
were the wire services and the New York Times, with their new
model of relatively neutral reportage. Yet there was never a dan­
ger of the newspaper becoming a daily dictionary of events. As
George Herbert Mead observed, “ the reporter is generally sent out
to get a story, not the facts.” Reporters remained story-tellers who
were expected to entertain as well as inform audiences. The differ­
ence was that tall tales, or highly partisan accounts, were no
longer permitted.
Then as now, however, the facts had to be framed within a
story. The story imputes significance to the facts with the aid of
such conventions as the lead and closer, the inverted pyramid, the
news peg and the angle. As Lewis Lapham writes, “ stories move
from truths to facts, not the other way around, and the tellers of
tales endeavor to convey the essence of a thing. . . . Journalists
have less in common with diplomats and soothsayers than they do
with vagabond poets.” 11
In the process of getting a story, even the most meticulously
objective reporter makes subjective choices, from the moment he
contacts a source (and fails to contact another) to the time he turns
in copy that includes some facts and neglects to mention others
of arguably equal relevance. In fact, a subjective element precedes
his work, since certain values and choices figure into an editor’s
story selection and assignment. And subjective choices will cer­
tainly guide the editors who revise and place (or kill) the story
after it leaves the reporter’s hand. In television, the process is

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somewhat different, but subjective decisions are just as critical
from story assignment to airtime.
The matter of source selection, an integral part of the re­
porter’s daily routine, should be considered. We saw in Chapter
Three how the media elite systematically favor some types of
sources over others, in ways that seem related to their own social
values. The stories we cited on the bishops’ letter show how
sources can be invoked to bolster the authority of a reporter’s
conclusion. The Post reporter cites the “ virtual consensus in the
economics profession” that the bishops’ proposals are unrealistic.
The Times reporter assures us that “many economists” will ap­
plaud the same proposals. Both are undoubtedly drawing on their
own discussions over the years with economists whose analyses
they have come to trust. Both undoubtedly could have quoted
prominent economists in support of their conclusion, had they
chosen to do so. But it is equally clear that their contrary conclu­
sions reflect their own judgments and values, which were not
wholly formed in the few hours each had to research and write the
story. It is only the conventions of objective journalism that de­
mand that they place their conclusions in the mouths of those with
expert standing on the topic.
The professional norm holds that the reporter is transmitting
his knowledge of other people’s opinions, rather than his own. The
resulting convention is the quashing of first person singular in
news copy. Despite the inroads of the new (personal) journalism,
the rule still holds at the major media outlets where we inter­
viewed. It is the same rule that guided CBS radio commentator
H.V. Kaltenborn, when he drafted his analysis of a 1940 campaign
speech. He wrote, “ I listened to Wendell Willkie’s speech last
night. It was wholly admirable.” By airtime, however, his listeners
heard a slightly altered version: “ Millions of Americans of both
parties listened to Wendell Willkie’s speech last night. Most of
them agreed it was wholly admirable.” 12
There is an ongoing dialogue between reporters and sources,
through which reporters simultaneously acquire information and
learn where to go for a good quotation. Even if they trust their
own instincts and knowledge, though, they still must respect the

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conventions. In the pithy phrase of one observer, “ Somewhere a

city editor is always saying, ‘You can’t write that unless you quote
somebody.’ ” 13
The choice of sources illustrates the many unavoidable deci­
sions that determine the flavor and “ spin” of any news story. Just
as important as what goes in the story, though, is what gets left
out. Often this is an unconscious decision. The reporter can’t
include what he doesn’t know about, and he may not think to
include something he would consider irrelevant. Other times re­
porters may be forced to exclude material they believe is relevant,
but which cannot be verified to an editor’s satisfaction. In the early
1950s, many reporters transmitted Senator Joseph McCarthy’s
charges of communists in the government, despite their personal
reaction of disbelief. Even though they felt they were being used,
the conventions of objective journalism did not allow them to
rebut McCarthy’s assertions in their stories.
In recent years these conventions have eased sufficiently for
reporters to rebut public officials by reminding readers of things
they did not say. Take the following Washington Post account of
a 1983 press briefing: “ White House spokesman Larry Speakes
. . . [read] a long list of federal food programs and the increased
levels of funding from 1980 to 1983. Speakes didn’t mention, how­
ever, that Reagan had tried to cut spending for many of the federal
food programs.” 14 Similarly, a New York Times account of a
presidential speech focused on an omission: “ In saying he had
reversed ‘America’s retreat’ in foreign policy, the President re­
ferred to some of his favorite 1980 themes, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan and the seizing in Iran of American hostages. He did
not refer t o . . . the death of 241 American servicemen last October
in Lebanon in a terrorist bombing.” 15 Finally a Times piece on a
miners’ strike in Britain began, “ The Labor Party’s annual confer­
ence today [accused] the police of perpetrating violent acts against
striking miners. It made no mention of violence on picket lines.” “
In all three instances, journalists could well argue that the
public was better informed for learning about facts that the
speaker failed to mention. The point is that the reporter’s choice
to include such information is obviously intended to change the

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reader’s impression of the event reported, to keep the speaker from
getting away with omitting material the reporter considers rele­
vant. Equally important, the previous generation of reporters was
less likely to have the option of including this sort of material.
They had to find a third party to make the point. For example,
a Democratic spokesman might have been quoted on the Reagan
administration’s attempts to cut the federal food program or on
its handling of the situation in Lebanon. O f course, that would
have meant contrasting two partisan positions, instead of present­
ing the refutation as a simple matter of fact. The latter approach
obviously carries greater rhetorical weight. It also subtly reminds
readers that the press is their objective protector against the parti­
san leanings of politicians.
Indeed, the reminder is not always subtle. In the following
item, the process of filling in what the speaker left out turns into
a full-scale refutation. This Washington Post report concerns Ala­
bama Senator Denton’s proposal to make English this country’s
official language. In straightforward fashion, the report cites Den­
ton’s concerns over illiteracy and especially bilingual education.
It cites his belief that the latter “ alienates immigrants from the
mainstream of American society.” However, this information is
framed by commentary that is anything but straightforward. The
article’s lead reads, “ It seems that there often is some kind of
‘foreign’ threat out there for Senator Jeremiah Denton. This time
the foreign threat is truly foreign. It’s foreign language.” This
sarcastic opening is matched by the “ missing” information the
reporter supplies after presenting Denton’s argument that bilin­
gual education hampers immigrants’ assimilation and advance­
ment. “ Denton didn’t mention the millions of immigrants who
came to America, spoke their native languages at home and yet
learned English and became an integral part of their new country
without English being constitutionally mandated.” 17
Here the inclusion of what “ wasn’t mentioned” goes beyond
factual material and places a politician’s assertion in a new light.
It drives home the point that Denton’s proposal is the frivolous
product of a nativist cast of mind. Yet there exists a serious and
widespread debate among scholars and educators over the virtues
 T he M e d ia E l it e

and vices of bilingual education. By dismissing Denton’s argu­

ment without reference to this debate, the story actually imposes
an interpretation under the guise of supplying new information.
Even as it claims to alert readers to political posturing, it averts
their attention from a serious issue.
If news always falls somewhere in between fact and fiction, or
objectivity and subjectivity, this last story clearly moves toward
the subjective end. So far we have reflected on the subjectivity that
suffuses even the most objective journalism. But throughout this
work we have alluded repeatedly to trends that are giving leading
journalists greater interpretive latitude. They range from the de­
cline of the press lords and the professionalization of the journal­
ist’s role, to the impact of the 1960s Zeitgeist, the new journalism,
and even television. The upshot is a widening of the sphere of news
judgment and an increased opportunity for top journalists to func­
tion as social critics, crusaders for justice, or patrons of the disad­
vantaged. But the increasingly interpretive and combative ap­
proach of the national media also increases the subjective elements
in the news.
One such element is a more provocative, even pugnacious
style. Consider these lead sentences from two Washington Post
stories:

Like a child trying not to eat the vegetables, Congress is likely

to push Central American issues to the side of its plate next
week, hoping they will get cold and go away."

Crying spies, data leakage and one-way benefits for the Soviets,
the administration wants to withdraw the United States from a
unique, 10 year-old detente-era institute here where 100 scientists
from East and West co-operate to seek solutions to problems
that plague mankind.19

These items share a tone that might once have been relegated to
the editorial pages. They seek not to inform but to persuade, not
to describe but to criticize. They forgo a balanced account in favor

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of confronting miscreants. In short, they cast off the conventions
of objective journalism to take up the muckraker’s cry of j'accuse.
The question here is not whether this is good or bad journal­
ism. Rather it is a different order of journalism from the dry,
factual wire-service style that purports to provide a mirror of
reality. As such, it invites analysis of the journalist’s own attitudes,
since it makes no apologies for presenting the news with a distinc­
tive point of view.
Moreover, a reporter need not insert his or her own perspective
quite so directly. It may appear in passing, by a choice of descrip­
tors. Consider a reference to “ Phyllis Schlafly, the noisy leader of
the successful scuttling of the Equal Rights Amendment . . .” 20
In the same vein, though at the other end of the political
spectrum, is a description of Eleanor Smeal, president of the Na­
tional Organization of Women: “ Sm eal. . . is a charismatic ideo­
logue whom her backers consider a visionary.” 21 Here a negative
description (ideologue) appears as fact, while a positive trait (vi­
sionary) is presented as an opinion held by supporters. It would
be easy to present the same information with a very different
implication: “ Smeal is a visionary whose detractors consider her
a charismatic ideologue.”
It is not just flamboyant language or a punchy style that makes
for more interpretive or reformist journalism. What is often re­
ferred to as the “ staid” New York Times sometimes combines a
quiet tone with an equally strong dose of criticism. For example,
we find in the midst of a story on defense spending, “ Administra­
tion officials are effusive in the arming of the forces and in ap­
plauding the quality of people in them. But they glide over the
shortcomings in readiness and staying power. Part of this is parti­
san politics.” 22This item uses the motif of adding what wasn’t said
(“ they glide over” ) and even provides an explanation for the offi­
cials’ shortcomings— partisan politics.
Occasionally, this tendency blossoms into a full-blown story
whose sole news value lies in its rhetorical value as a rebuttal. For
example, in 1984 a dispute arose over the extent of hunger in
America. A government-sponsored study suggested that hunger

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was quite uncommon. Liberal critics replied angrily that they were
personally familiar with many cases of hungry people. Presidential
counselor Edwin Meese rejected such criticism as “ anecdotal,”
hence an inadequate response to the study’s overall statistical
findings. The controversy generated an opportunity for the Times
to run the following story:

Sometimes a current political issue is crystallized for observant

Washingtonians by a glimpse or two of ordinary people, rather
than a spate of Congressional oratory or a prearranged White
House “ photo opportunity.”
Early on a cold Sunday evening, for example, a car from the
Maryland suburbs carrying a couple and a small child pulled up
to the curb on 17th Street near the Ellipse, beside a sidewalk
grating. The passengers called to four homeless people who were
huddled over a heat source, gave each of them a covered plateful
of food and drove away. A passerby found some irony in the fact
that the episode took place within clear sight of the White
House, where evidence of hunger has been called “ anecdotal.”
A day or two later, in a somewhat lighter vein, a bedraggled
man stood at the comer of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue,
two blocks from the first scene. He held a sign that read: “ I’m
hungry enough to eat a stuffed Meese.” 23

To rebut an argument that evidence is merely anecdotal, the

reporter responds with another anecdote, which he considers par­
ticularly devastating. (An alternative approach would have been
to cite an opposing study, which in fact soon surfaced.) Also
notable here is the technique of pseudo-attribution. A “ passerby”
finds the episode ironic, and it will be meaningful to “observant
Washingtonians,” presumably those who share the reporter’s
viewpoint and the “ passerby’s” sense of irony.
Humor, irony, and pointed ancedotes can enliven the news.
But this style of reportage is a long way from the Joe Friday
“just-the-facts-ma’am” approach. It is a more personalized form
of journalism that allows reporters to put their own thoughts and
feelings more overtly into their work. The Times style is perhaps

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more subtle than that favored by the Washington Post articles
cited above, but the interpretive quality is easily as great.
Poetic License. In recent years some reporters have taken a more
controversial step along the road toward subjective news by taking
artistic rather than literal truth as their standard. The new jour­
nalism of the 1960s popularized such techniques as reconstructed
dialogue (direct quotations verified only from second- or third-
hand sources) and composites (combining characteristics of sev­
eral different events or people into a single “ representative” scene
or individual).
The use of composites burst into public view with the 1981
Janet Cooke scandal. Cooke, a Washington Post reporter, was
stripped of a Pulitzer Prize when it was revealed that “Jimmy,”
the twelve-year-old heroin addict featured in her winning series of
articles, did not exist. He was a composite, a creation intended to
represent several youthful drug addicts she had met. Cooke had
earlier denied charges that her subject was fictional, and her edi­
tors accepted her word. She had also lied about her educational
credentials in her job application. When the truth came out, she
was fired.
The Cooke case stands at the fringes of our line of inquiry. The
issue seems far from the realm of legitimate interpretive journal­
ism. A reporter played fast and loose with the facts and lost her
job because of it. Yet later events suggest that the issue is less cut
and dried, and certainly less unique, than it first appeared. In 1984
a longtime New Yorker writer revealed that, in the words of a news
report, he had “ spent his career creating composite tales and
scenes, fabricating personae, rearranging events and creating con­
versations in a plethora of pieces presented as nonfiction.” 24
Two factors made this case very different from the Janet Cooke
affair. First, the reporter, Alastair Reid, defended his style as
accurate in spirit, indeed more accurate than a purely factual
approach. He told an interviewer, “ Facts are only a part of
reality. . . . You have to get over this hump that it’s fact or else.
There is a truth that is harder to get at and harder to get down
towards than the truth yielded by fact.” 25 Second, some prominent

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journalists came to Reid’s defense. The New Yorker is famed for

its meticulous, almost religious observance of factual accuracy.
Yet its editor, William Shawn, at first defended Reid’s approach.
Although he later condemned the use of composites, he took no
disciplinary action against Reid.26 Several New Yorker colleagues
also came to Reid’s defense. A former Atlantic Monthly editor,
Robert Manning, also called this approach “ legitimate,” while
cautioning that “ it’s quite easy to level with the reader.” 27
Perhaps most telling was the response of Washington Post
columnist Jonathan Yardley. He argued that the practice was not
only justifiable but commonplace:

Only the most doggedly literal-minded would deny him or any

other writer the freedom to compress material or to speak in an
assumed voice; it happens all the time, journalism being as
inexact a craft as any other that relies on the human eye and ear,
and there seems little reason to believe that Reid’s uses and/or
abuses of journalistic license have been significantly more griev­
ous than anyone else’s.28

A t the same time, many “ mainstream” journalists rejected

Reid’s methods. For example, the New York Times editorialized
that “ fictional facts are forever counterfeit.” 29 Even if the critics
outnumbered the defenders, though, both sides had their say in
print. The crucial point is that Reid’s methods were seen as con­
troversial rather than indefensible.
The contrast with the Cooke affair is instructive. Reid volun­
teered information that Cooke tried to conceal; he professed jour­
nalistic methods that Cooke admitted to under intense pressure.
Reid was and is a respected member of his profession. Cooke was
a novice whose word became suspect after background checks
revealed that she had lied to the Post about her educational cre­
dentials. The Cooke case was thus seen as a matter of right and
wrong; in Reid’s case, two legitimate modi operandi were counter-
posed. No one defended Cooke’s deceptions, while a prominent
Washington Post columnist justified Reid’s methods as a matter
of widespread and necessary practices coming out of the closet.

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 The Rashomon Principle
Reid himself claimed to be surprised by the controversy. In his
view, “ there is a more serious measure of accuracy than merely
the factual one— accurately reflecting moods and opinions. . . .
The real moral question comes over whether there is any intention
to deceive and falsify. And the intention is rather to clarify than
to deceive and falsify.” 30
With this approach we reach the far end of the subjectivity
spectrum. The most objective journalist, as we saw, must pick and
choose in moving from reality to news. Advocates of subjective
journalism claim the right to rearrange reality to conform to their
own inner vision of the truth. In either case, journalists’ predispo­
sitions may influence their product. Objective journalists cannot
escape this possibility; their subjective colleagues embrace it.
The subjective school, while probably a minority position, is
no longer unthinkable in the world of daily journalism. In fact, it
may be the wave of the future. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham
believes the new pressures in this direction stem from the rising
status of journalists, which we outlined in Chapter Two. He writes
of the bright, self-assured new breed who began filtering into the
profession in the early 1960s,

Having enjoyed the privileges of both affluence and education,

the new generation of journalists felt inhibited by the older
conventions. They thought of themselves as “ creators,” as the
possessors of “the truth” brought down from [Harvard] in
bound volumes, as novelists manqués, as the social equals of the
politicians or popular celebrities about whom they are obliged
to make romances. . . . [They thought] the devices of literary
fiction could be applied to the data base of the news.31

Enter Television
The Video Version. A t precisely this historical moment, the new
breed also discovered a new journalistic medium that could more
readily meet their needs for self-expression and creative reporting.
Television news began as little more than a talking wire service,
occasionally enlivened by newsreel footage. During the 1960s,
however, the medium was rapidly transformed by technological

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advances, increased resources, and a turbulent decade that seemed

made for television coverage. Newspapers could not compete with
the immediacy and vividness television coverage gave to assassina­
tions, race riots, space exploration, combat abroad, and antiwar
demonstrations at home. As the nation’s eyes turned from the
printed page to the television screen, broadcast journalism evolved
into a distinctive and highly interpretive genre.
The public generally gives television news its highest marks for
fairness, accuracy, and even thoroughness.32 Numerous scholars
have argued that this has more to do with the power of visual
images than any true superiority.33 The cracker-barrel sages who
once intoned that seeing is believing now propound a high-tech
version: “ The camera never lies.” This adage is fallacious in either
form. The network news story the viewer sees in the evening is as
painstakingly constructed as the one he reads in his morning
newspaper. It employs the same techniques of selection and edit­
ing, with the additional set of news judgments that determine the
proper mix of sight and sound. A three-minute film report repre­
sents the careful distillation of an hour or more of film footage,
created under the editorial guidance of a field producer who oper­
ates under instructions from an executive producer.34 If the seams
don’t show, chalk it up to the expertise of the tailors.
If anything, television’s rejection of traditional wire service
conventions makes it substantially more subjective than the daily
paper. As media analyst Paul Weaver has noted, television news
adopts the more personal voice of the omniscient reporter-narra­
tor; it imposes a more unified interpretation on the day’s events;
and it is attracted to the drama and spectacle that produce good
film. As a result: “ Whereas newspapers focus on a diverse mass
of specific events, television depicts something more directly the­
matic and melodramatic— the spectacle adorning the national
dramas of the whole and the parts, of conflict and consensus, war
and peace, danger and mastery, triumph and defeat, and so on.” 35
Robinson and Sheehan’s systematic comparison of CBS and
upi campaign coverage confirms television’s intrinsic interpretive
cast. These researchers found that the network tended to mediate
or interpret the facts rather than just report them. CBS was also

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 The Rashomon Principle
more analytical, providing explanations rather than descriptions.
And it was more thematic, feeding separate news items into cohe­
sive story lines. Robinson and Sheehan conclude, “ while the wires
still provide information (who, what, where, when), the networks
increasingly offer instruction (why and how). . . . In the last
analysis we have two different genres of political reporting, old
and new, traditional and contemporary.. . . Traditional print [the
wire services) continually spits out fact-laden news. Much more
often network journalism presents a short story, complete with
moral. Print works to be informative, while network news shades
markedly toward the didactic.” 36
Leaving aside the elements of narration, visuals, and storytell­
ing, the camera itself can lie by selectively presenting visual infor­
mation. An extreme close-up can exaggerate the tension in a
speaker’s face, showing glistening perspiration and unflattering
shadows, suggesting an untrustworthy demeanor. By contrast, a
camera aimed slightly upward at a speaker from middle distance
can produce a more authoritative and forceful impression. The
camera can grant respect or take it away.
A remarkable West German study put some of these intuitive
principles to the test. The researchers first surveyed network news
staffs to determine their political preferences. Then they asked
cameramen how they would go about making subjects look good
or bad, if they so chose. The prevailing response was that shots
sharply angled from above or below produced the most unflatter­
ing images. The researchers then coded the camera angles used to
photograph major party candidates for chancellor in a national
election. They found that the Social Democratic candidate was
more favorably photographed than his Christian Democratic op­
ponent. What party did most television journalists favor? The
Social Democrats, by a margin of 70 to 20 percent.37
The New Ombudsmen. The nightly newscast is television’s least
subjective journalistic format. Documentaries and so-called news­
magazine shows like “ 60 Minutes” and “ 20/20” allow far more
leeway in presenting stories with a point of view. “ 60 Minutes”
pioneered the concept of using news as entertainment. Much of its
appeal lies in its ability to merge the muckraking aspects of print

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journalism with the personal and thematic imprint of television

news.
Executive producer Don Hewitt is well aware of this achieve­
ment. His credo is clear and simple: “ Our purpose is to make
information more palatable and to make reality competitive with
make-believe. There are shows on t v about doctors, cowboys,
cops. This is a show about four journalists. But instead of four
actors playing these four guys, they are themselves.” 38Yet Hewitt
gives the tradition of Edward R. Murrow equal time with that of
Fred Silverman. “ You know what we are?” he proclaims. “ We
have become America’s ombudsman!” 39
Being America’s ombudsman requires considerable editorial
discretion. For a “ 60 Minutes” segment fifty times as much film
may be shot as is finally used— about double the ratio for an
evening news story. Similarly, far more time and resources can be
devoted to a story, allowing much greater development of a story
line. No wonder Mike Wallace says flatly, “You have the power
to convey any picture you want.” In fact, he goes on, “ we once
thought about doing a ‘Rashomon’— getting a piece of material
and editing it several different ways— to demonstrate that fact.” 40
Audiences have yet to see such a multiperspective approach.
Moreover, Wallace’s proposed story would not really fit the bill,
since the “ 60 Minutes” staff would be in charge of presenting all
the viewpoints. A true Rashomon effect would emerge only if “ 60
Minutes” subjects produced their own competing reports. This
actually occurred in 1979, after the show aired a segment criticiz­
ing the Illinois Power Company for cost overruns on a nuclear
reactor they were building. Unlike the typical subject of a “ 60
Minutes” exposé, Illinois Power fought fire with fire. They had
videotaped all the interviews themselves. So they produced their
own filmed report, showing the footage CBS left out and adding
information the program omitted.
Among other things, the original broadcast contained some
factual errors that put the company in a bad light, which CBS later
retracted; it misinterpreted a scheduling chart to Illinois Power’s
detriment, ignoring a company representative’s explanation of
how to read the chart (as Illinois Power’s film showed); and it

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relied heavily on the testimony of a former employee, without
informing viewers that, as CBS knew, he had falsified his educa­
tional credentials. As Paul Good later reported in Panorama, “ in
virtually every case, the Illinois Power film shows “ 60 Minutes”
omitting portions of interviews that offer evidence challenging its
contentions against the power company. Certainly, Illinois Power
tries to put its best face on things. But “ 60 Minutes” follows a
pattem of believing the worst and artfully neutralizing elements
that might disturb that pattem.” 41
The point is not that “ 60 Minutes” produced a sloppy or unfair
story. Rather, the story looks very different when told from the
other side, the side the viewer ordinarily never sees. When con­
fronted with this unexpected opportunity to participate in an
actual Rashomon-type story, CBS proved reluctant. In a written
reply to Illinois Power, a network vice-president warned that
“ your own use and distribution of the [“ 60 Minutes” ] material
constitute in themselves an infringement on our copyright.” 42
In fact such usage is protected under the “ fair use” doctrine,
and CBS never followed up on its implied threat of legal action, c b s
did, however, sue to stop Vanderbilt University from taping news
broadcasts for scholarly use. c b s contended this archive of t v
newscasts, which enabled historians, political scientists, and other
media analysts to review network broadcasts, was in violation of
their copyright.43News executives are just as susceptible as the rest
of us when faced with the temptation of presenting their own
version of events as the authorized version. There is a natural
tension between their usual staunch espousal of First Amendment
principles and their reluctance to lose control over the information
they produce. The danger is that this tension may undermine their
position as unwavering advocates of the public’s right to know. It
helps explain the disturbing conclusion of one survey of public
attitudes toward the media: “ For many Americans, it is the media
who may be the enemy of freedom of expression, since the media
have the power to select and limit the information available to the
public.” 44
Talking Back to the Tube. Following the example of the “ 60
Minutes” Illinois Power episode, the public recently received
 T he M e d ia E l it e

another unusual look behind the scenes of a now-famous 1982 CBS

News documentary, “ The Uncounted Enemy.” The broadcast
charged that General William Westmoreland conspired to deceive
the president and the American public about enemy troop
strength during the Vietnam War. Four months later, two investi­
gative journalists, writing in TV Guide, called the broadcast a
“ smear” that was “ misshapen by personal bias and poor supervi­
sion.” 45 They charged that the program’s executive producer,
George Crile, set out to prove a conspiracy and ignored or omitted
evidence to the contrary.
In response, CBS carried out an internal investigation headed
by senior producer Burton Benjamin. His report unexpectedly
became public as a result of a libel action subsequently brought
by General Westmoreland. The Benjamin report substantiates
many of the TV Guide charges. It cites eleven “ principal flaws,”
including “an imbalance in presenting the two sides of the issue” ;
failure to prove a conspiracy; failure to identify a key accuser as
“ a paid consultant” ; allowing another accuser to be interviewed
twice and to see screenings of other interviews; and other “ cod­
dling of sympathetic witnesses.” 46
These criticisms concern both the process and the product, and
they show how the two are interwoven. The producers’ contention
of a conspiracy led them to favor some witnesses and exclude
others, and to use some interview footage and leave others on the
cutting room floor. The effect of this unbalanced approach on the
actual broadcast was measured in various ways. For example, the
report compared the number of Westmoreland’s accusers and
defenders shown on the program. Nine different accusers were
shown, compared to one defender, aside from Westmoreland him­
self. Alternatively, it measured the amount of air time allotted to
each side. Westmoreland and his supporter spoke for just under
6 minutes; his accusers spoke for over 19 minutes.
Thus, the Benjamin report not only confirms the charge that
the production process was one-sided, it shows systematically how
this resulted in an unbalanced presentation. This is a critical point,
and we shall return to it momentarily. The main service the Benja­
min report renders, though, is to give us an inside look at a

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 The Rashomon Principle
network documentary. It shows how a single viewpoint, that of
the executive producer, can shape the facts to conform to his own
vision of the truth.
Later, millions of viewers would get a taste of the report’s
findings, as network news programs showed outtakes from the
documentary to illustrate points at issue in the Westmoreland
libel suit. General Westmoreland dropped his case, perhaps see­
ing the futility of trying to prove CBS’ “ reckless disregard for the
truth,” a rigorous legal standard. But a generation of television
viewers for the first time glimpsed the difference between the
smooth product they take for granted and the difficult process of
creating it.
“The Uncounted Enemy,” like the “ 60 Minutes” Illinois
Power story, illustrates the problems that may give rise to an
unbalanced broadcast. Unfortunately, we are most likely to obtain
a look behind the scenes when the angry subject of an expose fights
back. When the story is less pointed, journalists find no reason to
expose their techniques to public view. Indeed they sometimes go
to jail on principle, to protect their notes or recollections against
judicial intrusion. But this protectiveness in “ hard cases” often
leaves scholars in the position of the psychiatrist who tries to
generalize about human nature on the basis of the neurotic pa­
tients he sees in his practice. The best analysts realize that neu­
roses provide insights into irrational processes common to us all,
without reducing all human behavior to mere neurosis. Just so, we
must recognize that the controversial story helps us see behind the
scenes without implying that the exercise of news judgment auto­
matically produces unfair outcomes.

Our effort is aimed at eliminating the false dichotomy between a

“ true” and a “ biased” story. News judgment necessarily reflects
partial perspectives, which are filtered through the conventions of
the journalistic profession. The news will always represent the
interaction of individual perspectives and group conventions. But
neither term in the equation is static. Both vary with changes in
the profession’s personnel and norms. We have tried to show how
the rise of a new generation of more cosmopolitan journalists has

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worked to introduce more overtly subjective elements in the

norms and conventions of their work. Now we must determine
how these elements operate, day in and day out, to produce pat­
terns and perspectives in news coverage over the long run.
In “ The Uncounted Enemy,” whatever the producers’ inten­
tions or methods, the final measure of their work lies in the broad­
cast itself. In commissioning the Benjamin report, CBS News was
concerned to see whether its employees followed company stan­
dards designed to ensure fairness. For example, reinterviewing a
friendly witness and allowing him first to see other filmed inter­
views violated those standards. Our concern is with the end result.
Which viewpoints are expressed and which are omitted, regardless
of the procedures and decisions that shaped the piece? If certain
viewpoints are favored over others in a story, and if the favored
viewpoints are those held by the reporter, that would be prima
facie evidence of a journalist’s attitudes influencing his work.
From the audience’s perspective, it doesn’t matter whether the
influence is conscious or unconscious, intentional or unwitting, a
violation of standards or their fulfillment. What matters is what
the audience sees, and what it never gets the chance to see.
It is not enough, however, to assert that the news favors one
view over another. This must be demonstrated in ways that trans­
cend the critic’s own subjective outlook. The Benjamin report
provides an example of this, by measuring the amount of time
given to Westmoreland’s attackers and defenders. This is a reliable
and quantitative way of asking whether a story meets the standard
of balance. An equivalent approach to a newspaper story would
be to compare column inches of space allotted to sources on
different sides of an issue. The great advantage of this quantitative
approach is that various critics with different perspectives can
agree on the result. They might differ in interpreting the result.
For example, one might argue that the weight of the evidence was
on the side of Westmoreland’s critics; therefore, they deserved
more air time. One network wag, buffeted by demands for “bal­
anced” stories, once suggested doing a balanced documentary
entitled, “ Hitler: Pro and Con.”
Journalists must not only decide how to balance two compet­

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 The Rashomon Principle
ing views, they must decide when there are two (or more) legiti­
mate sides to an issue. So one might quibble over the standard of
fairness being applied. Nonetheless, the quantitative approach
provides a core of less subjective information, a datum that pro­
vides a common ground for interpretation. Without that starting
point, we are lost in the wilderness of subjective criticism stem­
ming from our own self-interest and self-delusions. Business and
labor, Democrats and Republicans, conservative and liberal
groups all complain that the news is biased against them and in
favor of their opponents. Journalists sometimes feel that the best
measure of accuracy is having an equal amount of flak descend
from both sides. In fact, however, one side (or both) may be
wrong. The journalist’s problem may lie either in choosing be­
tween them or in finding an appropriate middle ground. It is rarely
a simple choice.

The Role o f Content Analysis

To sort out competing claims, it is necessary to depend on reliable
and accurate measures of the news. The tool that social scientists
apply to this task is called content analysis. This term refers to a
set of techniques that allows us to classify information in an
objective and systematic way.47 It involves proceeding by explicit
rules and judging by clear criteria that minimize our own subjec­
tive predispositions. The goal is to produce valid measures of news
content. The hallmark of success lies in reliability. Other inves­
tigators who apply the same procedures to the same material
should obtain the same results. Again, they may differ in interpret­
ing those results. For example, General Westmoreland and CBS
producer George Crile differ on the fairness with which “ The
Uncounted Enemy” treated its subject. But both would have to
agree that Westmoreland’s defenders received less airtime than his
critics, however differently they might interpret that fact.
Analyzing Campaign Coverage. How can content analysis help to
resolve disputes about media coverage? Consider the quadrennial
complaints of presidential candidates that the media are biased
against them. Accusations of media hostility are a regular feature
of contemporary political campaigns, transcending the boundaries

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of party and ideology. In 1984, supporters of Jesse Jackson and

Ronald Reagan were probably equally certain that the media held
a grudge against their respective candidates, while backers of
Gary Hart and Geraldine Ferraro complained bitterly about the
fickle media turning against those candidates. Each group could
cite numerous unnecessarily critical stories, along with puff pieces
that allegedly assisted a rival. Journalists tend to discount such
complaints as predictable partisan carping. But even paranoids
may have enemies, and even partisans may have a valid case. The
problem is how to assess their claims in a nonpartisan fashion.
How do you assess a highly subjective matter like media fair­
ness in a manner that is itself fair? In principle, the answer is
simple— by establishing objective criteria of fairness and applying
them systematically to media coverage of all candidates. For ex­
ample, one standard of fairness is equal access. A straightforward
(if laborious) way of comparing candidates’ extent of coverage is
by measuring the time each receives on television and radio and
the space allotted to each in newspapers and magazines. Here the
measuring instruments are objective and precise— a stopwatch
and a ruler.
Yet, candidates are concerned not only with the amount of
coverage they receive but also with its tone. Only the darkest of
dark horses would dare accept the adage that what the press says
doesn’t matter so long as they spell your name right. When a
candidate’s press revolves around whether his name is spelled
“ Hart” or “ Hartpence,” he begins to worry that bad press is worse
than no press at all.
Good and bad press are harder to measure objectively than the
mere fact of coverage, but the task is by no means impossible. First
you decide which topics are relevant, e.g., discussions of the candi­
date’s competence, integrity, consistency, et cetera. Then you de­
termine the tone of each statement dealing with one of these
topics. The result may be coded as positive (“ Reagan is a great
communicator” ), negative (“ Reagan often gets his facts wrong”),
balanced (“ Reagan is a master at using anecdotes, but he often
gets his facts wrong” ), or neutral (“ Reagan’s use of anecdotes has
stirred debate” ).

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 The Rashomon Principle
Some judgments are more difficult than these, and coders must
be guided by clear rules. In making each decision, coders should
be applying rules, not expressing their own opinions. If the rules
are sufficiently clear, two coders working independently should
come to the same conclusions, regardless of their own opinions
about the subject matter (this is called “ inter-coder reliability” ).
These procedures are easier to describe than to attain. For
example, the analysis must be exhaustive. Edith Efron’s study of
the 1968 presidential election concluded that Humphrey received
much more favorable television news treatment than Nixon.48
However, most coverage was neutral or ambiguous. The difference
between the two candidates’ coverage is small relative to the entire
body of campaign news.49On the other hand, Richard Hofstetter’s
careful study of the 1972 election may include too much material
in its definition of good and bad press. One of his criteria for
positive or negative news was the success of the campaign. Thus,
reports about Nixon’s big lead in that landslide year may have
inflated his positive totals, with the converse holding true for
McGovern. Hofstetter found that each candidate received a
roughly equal amount of good and bad press. Yet Nixon’s positive
horse race coverage may have obscured more negative portrayals
of his character and policies.50
Such examples show that content analysis is not a panacea.
Any method can be applied in various ways, for better or worse.
The great virtue of this method is that it reduces, to some degree,
questions of opinion to questions of fact. We may disagree over
how well Hofstetter measured the fairness of 1972 campaign cover­
age. But his findings provide a point of departure for debate. If we
accept his definition of the issue and his interpretation of the
findings, we are led to the same conclusion that he reached. We
are arguing about the significance of facts rather than the facts
themselves. And this is a great leap forward from the realm of
purely subjective opinion.
Moreover, by studying controversial topics systematically
with a scientific method, we replace endless partisan wrangling
with the search for generally acceptable answers. The failings of
one study become the problems that the next study seeks to solve.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

Thus, Robinson and Sheehan, learning from Hofstetter, were

careful to distinguish between the horse race and substantive is­
sues coverage when they assessed the fairness of 1980 campaign
coverage.
We do not posit a positivistic utopia in which all controversy
eventually gives way to timeless principles of numerical evalua­
tion. History is too sly to be reduced to physics, and events always
seem a step ahead of interpretations. For example, Robinson and
Sheehan found in 1980 that television news was about equally hard
on Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives— it
had a bad word for everyone. So they argued that the real problem
with television journalism was not partisanship but negativism. In
1984, however, Robinson and his colleagues found that the Mon­
dale campaign received favorable television coverage, while Rea­
gan and Bush were treated much more harshly, some nine times
as negatively as their Democratic opponents. Was this a new wave
of partisan bias by the liberal media? Not so, argued Robinson. It
was bias against the front-runner, another trend he had spotted in
1980.51
Edith Efron would no doubt disagree with this interpretation.
She might claim vindication for her disputed 1968 findings, argu­
ing that 1980 was an aberration that reflected the media’s dislike
for Jimmy Carter. So are we back in the realm of partisan wran­
gling, having gained nothing from twelve years of scholarship?
Not quite. We have a much clearer picture of what campaign
media coverage is like than we used to, even if we are not yet sure
of why it is that way.52 The very fact that the coverage can vary
so much from one election to the next militates against simple
conspiracy theories.
Further, some alternative hypotheses can be eliminated in light
of evidence that has accumulated since 1980. Pro-Mondale cover­
age in 1984 shows that the networks are not always evenhanded
in the general election; nor are they necessarily negative toward
all candidates. That leaves the anti-front-runner hypothesis stand­
ing. Television journalists may see themselves not as liberal cru­
saders but as giant killers whose job is not to follow the leader but
to fell him.

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 The Rashomon Principle
In principle, we should be able to submit the competing “lib­
eral bias” and “ anti-front-runner” hypotheses to the test— espe­
cially if we analyze television coverage of the 1964 campaign, the
last landslide victory of a liberal Democrat over a conservative
Republican. Unfortunately, there are no thorough and accessible
records of that coverage, since it predates the 1968 creation of
Vanderbilt University’s Television News Archive. While we’re
waiting for the next Democratic landslide, some enterprising
scholar might examine coverage of highly partisan statewide races
that attracted national television attention, such as Jim Hunt vs.
Jesse Helms in North Carolina, or Lew Lehrman vs. Mario
Cuomo in New York.
Granted, we still lack definitive answers on television’s parti­
sanship in political campaigns. But content analysis has given us
some preliminary and partial answers, has helped us to better
formulate the questions, and directs our strategies for getting
better answers in the future. It has also increased our understand­
ing of campaign journalism enormously over the past fifteen years.
Content analysis has replaced the assertions of columnists and
speechwriters with a growing body of knowledge. If all the an­
swers are not yet in view, at least the questions can be posed in
a more sophisticated and fruitful fashion.53
Beyond Elections. Campaign journalism, however, offers a poor
test of how journalists’ outlooks and sensibilities color their por­
trayals of social conditions. Political campaigns are far from typi­
cal arenas for social change. The hothouse atmosphere and high
drama they generate, their often abstract rules and fixed
schedules, and their clear-cut denouements are more reminiscent
of the sports section than the front page. Election coverage is too
idiosyncratic to permit generalizations about how reporters are
guided to some topics but not others, some sources but not others,
some conclusions about how society works but not others.
In addition, campaigns offer a uniquely personalized setting
for social conflict, and journalists must respond simultaneously to
individuals and the issues they raise. All issues are shaped and
carried partly by the personalities of their adherents, but in politi­
cal campaigns they are carried too far to be disentangled. John

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Kennedy’s good press may have been less attributable to his liber­
alism than to his persona. Sophisticated, urbane, self-confident,
witty, and ironic, he represented a kind of ego ideal for reporters
who were charmed even if they diifered over specific issue posi­
tions. No such residue of good will aided his liberal successor,
Lyndon Johnson, whose own insecurity and resentment toward
the “ eastern establishment” only fanned the flames of press suspi­
cion toward his backwoodsy manner. Nor did Jimmy Carter’s
piety fare well with the more freewheeling Washington press
corps.
To minimize the effects of such ephemeral or extraneous fac­
tors, we decided to examine how the media covered controversial
social issues over long periods of time. We looked for issues that
not only engendered ongoing controversy, but also generated
questions whose answers required some expertise. The strategy
was to follow major media coverage of several complicated issues
for several years, permitting comparisons among media outlets
across diverse topics.
Chapters Six through Eight focus on three long-term social
and political controversies: the safety of nuclear power, the use of
busing for racial integration of public schools, and the role of the
oil industry during and after the energy crises of the 1970s. The
results of our studies are presented in these three chapters. How­
ever, first we should explain why we chose these particular topics,
and what we hoped to learn about the media by examining them.
These issues are diverse, encompassing aspects of science and
technology, the sociology of race relations, and business and eco­
nomic policy. They also generated ongoing, and occasionally mas­
sive, coverage over long periods of time, providing material for the
comparisons we wanted to make. Finally, all three produced dis­
putes among both the general public and the intelligentsia.
Nuclear safety, busing, and the economics of petroleum are all
issues that are at once highly technical and profoundly political.
They evoke passionate responses from the man in the street even
as academic experts debate their meaning in scholarly journals.
This presents both an opportunity and a problem for journalists.
These are “ hot” issues that people want to know about, and they

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bring forth partisan claims and counter-claims. At the same time,
scholars have been spewing forth a great deal of information on
these very topics, but much of their work is arcane, couched in
scientific terminology, and resistant to quick conclusions that
make for clear and concise reporting. Thus, such topics offer an
opportunity to see how reporters attempt to transmit information
on matters that they rarely have time to explore fully. This allows
us to ask what kinds of sources they seek out, how broadly and
deeply they penetrate into uncharted terrain, and how they at­
tempt to simplify complex arguments without oversimplifying
them.
The Search for Standards. There was an even more important
reason why we chose such difficult and complicated issues. A
crucial problem for content analysis is the standard by which the
content is judged. In the case of campaigns, analysts usually as­
sume that political candidates representing the two major political
parties should receive roughly equal treatment. This is an arbi­
trary standard, as evidenced by the complaints of third-party
candidates, but it probably reflects a consensus of both scholars
and the general public. Even in this case, though, problems arise.
What if the candidates behave differently, or one performs better
than the other? Shouldn’t that difference in reality be reflected in
the coverage? If an incumbent president runs a “ rose garden”
campaign that generates less news than his opponent does, should
his coverage be inflated to produce parity? If one candidate’s
campaign runs smoothly and elicits enthusiasm, while the other
falters and fails to move the public, shouldn’t the news reflect the
difference? Such considerations oring us back to the question of
whether variations in media coverage are simply reflections of
reality. This problem is compounded when studying issues, since
there may be many “ candidates,” all claiming to represent the
solution to a problem, some inevitably worthier than others.
Scholars have wrestled with this “ reality” problem for
decades. In a seminal study conducted over thirty years ago,
sociologists Kurt and Gladys Lang neatly solved the problem by
comparing television coverage of an event to the notes of on-the-
spot observers they had stationed there in advance.54 They

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concluded that the television news broadcast distorted the reality

of the event, a parade in honor of General Douglas MacArthur.
More recently, political scientist David Altheide has shown how
on-spot observation in the television studio can contribute to our
understanding of distortions in a newscast.55 Unhappily, such
methods work better for judging coverage of events (especially
those that can be anticipated) than long-term coverage of issues.
Even if we had stationed observers at Three Mile Island, or in
South Boston during court-ordered busing, such eyewitness ac­
counts could tell us little about such abstract issues as reactor
safety or “ white flight.”
Therefore, we adopted a quite different strategy. Coders were
directed by scholars who, by virtue of advanced training in rele­
vant fields and extensive study before the content analysis began,
were experts on each topic. Each of these project directors began
by studying the academic literature and following the debates
among specialists, noting the scholarly consensus where it existed
and the particular points of contention where it did not. Once this
was done, we worked with each project director to develop a
content analysis system that examined coverage of the most im­
portant issues they had identified. Then each project director
trained a team of coders, first giving them a substantive back­
ground in the topic and then teaching them the coding system.
This procedure was laborious and time-consuming, but it per­
mitted much more thorough analyses than commonly are ob­
tained. For example, these studies go beyond whether a story is
positive or negative to explore the themes it elaborates, the sources
it quotes, the way issues are phrased, and whether a topic is treated
as controversial or consensual.
Finally, we compared media treatment of each topic to state-
of-the-art knowledge among scholars. This is not to say that the
scholars always had the final answers. Indeed, one recurring ques­
tion is whether journalists accurately transmitted their uncertain­
ties where they existed. The assumption is that media coverage
should reflect the best knowledge available on a topic, even if that
means reporting a lack of knowledge. For example, one would
expect an article on extraterrestrial life to cite many different

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 The Rashomon Principle
views, reflecting the lack of either certain knowledge or scientific
consensus on this issue. Yet, one would not expect to see equal
time given to those who reject the theory of evolution, because
scientists overwhelmingly endorse it. Claims to the contrary
should be treated as distinctly minority views, if journalists accu­
rately reflect the intellectual consensus. As these examples sug­
gest, our standard for judging the news is not truth but the accu­
rate transmission of available information. One may never be sure
what the truth is, but good reporting tells us what is agreed on,
what is disputed, and what is unknown, so we can judge for
ourselves.
Analyzing Issue Coverage. In each of the following chapters, we
lay out a major social issue with its attendant controversies, then
show how national media outlets presented the issue. We ask first
what the experts thought, then what the media told us, and finally,
whether there was a discrepancy between the two. If the media
portrait diverged from the best available knowledge, in the direc­
tion of journalists’ own attitudes, that would be prima facie evi­
dence that their attitudes, however unconsciously, influenced their
coverage.
The case of nuclear energy was our most extensive area of
inquiry. The first task was to gain an overview of expert opinion
on the controversies that rage about the safety of this technology.
To find out what the experts think, we not only surveyed the
literature but the experts themselves. This involved sending
lengthy questionnaires to large samples of leading scientists and
engineers, as well as key decision-makers in industry, government,
and academia. Their responses provide a portrait of that commu­
nity’s views on controversial issues, ranging from the effects of
low-level radiation to the probability of nuclear accidents. Simul­
taneously, the same questions were asked of America’s most influ­
ential science writers. Finally, to complete the comparison, the
media elite were asked a few questions about their attitudes to­
ward nuclear power.
After the surveys were completed, we worked with a scholar
specializing in energy policy to prepare an overview of the
scholarly literature on the points of debate. Dr. Robert Rycroft,

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Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Science, Technol­

ogy, and Public Policy at George Washington University, iden­
tified the major points of contention and the various perspectives
in the scientific literature. This document was the basis for a
content analysis system to measure how well media coverage cap­
tured the key elements of this debate. Then a team of coders was
assembled that included individuals with diverse viewpoints on
nuclear energy. The coders were trained until they agreed at least
80 percent of the time on how information should be classified for
all categories in the content analysis. Levels of agreement were
usually much higher than the 80 percent minimum, which is
relatively standard in this field.
One point is essential to understand this process: coders were
not asked to make subjective judgments based on their own feel­
ings about nuclear energy. Instead, they were taught to follow a
system of highly specific rules designed to minimize the effect of
personal feelings on coding decisions. The success of these rules
is measured by the high levels of agreement among the coders.
The research team then embarked on the arduous task of
coding fourteen years of newspaper, magazine, and television cov­
erage. When they were finished, the data were computerized and
the results analyzed. Finally, we compared this information about
media coverage with the attitudes measured in the surveys.
The results of the nuclear power content analysis are detailed
in the next chapter, followed by similar accounts of busing and oil
industry coverage, excluding the surveys of experts. This overview
of the research strategy is intended to convey the scope and
method of this undertaking.
We also chose at the outset not to try to match the attitudes
of particular reporters with the stories that they covered. Every­
one we surveyed was promised complete anonymity, and all rec­
ords matching names with survey responses were destroyed. Ethi­
cal concerns aside, we were far from certain that this approach
would be fruitful. For one thing, it overlooks the crucial editorial
component of mainstream journalism. Editors may not receive
bylines, and television producers may never appear onscreen, but
their role can neither be ignored nor precisely measured.
 The Rashomon Principle
On a more theoretical level, we are less concerned with the
attitudes of particular individuals than with the intellectual milieu
to which their ideas contribute. One of the most important charac­
teristics of the media elite is its social and intellectual
homogeneity. Such homogeneity both informs and limits concep­
tions of the news. Organization theorists have pointed out how
reporters absorb the culture of the newsroom. But they also help
create that culture, by contributing to perspectives that become so
widely shared that they are taken for granted.
This chapter has shown how such perspectives might influence
the news product. The most straightforward news report is the
outcome of unavoidable choices that reflect the journalist’s sen­
sibilities in weaving together fact and interpretation. We have
illustrated the ways stories can vary according to choices of em­
phasis, source selection, descriptive vs. insinuational language,
and even poetic license that reshapes the facts to fit the truth.
These choices are not constants but variables. They vary from one
individual to another, and one era to another. The choices made
by mainstream journalists shifted toward a more self-consciously
objective approach with the rise of the wire services a century ago.
Today, under the influence of television, they seem to be incor­
porating more subjective elements.
The techniques of content analysis can show whether and how
these elements shape the contours of media coverage. Thus, the
analyses presented in the next three chapters attempt to determine
whether the intellectual climate within which leading journalists
operate influences their coverage of specific social controversies
over the long run. Ben Bagdikian has written, “ The central func­
tion of journalism is to permit a more valid view of ‘reality.’ ” 56
To assess the “ reality” that journalism presents, requires a scien­
tifically valid view of the news.
 “ Even while the awesome force o f the atom
spreads, we still do not fully comprehend its
dangers— except that it poses the possibility of
our extinction and the death o f the earth.”
— “ The Fire Unleashed,” abc documentary

O n e s p r in g night in 1985, ABC did something highly unusual. The

network preempted its entire prime-time schedule in order to
confront what host Peter Jennings called “ the most crucial issue
ever to confront the human species— the degree to which the atom
has come to dominate this planet.” Thus began “The Fire Un­
leashed,” a three-hour documentary on the dangers of nuclear
weapons and nuclear energy, which the program treated as malev­
olent Siamese twins.
Narrators spelled out the “ deepening dangers and uncertain­
ties” of “ the atom’s fearful power” :

Nuclear power . . . in the U.S., the industry is staggering with

economic and safety problems. The worst nuclear plant accident
in history. Radioactive nuclear waste, with elements that will
remain a threat to life for hundreds of generations to come.
Nuclear proliferation. . . the nuclear arms race__ These issues
of the nuclear age raise the largest question of all— whether it’s

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 Media Meltdown
possible we’ve brought forth a power beyond our power to
control. A power posing for the first time the possibility of our
actual termination. The termination of our whole past and
place. The earth. Our home.1

This is strong stuff. It continued for three hours, accompanied

by a panopoly of visual effects and sophisticated computer graph­
ics. It was the state of the art taking on the fate of the earth. And
it was powerful. One study of a randomly selected group of view­
ers found that the show produced a 36 percent increase in those
opposed to the use of nuclear energy to provide electricity. This
impact was still evident when they were resurveyed five months
later.2
Opinion shifts such as these tend to be short-lived unless rein­
forced by other sources. But it certainly shows that the media can
affect public attitudes toward nuclear power. And it raises broader
questions about the role media coverage has played in the dra­
matic decline in public support for nuclear energy.
Public attitudes toward nuclear power have completely turned
around since the early 1970s.1 In 1971, the proportion of Americans
willing to have nuclear plants in their own communities was dou­
ble the proportion opposed (57 to 28 percent). By 1978, a year
before the Three Mile Island (t m i ) accident, opponents already
outnumbered supporters. In 1980, a year after t m i , the number of
opponents was more than double that of supporters (63 to 28
percent). Moreover, polls show that nuclear power has become the
least popular energy alternative in recent years, mainly because of
fears about safety.4
The media undoubtedly have played some role in this process,
simply by transmitting information to millions of people who lack
the time, inclination, or expertise to read the technical literature
on nuclear energy. Several studies by the Battelle Institute in
Seattle, Washington, concluded that major media coverage has
been predominantly negative toward nuclear power.5And a study
by the Media Institute in Washington, D.C., found that, on televi­
sion newscasts, critics get about twice as much airtime as support­
ers to make their case.4 Yet, if nuclear power is as dangerous, and

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its critics so numerous, as “ The Fire Unleashed” suggests, such

coverage may be entirely appropriate.
Thus, we return to the conundrum raised in Chapter Five.
How do you evaluate the coverage independent of the event being
covered? How does media criticism rise above blaming the mes­
senger? What is an appropriate standard forjudging media cover­
age of nuclear safety? To evaluate the coverage, it is necessary to
understand something about the topic. To do this, we will turn to
both the people who spend their professional lives dealing with
these often arcane issues and, more broadly, those whose ad­
vanced scientific or technical training instills the ability to com­
prehend such issues. That means, first, reviewing the technical
literature to determine the terms of the debate over nuclear safety,
problems, and issues. It also means polling the scientific and engi­
neering communities to gain an overview of their views on these
matters.

A Framework for Analysis

Nuclear energy is by far the most sophisticated high technology
energy alternative. The fuel cycle through which uranium is trans­
formed into usable electricity involves many stages: mining, mill­
ing, conversion, enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor operation,
reprocessing, waste management, and transportation. Each of
these steps involves a host of intricate technological activities, and
at every stage of the process certain questions remain to be an­
swered. We will first outline the types of questions that have been
raised and the types of answers that have been proposed. Then we
will apply these concepts to the specific topics in the nuclear
debate.
q u e s t io n s : What gaps in our current knowledge must be filled if
nuclear power is to overcome the substantial hurdles in its path?
Three areas of uncertainty can be identified: design, impact, and
management.
Design questions have to do with performance. They concern the
scientific and engineering requisites that create technologies and
develop them to the point of commercial use. The key perform­
ance question is: How will the technology execute the functions

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 Media Meltdown
for which it is designed? Behind this lurks a second question:
According to what criteria?
Impact questions concern the distribution of economic benefits
and the costs and risks to health and environment that result from
placing a technology in a particular location. Here the key ques­
tion is: Who wins and who loses? The state of the art in this area
is less well developed than in that of design uncertainty.
Management questions involve who participates in making deci­
sions at each stage of the technological process. This is the murki­
est area of policy uncertainty, because it deals with social and
behavioral science questions. The task is to develop institutions
that can control the impact of modem technology while still assur­
ing adequate performance. This is the arena where trade-offs be­
tween efficiency and equity must be resolved.
a n s w e r s : We turn now to the process by which significant de­
sign, impact, and management uncertainties are addressed. This
is not simply a matter of finding the right answers but of deciding
what kind of answers to seek. Do definitive solutions exist, even
in principle, or are the “ answers” limited to deciding how best to
live with enduring uncertainties? In the terms employed below,
are we confronted with problems to be solved or issues that can
at best be resolved?
Problems are the domain of the expert, where the solution in­
volves “ the application of knowledge and choice in a definitive
way.7Technological problems are most amenable to rational deci­
sion-making when there is relatively detailed understanding of the
system involved and only small changes are required to develop
a solution. Problem-solving involves the reduction of risk— the
use of expertise to decrease the likelihood or the magnitude of a
potential hazard.
Issues, on the other hand, are the domain of the politician. They
involve fundamental enduring conflicts among objectives and
those who pursue them. Problems can be solved, issues cannot.
Issues can, however, be resolved. Their resolution requires the
adaptiveness to compensate for incomplete understanding, and
the flexibility to reach a balance between competing interests.
Unlike problems, issues deal with situations where risks cannot be
 T he M e d ia E l it e

reduced. These matters are “ trans-scientific,” because they are not

resolvable by science— they transcend science.*
The distinction between problems and issues has been critical
for nuclear power. To a great extent, the debate between nuclear
advocates and opponents has been structured according to
whether a complex design, impact, or management question fell
into the problem or issue category.

Applying the Framework

How do these categories apply to the major questions about nu­
clear safety? Dr. Rycroft’s survey of the scientific and social scien­
tific literature identified ten major topics in the nuclear debate: the
nuclear fuel cycle, reactor safety during and after accidents, safe­
guards against the loss or destruction of radioactive materials,
proliferation, health and safety risks of normal reactor operation,
environmental hazards, radioactive waste disposal, siting and li­
censing of nuclear technologies, risk assessment, and citizen in­
volvement in decision-making. We will briefly describe major
areas of concern about each, on the basis of the current debate.
Each topic will be framed according to the main type of questions
that are asked and the solutions that are offered. Opposing posi­
tions will be presented regardless of the support each commands.
Thus, this section will set forth the terms of the debate. In the
following section, we will ask which opinions predominate among
energy specialists.
Design Problems. Performance questions to which current scien­
tific and technological expertise can be applied include: the ade­
quacy of the nuclear fuel cycle, reactor safety, and safeguards.
Nuclear fuel cycle adequacy refers to questions about the pro­
cess undergone by materials used as fuel in nuclear power produc­
tion. Uranium extraction technologies are similar to the strip- and
underground-mining techniques used in the coal industry. Milling
activities involve the processing of ore to create material that is
enriched to produce fuel for the nuclear reactor. Before this mate­
rial can be used, however, fuel rods must be manufactured and
assembled. These initial stages in the process are together termed
the “ front end” of the fuel cycle. After the reactor has used the
 Media Meltdown
fuel, the “back end” activities come into play. They include stor­
ing the spent fuel, reprocessing fuel to recover plutonium and
residual uranium, and waste disposal.9
A t least three of these steps have been a source of concern:
estimates of uranium resources, insufficient enrichment capacity,
and the lack of fuel reprocessing. (Waste disposal is such a major
public concern that it receives separate treatment below.) Since
the nuclear industry has gone into decline, these design problems
have been assigned a much lower priority on the policy agenda.
Nonetheless, some critics regard the current lack of reprocessing
facilities as a major obstacle to successful waste disposal. Storage
capacity at reactor sites for spent fuel has been limited in anticipa­
tion of the development of a reprocessing stage. The lack of re­
processing also increases pressures for more uranium and enrich­
ment. Other analysts, however, have argued that any advantages
of reprocessing are outweighed by the increased danger of nuclear
proliferation.10
Reactor safety, along with waste disposal, has been one of the
two most controversial nuclear power concerns. The most impor­
tant debate concerns the reactor’s vulnerability to core melt­
downs. Despite the fact that American reactors have operated for
a quarter century with one of the energy system’s most impressive
safety records, there is continued concern about their safety per­
formance.
The controversy over core meltdown problems (given a certain
emotional edge when described as the “ China Syndrome” ) centers
on the probabilities and magnitude of a sequence of uncertain
events. First, reactor fuel could be melted by the failure of the
cooling systems and release of radioactivity beyond the capabili­
ties of the control rods. Second, if the core did melt, the contain­
ment vessel could fail from too much pressure or heat. Most
experts believe this is a very unlikely but very dangerous combina­
tion of circumstances.
A number of highly publicized Atomic Energy Commission
(a ec ) and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc ) studies have
emphasized the extremely low probability and magnitude of
effects associated with a core meltdown. The most controversial
 T he M e d ia E l it e

of these was the “ Rasmussen report,” which found thé likelihood

of being killed by a nuclear reactor mishap comparable to that of
being struck by a meteor. Even among supporters, this analysis
was cause for concern— not for characterizing nuclear plants as
safe, but for the degree of certainty that was attached to this
finding.11 On the opposition side, such blanket endorsements have
been used as ammunition for an attack on the credibility of all
official risk studies.
Ironically, the controversy surrounding the potential for catas­
trophic accidents in nuclear reactors may have obscured a number
of less dramatic safety problems. In the wake of t m i and other
nuclear reactor malfunctions, the nuclear community has begun
to take a closer look at several problems that traditionally have
been given low priority. These include concerns about reactor
vessel cracking,12 human reliability failures, the physical chemis­
try of fission product behavior in accidents,13 and the problems of
degraded reactor cores.14Thus, the reactor safety problem may be
undergoing a subtle change toward incorporating a number of
more likely but less dangerous risks, instead of focusing entirely
on catastrophic events.15
Safeguards are required throughout the fuel cycle to reduce
the risks of theft, terrorism, or other losses of radioactive materi­
als. Debate in this category centers on two factors. First, are
existing measures adequate to manage and control these materials,
especially uranium and plutonium? Second, is it possible to design
and implement a sufficiently stringent system of accountability
and security?
Many opponents of nuclear power have argued that total ac­
countability is either impossible to achieve or can be attained only
through significant loss of civil liberties. Fears of a “ plutonium
police force” or other Draconian measures often are cited by
groups concerned about the possible trade-off between safeguards
and personal freedoms.16
In response to these questions on the safeguards problem,
proponents point to various technological solutions. In addition to
more sophisticated monitoring and security techniques, these in­
clude the use of innovative siting approaches, such as clustering

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nuclear facilities in fewer locations. This would minimize vulnera­
ble transportation and communications linkages, simplify control
over fissionable materials, reduce access to the most hazardous
products, and permit scientific and engineering expertise to be
easily mobilized in the event of a threat to the system.17
Design Issue. Proliferation is the only major performance ques­
tion whose complexities appear to transcend the rational applica­
tion of scientific and technological expertise. In this context, pro­
liferation concerns the spread of nuclear weapons, which may
occur through the spread of nuclear power. Because weapons-
grade materials are potential outputs at almost every stage of the
fuel cycle, the global political community for years has attempted
to constrain the military potential of nuclear energy.1*
United States policy for some time has emphasized an attempt
to limit the spread of scientific and technical expertise and institu­
tional capability in nuclear weapons. Underpinning this approach
is the central issue in the proliferation debate: What difference
does it make for world proliferation whether the U.S. has breeder
reactors or any other component of the plutonium economy?
It is this conflict between a desire to limit the spread of nuclear
weapons and a recognition that American policies cannot, “ with
a wave of the hand,” prevent other governments from becoming
nuclear, that leads some energy analysts to call proliferation the
“ irreducible risk” of nuclear energy.19
Impact Problems. When one moves from questions about techni­
cal performance to the consequences of placing a technology in a
particular location, the uncertainties become greater and the prob­
lems more difficult to solve. In part, this has to do with the limited
level of development of impact assessment. It is also a function of
the highly complex nature of the costs, risks, and benefits of
sophisticated technological systems.20There appear to be two im­
portant impact problems in the nuclear power arena: health and
safety risks and environmental hazards.
Health and safety risks include the exposure of both nuclear
workers and the general public to low-level radioactivity. Both
workers and the public routinely come into contact with small
quantities of radioactivity that are either impossible or

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uneconomical to segregate from the environment. The dispute

concerns the consequences of these releases and contacts.21
Opponents of nuclear energy argue that exposure to radioac­
tivity in the mining and milling of uranium products has led to an
epidemic of lung cancer in the work force.22 Industry supporters
deny this and point out the much more hazardous threats to
health and safety posed by a number of non-nuclear sources of
radiation.23
In essence, this debate has become enmeshed in a conflict over
very different perceptions of the appropriate framework for evalu­
ating health and safety consequences. Critics of nuclear power
tend to adopt a “ no-risk” framework, arguing that the public and
nuclear energy work force should be exposed to no additional or
unnecessary risks. By contrast, nuclear advocates argue for either
a “ risk-risk” consideration, which balances the beneficial and ad­
verse health effects of energy technologies against one another, or
a “ risk-benefit” orientation, in which the hazards and rewards of
nuclear power would be compared systematically.
Environmental hazards of nuclear energy are subject to many
of the same uncertainties and controversies as health and safety
problems. Three areas of concern dominate this category: air pol­
lution, water pollution, and land use. Nuclear facilities have eco­
logical consequences in each of these areas.
Air quality can be affected by routine releases of radioactive
gases from reactors and reprocessing facilities. But these emissions
are maintained at very low levels— lower than the background
radiation from naturally occurring radioactive minerals or gases,
for example.24
Thermal pollution is a well-known consequence of reactors
that circulate water from a river or lake and then return it. How­
ever, there is a relatively straightforward technological fix for this
problem— closed-cycle cooling systems, which reduce the heat.
The most significant land-use impacts are those associated
with the mining and milling of uranium. Trace amounts of ra­
dioactivity are left behind at each step of extracting and processing
uranium ore. Significant amounts of land are also required to
construct and operate or clean the facilities.

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 Media Meltdown
Impact Issue. Radioactive wastes are generated at every stage of
the fuel cycle, in both high-level and low-level form. The latter
includes contaminated materials such as clothing. By far the
greater concern is with the disposal of high-level radioactive spent
fuel from reactors. Discharged nuclear fuel has been accumulating
in interim cooling pools at the various power plants. The questions
surrounding waste disposal raise the issue of whether any genera­
tion has the right to leave such a potentially hazardous legacy to
its descendants.
Waste disposal always has been seen as perhaps the most
technologically demanding stage of the fuel cycle. But until re­
cently, radioactive waste management policy appeared to stag­
nate. Critics demanded that nuclear industry expansion should be
limited until an adequate disposal method is found and demon­
strated. O f course, this places the government and industry in the
position of demonstrating something that, by definition, would
take hundreds of years.
Nuclear proponents, on the other hand, argued that technolog­
ically feasible disposal methods were available, constrained only
by politics. Fortunately, this stalemate may be ending. There is
now substantial optimism within the energy community about our
ability to dispose of nuclear wastes with current technology. How­
ever, there are still questions about the impact of such a program.25
The choices facing the technical community have to do with
the type of disposal, the barriers that separate radioactive materi­
als from the environment, and the geological structure within
which the wastes will be deposited.26 For the first time in the
American nuclear experience, however, the design and construc­
tion of waste disposal facilities seems feasible. The 1982 Nuclear
Waste Policy Act established schedules and procedures for locat­
ing and constructing a permanent nuclear waste repository by
1998.27
Management Problems. As with the transition from design to
impact problems, the move from impact to management concerns
brings into play an additional layer of uncertainty and a new
group of experts— the social and behavioral scientists. Moreover,
management problems and issues involve the general public in the

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nuclear energy debate to a much greater extent. Two management

problems have been critical to the evolution of American nuclear
power: licensing and facility siting and risk assessment.
Licensing and facility siting obstacles are a complex combina­
tion of procedural requirements, governmental jurisdictional con­
flicts, and public resistance to the location of nuclear technologies.
The length of time it takes to bring a nuclear power plant from
the planning stage to operation is a sign of the poor state of the
industry’s health. Fragmented rules at all levels of government
have been a major factor in this problem. Unanticipated regula­
tory changes are cited by industry officials as a key economic
uncertainty facing the electric utilities.1*
Risk assessment is at the very root of the debate over design,
impact, and management concerns. Risk is an empirical measure
of the probability and severity of the adverse effects of nuclear
power. Safety, or the degree to which risks are acceptable, must
be a judgmental and, therefore, political standard. It is easy to note
that risk is not purely a technical problem, not something that can
be left to the nuclear energy community in isolation. But building
such an appreciation into the policy process is not easy.”
We must distinguish between two concepts of risk: first, as a
problem arising from insufficient technical evidence (in which case
the response is to ascertain scientific truth); and second, as a
consequence of a lack of public acceptance (to which a number of
responses, including public education or public participation,
might be reasonable). Most nuclear energy problems and issues
appear to fall into this second category of risk. A host of institu­
tional and management factors must be addressed, to bring about
their resolution.30
Management Issue. Citizen involvement in scientific and techno­
logical decision-making generally takes four forms: exchange of
information, administrative interaction, the making of actual deci­
sions, and support for participation.31 Mechanisms for exchanging
information, such as hearings, are by far the most common meth­
ods of gaining citizen input. Administrative interaction refers to
ways in which the public and representatives of technical agencies
are brought into contact, such as through the use of task forces

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and advisory committees. Actual citizen decision-making author­
ity is vested in such mechanisms as the citizen review board or
referendum. Finally, support for participation involves supplying
interest groups with technical or legal expertise, or funding.
The evaluation of these mechanisms, however, has been mixed.
Most are highly inefficient. The trade-off required by citizen in­
volvement is the very difficult choice between expensive and time-
consuming participatory structures and the constant pressures for
greater efficiency. Almost as troublesome, existing research raises
warning flags regarding the ability of public involvement to re­
solve conflicts in nuclear energy decisions. For example, European
experiments in citizen participation found that increased involve­
ment merely reinforced existing views of the nuclear contro­
versy.12 Nevertheless, the success of nuclear policies ultimately
depends upon public acceptance. Who should control? This is still
the main unanswered question.

Polling the Energy Community

We have outlined both sides of each disputed question to convey
the dimensions of this debate. But this does not imply a balance
of opinion on any question. To provide a standard for judging
media coverage, we need to know not only what the questions are,
but where the energy community stands.
Nuclear energy is often cited as the classic example of a scien­
tific and technical controversy in which conflict is heightened by
divisions among experts.11 In 1975, for example, Ralph Nader
secured the support of five Nobel laureates for a public statement
opposing further development of nuclear energy. In response,
Hans Bethe and eleven other Nobel winners signed a petition
favoring nuclear development. Prominent scientific critics of nu­
clear energy, such as Barry Commoner and Amory Lovins, are
known to millions, as are fervent supporters like Edward Teller.
So it is hardly surprising that the public has come to expect
disputes between experts in the nuclear policy arena.
Yet what does the public really know about the views of the
energy community, aside from a few highly publicized activists?
The best way for us to find the answer to this question was to ask

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them directly. In 1980, we sent a detailed questionnaire on nuclear

energy to leading American energy scientists and engineers.34
Initially, energy scientists were selected randomly from listings
in American Men and Women o f Science of prominent scientists
trained in seventy-one energy-related fields. Their areas of training
represent such diverse specialties as conservation, environmental
health, radiation ecology, reactor physics, and solar energy. Then,
engineers were selected randomly from fourteen energy-related
fields listed in Who's Who in Engineering. Examples of these
disciplines are energy engineering, nuclear engineering, and envi­
ronmental engineering.
Our next step was to select nuclear specialists from a larger
study of nuclear decision-makers surveyed by Dr. Robert Cohen
of the survey research firm Yankelovich, Skelley and White.35This
group represents a reputational sample of influential researchers
in the nuclear field, such as senior scientists at national laborato­
ries and social scientists who have directed large-scale foundation-
funded studies of energy policy.
High response rates in all three surveys were obtained, ranging
from 71 percent of the nuclear specialists to 82 percent of the
engineers. This provided samples of 358 energy scientists, 279
engineers, and 42 nuclear specialists. Most of them are based at
universities. Thus, 57 percent of the scientists sampled are aca­
demics, 20 percent work for a government organization, and 23
percent are employed by industry.
Finally, in order to evaluate media coverage, we wished to
compare scientific and engineering opinion to that of leading jour­
nalists. To accomplish this, we sent the same survey to leading
science journalists at major media outlets. This group included
veterans of the science beat at the national media network (as
defined in Chapter Two), as well as other influential science jour­
nalists identified in a previous study.36Forty-three responses were
received, a rate of 60 percent. In addition, a short follow-up survey
was mailed to all journalists included in the media elite sample,
in order to assess the opinion milieu of the national media. They
were asked their opinions on nuclear development, reactor safety,

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and willingness to live near a nuclear plant. The return rate among
this group was 65 percent.
Table 7 shows that the three groups of energy specialists were
consistently supportive of nuclear energy and sanguine about deal­
ing with its uncertainties. It also reveals a gulf between these
groups and the journalists, who were more pessimistic about

Table 7— Attitudes of Scientists, Engineers, and Journalists

Toward Nuclear Energy
Energy Nuclear Science
Scientists Engineers Specialists Journalists

Favor rapid nuclear

development 70% 82% 69% 24%
Favor nuclear
moratorium 5 3 5 24
Present risks not
acceptable 20 ii 12 40
Very confident of
problem-solving
knowledge 65 68 74 18
Reactors are very
unsafe 3 4 5 16
Would live near a
reactor 71 83 88 47
R a te as “ very seriou s ”
problem s:
Training personnel 47 Si 32 61
High-level waste
disposal 46 40 23 65
Proliferation 31 30 50 54
Consequences of
accidents 26 18 25 48
Plant construction 24 23 8 35
Transporting waste 16 19 5 42
Plant design 21 22 5 35
Low-level waste
disposal 18 23 5 37

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

Table 7 (Continued)
Energy Nuclear Science
Scientists Engineers Specialists Journalists

Likelihood of
accidents 17% 18% 13% 40%
Sabotage 19 20 18 19
Release of
radioactivity IO 9 2 23
Decommissioning
plants 12 H 2 33
Risks to workers 4 6 0 24
Rate as ‘ \ery
important” factors:
Engineering/
technical 85 86 74 81
Scientific/theoretical 45 48 31 41
Environmental 46 38 41 65
Economic 54 55 79 61
Moral 20 20 IO 28
Political 29 34 46 37
Rate performance as
“good” or
“excellent”:
Industry experts 76 79 86 40
Academic experts 71 65 57 49
Government experts 58 51 67 37
Reactor technicians 48 65 67 33
Reactor owners and
licensees 43 59 52 9
U.S. government
regulators 26 30 31 14
State and local
authorities 14 12 7 9
The public 12 11 14 24
Congressional
committees IO IO 14 12
—- — —

Number of Cases 358 279 42 43

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 Media Meltdown
virtually every aspect of this subject. Perhaps the most significant
implication is the substantial optimism among the energy commu­
nity about the problems and prospects of nuclear power. Across
the entire range of potential problems confronting the nuclear
energy alternative, these scientists and engineers generally exhib­
ited confidence in the technology and in their understanding of the
key performance, impact, and control dimensions of the nuclear
controversy.
Large majorities favored rapid nuclear development, and no
more than 5 percent of any group supported a moratorium on
plant construction. Moreover, they did not regard most of the
problems and issues discussed above as serious impediments. O f
thirteen problem areas listed, only the training of reactor person­
nel was rated as very serious by a majority of any group. Fewer
than one in four applied this level of concern to any of such hotly
debated topics as the design and construction of reactors, risks to
plant workers, the likelihood of accidents, transporting nuclear
waste, or the dangers of sabotage.
In general, their ratings accord with our review of the techni­
cal literature. They suggest that the major issues (in our narrow
sense of the term) confronting nuclear power within the energy
community are radioactive waste disposal, reactor maintenance,
and proliferation. All this is consistent with much of the public
debate. But care must be taken in interpreting these findings.
First, recognizing a problem does not necessarily imply an
inability to reduce risks, even when the problem is viewed as very
serious. Thus, most energy specialists were very confident that
they already possessed the knowledge to solve scientific and tech­
nical problems posed by nuclear power.
Second, as one defines expertise more narrowly, the pattern of
overall support for nuclear energy increases. For example, by
limiting the analysis to those scientists who have actually written
articles on a particular subject, much more positive reactions were
obtained. For example, only 33 percent of those who have written
on waste disposal regarded it as a very serious problem. The same
general pattern held for the other problems.
In addition, the identification of even serious problems didn’t

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seem to dampen confidence in the current safety of nuclear reac­

tors. Despite their expressed concern over reactor personnel,
majorities of all groups rated nuclear plants as very safe, and no
more than 5 percent of any group rated them very unsafe.
We asked not only what energy specialists thought about nu­
clear energy but also how they thought about it. Their views were
guided primarily by technical and engineering considerations, and
secondly by scientific, economic, and environmental concerns.
They gave short shrift to either political or moral aspects of this
issue. Since they regard the current state of the art as safe and
relatively well understood, and future development as worth the
risk, it makes sense that they would have the politicians and
moralists give way to the technicians and economists.
This may also help to explain their focus on technical design
problems (safety, etc.) as the perceived key to resolving the nu­
clear stalemate. Almost as striking, however, was the importance
they attached to environmental considerations. In fact, impact
problems narrowly surpassed even scientific/theoretical factors.
Such a perspective might underlie the emphasis on waste disposal
noted above.
The perceived irrelevance of political factors also holds im­
plications for their assessments of management issues. An indica­
tion of their tendency to downplay such concerns lies in how they
rated the performance of various groups in dealing with nuclear
problems. They gave high marks to the scientific and engineering
professions, while reserving failing grades for government regula­
tors, Congressional committees, and the general public.
One last sign of their confidence in nuclear development was
the relatively high ratings these groups gave the nuclear industry.
They rated the performance of both reactor owners and techni­
cians higher than that of either regulatory or Congressional over­
sight groups. And these scientists and engineers, most of whom
are academics, reserved their most positive evaluations for indus­
try experts, ranking them ahead of their peers in both government
and universities.
Finally, it is unlikely that these views have changed markedly
since this 1980 study. In 1985, we sent a short follow-up survey to

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 Media Meltdown
the scientists, again asking about reactor safety, willingness to live
near nuclear plants, and knowledge about nuclear problems. On
all three questions, the results were almost identical to those of the
earlier survey. So scientists’ confidence in nuclear power proved
not only strong but stable.
In sum, energy scientists and engineers were quite optimistic
about the current safety and future potential of nuclear power.
They did show concern about particular design and impact prob­
lems and issues; however, they perceived even serious problems as
amenable to technical solutions. The scientists and engineers were
very conscious of the importance of environmental and economic
considerations, but did not view broader political or moral issues
as significant to the nuclear debate.
The agreement among energy specialists highlights the diver­
gence of media attitudes. On virtually every question the journal­
ists were more skeptical about nuclear safety, often by wide mar­
gins. Leading science journalists were as likely to favor a nuclear
moratorium as they were to support rapid development, and only
a minority would live near a reactor themselves. They were from
two to five times more likely than the other groups to rate current
reactors very unsafe, reject the risks involved, and express doubt
about current knowledge of nuclear problems.
On the few questions they were asked, the media elite re­
sponded in similar fashion. They were slightly more likely than
science journalists to support rapid nuclear development (by 31 to
24 percent) and less likely to favor a moratorium (16 vs. 24 per­
cent). But they were slightly less willing to live near a nuclear
reactor (40 vs. 47 percent), and about the same percentage rated
reactors very unsafe (17 vs. 16 percent).
Thus, the two media groups were as united in their skepticism
toward nuclear power as the three energy specialist groups were
in their support of it. This gulf is illustrated most succinctly by
their respective reactor safety ratings. Within each media group,
the percentage rating current reactors very safe equalled the per­
centage rating them very unsafe. By contrast, the other groups
were up to almost twenty times more likely to pick the very safe
category (e.g., by 58 to 3 percent among energy scientists).

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It is important to realize that science journalists did not frame

the safety issue very differently from scientists and engineers.
They, too, gave their highest priority to problems of training
reactor personnel, waste disposal, and proliferation. They, too,
rated engineering factors as the most important. They were simply
more critical than energy specialists toward the technology and its
oversight.
Thus, journalists rated virtually every problem as more serious
and the performance of most groups as poorer. They gave their
most serious rating to problems of avoiding reactor accidents,
transporting wastes, risks to plant workers, and the release of
radioactivity over twice as often as the expert groups. In assessing
performance, they were especially critical of industry representa­
tives. They were about half as likely as the energy specialists to
rate industry scientists and engineers as good or excellent, and
about one-fifth as likely to give high marks to reactor owners and
licensees.
Overall, these surveys reveal an energy community that mainly
supports nuclear safety and a journalistic community that is
equally as critical. The views of scientists and engineers are not
presented here as a norm from which journalistic opinion should
not deviate. There is no single “ legitimate” perspective on the
nuclear debate. But the sharply different outlooks of these groups
provides an opportunity to consider the role that values may play
in news coverage. In Michael Robinson’s terms, how “ mediating”
are the media on this topic— do they mainly transmit the perspec­
tive of the energy specialists, or do they translate the issue into a
framework that reflects their own concerns? In short, does the
news about nuclear safety more closely resemble the perspectives
of the energy community or those of the journalistic community?

Media Coverage o f Nuclear Energy

The Nuclear News Agenda. We analyzed nuclear energy coverage
from 1970 through 1983 at seven national media outlets— the New
York Times; the three major newsmagazines, Time, Newsweek,
and U.S. News and World Report; and the evening newscasts of
a b c , CBS, and NBC. During these fourteen years, nuclear power

184
 Media Meltdown
received extensive national media coverage— nearly 6,000 stories
in the Times alone, well over 1,000 stories on the network news,
and over 250 stories, many running several pages, in the major
newsmagazines. This means that the news audience was con­
fronted by an average of over one story per day (nearly ten a week)
in the Times, one newsmagazine story every two to three weeks,
and almost two evening news broadcasts a week devoted to this
topic.
For this study, coders examined all the magazine articles, half
the television broadcasts, and a randomly selected 10 percent of
the Times’ coverage of this subject.37 On all categories discussed
below, agreement between coders exceeded 80 percent.38
A ll three media formats produced increased coverage over the
years, even aside from the deluge of stories unleashed by Three
Mile Island. Fpr example, in the early 1970s, the New York Times
ran only about one nuclear energy story every other day. By the
middle of the decade, the flow had doubled to roughly one a day.
Then in 1979, t m i opened the floodgates, and the paper published
almost a thousand stories, virtually three a day. In the 1980s, the
news flow abated somewhat, but still remained above pre-TMi
levels.
Most of these stories did not address nuclear energy as a whole,
but rather one of the narrower problem areas identified in the
framework for analysis. These include the nuclear fuel cycle, reac­
tor safety, safeguards against the loss of radioactive material (in­
cluding terrorist threats), proliferation, health and safety risks of
normal reactor operations, environmental hazards, radioactive
waste disposal, sighting and licensing of nuclear technologies, risk
assessment, and citizen involvement in decision-making.
With regard to these topics, the media’s nuclear agenda was
everywhere virtually identical. By far the most coverage went to
reactor safety. It was followed by a second tier of topics that
garnered moderate attention, including licensing and siting, pro­
liferation, waste disposal, health and environmental hazards, safe­
guards, and citizen participation. Finally, risk assessment and the
nuclear fuel cycle got short shrift at most outlets, accounting for
only a few stories throughout the entire sample period.

.85
 T he M e d ia E l it e

Not only the amount but the focus of nuclear coverage has
changed markedly over the years. For example, the predominance
of reactor safety stories is confined to the post-TMl era. Almost 75
percent of the reactor safety magazine articles and 88 percent of
the television stories on this topic appeared since 1979. The shift
in news priorities following t m i carried some other topics into the
public eye. Health and safety hazards were accorded new promi­
nence in the print media, as articles on the risks associated with
even routine releases of radioactivity from reactors increasingly
appeared. New attention also was given to the role of the public.
The print media began running many more stories on citizen
involvement in decision-making, while television gave its first sus­
tained coverage to licensing and siting disputes, picking up where
the Times left off.
q u e s t i o n s : We turn now from the relatively simple questions of

what, when, where, and how much, to the more substantive issues
of how nuclear coverage is structured. First, how are the questions
framed? Does the news focus mainly on questions of design, im­
pact, or management? And do journalists’ news judgments agree
with the experts’ assessments about which topics fall into each
category?
In addition to the questions that arise, there are those an­
swered along the way. So we also coded all stories dealing with
uncertainties that were overcome. Such stories were few and far
between in all outlets, ranging from only one in twenty news­
weekly stories to one in seven television newscasts and just over
one in six newspaper articles.
Typical of such stories was a CBS report on alleged health
hazards to nuclear plant workers: “ A ten-year study of radiation
effects . . . rejects charges that radiation levels at certain nuclear
power plants are dangerously high. The report. . . contends that
current government standards provide generally adequate protec­
tion for workers exposed to radiation.39 This category also in­
cluded stories about the disposition of licensing disputes and the
outcome of anti-nuclear protests.
For the questions that remain, our review of the technical

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 Media Meltdown
literature placed several major topics into each category of uncer­
tainty. The major uncertainties concerning the fuel cycle, reactor
safety, safeguarding radioactive material, and proliferation are
widely regarded as design questions. How do you make the tech­
nology perform properly, and how should you assess its perform­
ance? These design questions underlie a range of topics, from the
need for secure uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities to
the performance of emergency core cooling systems.
For example, an early Time article dealt with design questions
about reactor fuel rods: “There is also disturbing evidence that the
nuclear fuel rods in one kind of atomic plant have bent, crushed
or cracked during normal operation. . . the rods, designed for and
proved in a previous generation of smaller reactors, may simply
not stand the higher pressures and temperatures of today’s big
reactors.40
By contrast, such topics as everyday health and safety con­
cerns, environmental hazards, and waste disposal are treated pri­
marily in terms of their impact on the human and natural environ­
ment. What health risks does low-level radioactivity pose for
reactor workers? What ecological impact do nuclear facilities have
on the surrounding land, water, and air? What are the long-term
consequences of creating highly toxic waste products? These ques­
tions transcend the proper performance of technologies. They call
for an understanding of the continuous interplay between technol­
ogy and the environment.
Thus, a Newsweek piece highlighted uncertainties over the
impact of low-level radiation: “ Too much radiation can cause
cancer. But how much, and at what levels? So when low-level
radiation leaked from a nuclear power plant last week, some ex­
perts called for an immediate evacuation of the area, while others
said the leak was less dangerous than a chest X-ray.” 41
Finally, even greater uncertainty attends the topics that are
mainly matters of management. How should government decide
where and when to build and license nuclear plants? What kinds
of involvement by concerned citizens are necessary and appropri­
ate? How do we decide whether the inherent risks of nuclear

>87
 T he M e d ia E l it e

power are acceptable? These questions include design and impact

concerns but are more fundamentally dependent on institutional
and management factors.
For instance, a Newsweek article dealt with the management
of nuclear development: “ Until now, nuclear regulation was solely
the province of technical experts in Washington— first at the
Atomic Energy Commission and later at its successor agency, the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But now that nuclear worries
are coalescing into a popular crusade in several states, Washing­
ton’s regulatory monopoly is ending.’’42
Since major areas of uncertainty fall into all three categories,
one might expect to see considerable news coverage devoted to
each. Instead most coverage focused on management uncertainties
(see Table 8). This was so only partly because the media were
highly attentive to questions most experts regard as management
matters, such as licensing procedures and citizen participation. In
addition, they concentrated on the management aspects of other
topics that scientists and engineers tend to address in terms of
design and impact uncertainties. The result was to magnify the
uncertainties attached to nuclear power, by presenting these topics
to the public in a fashion that highlighted the most difficult ques­
tions and downplayed the more tractable.
All seven media outlets placed more emphasis on management
questions than on any other category. In fact, everywhere but at
the New York Times, management uncertainties received several
times as much coverage as any other type of question. On televi-

Table 8— Types of Question Posed on Nuclear Safety

New York Times Magazines Television

Solution 22 5 14
Design 23 4 9
Impact ii 9 14
Management 44 82 j >3
IOO% 100% 100%
Number of Cases 486 213 582

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 Media Meltdown
sion, nearly two out of every three broadcasts were confined to
management questions. And at the newsweeklies, over four out of
every five stories focused on management concerns. There was
only token variation from one outlet to the next within a given
news format.
Just as significant is the divergence between scientists’ and
journalists’ treatments of particular topics. The technical litera­
ture tends to treat questions related to the fuel cycle, reactor
safety, proliferation, and safeguarding fissionable material in de­
sign terms. Yet none of the seven national media outlets portrayed
any of these topics primarily in terms of design. Only the New
York Times addressed more than a small minority of its coverage
to the performance of technologies associated with any of the four
topics. Thirty-eight percent of Times stories dealing with reactor
safety, and 33 percent concerned with the fuel cycle, dealt with
design uncertainties.
To be fair, this probably understates the paper’s congruence
with the technical literature on these topics. The Times was more
likely than the other outlets to report on the resolution of technical
uncertainties, and many such stories were concentrated on these
two topics. So it is likely that a majority of Times articles on the
nuclear fuel cycle did address design questions.
The pattern was very different, though, when the Times came
to covering efforts to prevent the diversion of uranium for nuclear
weapons. Only 8 percent of its proliferation stories, and not a
single article on safeguards, dealt with design questions.
If these results distanced the Times from the experts, they put
the paper squarely in the media mainstream. The networks cov­
ered design questions in about one broadcast out of five on reactor
safety, in a single fuel cycle story, and in none of the stories on
proliferation or safeguards. The newsweeklies dealt with design
questions in only 6 percent of their reactor safety stories and in
none of the pieces concerning safeguards, proliferation, or the fuel
cycle.
Thus, on three of the four topics the experts associate with
design questions, the networks and the newsweeklies together
produced a total of two design-oriented stories during the
 T he M e d ia E l it e

fourteen-year period. Not a single story on the design questions

involved in nuclear safeguards ever appeared in the seven media
outlets coded. (Because we coded only samples of the Times and
network coverage, such stories may have appeared occasionally.
But the number of them would almost certainly have been very
small.)
What happened to the stories that did run on design topics?
In most cases they were framed as management questions. For
example, this was true of every article on safeguards in the week­
lies, over 90 percent of the television broadcasts, and over 80
percent of the Times articles. Thus, NBC aired a proliferation story
following the 1981 Israeli air strike against an Iraqi nuclear instal­
lation. The correspondent said, in part, “ Physicist [Theodore]
Taylor thinks nuclear power and nuclear weapons are so closely
linked, controlling one requires giving up the other.” 43
The trends were similar, although not so dramatic, on fuel
cycle and reactor safety stories. As a result, many of the nuclear
design questions that scientists and engineers debated were rarely
or never aired in the major media. Instead readers and viewers
persistently were confronted with management questions, which
became the entire story by default.
The correspondence was somewhat greater on two topics
whose uncertainties scientists see mostly as matters of impact—
health and safety risks and environmental hazards. On waste dis­
posal questions, though, the media stressed the management ques­
tions involved. News judgments best mirrored expert judgments
on topics the latter deemed to be management questions. Since the
media treated virtually all topics as management questions, it is
not surprising that they agreed with the scientists on topics like
sighting and licensing plants, citizen participation, and risk assess­
ment. In fact, of the ten topics considered, television and the major
newsweeklies treated nine primarily as management questions.
Thus, the pattern is consistent— management stories drive out
stories about the performance of nuclear technologies and their
impact on people and the environment. Since management ques­
tions are inherently less amenable to resolution than design and
 Media Meltdown
impact questions, the uncertainty surrounding nuclear energy is
heightened by the news process.
This one-sided view is not a fact of nature. The coverage does
not have to be this way. Indeed it has not always been this way,
at least not to the degree that it has recently. In the early 1970s,
when nuclear power was less of a story, it was also a somewhat
different story.
From 1970 to 1972, 30 percent of New York Times stories, 27
percent of television broadcasts, and even 12 percent of the highly
management-oriented newsweekly articles reported on difficulties
of nuclear energy that were resolved or uncertainties that were
overcome. Soon thereafter, though, this kind of coverage virtually
disappeared. For the rest of the decade only 4 percent of network
newscasts and 2 percent of magazine articles reported on newly
found answers to nuclear questions. In the newsmagazines, only
two such stories appeared from 1973 through 1975, one story from
1976 through 1978, and no stories at all during the saturation
coverage of 1979. The drop-off at the New York Times was more
gradual, but no less inexorable— from 30 percent to 25 percent
during 1973 through 1975, to 15 percent thereafter, half the original
figure (but still more than the newsmagazines ever carried).
As the coverage of problems being solved dwindled, the atten­
tion given to management questions accelerated. The key period
again was 1973 to 1975. During those years the proportion of
management stories jumped from 58 to 78 percent at the networks,
from 71 to 86 percent at the magazines, and from 15 to 34 percent
at the Times. The Times' coverage of management questions con­
tinued to rise slowly until they finally comprised a majority of all
stories after 1980.
These figures indicate that the media’s struggle over how to
frame nuclear power questions effectively was over by 1973. The
outcome emphasized the questions least likely to be resolved. In
the early 1970s, nuclear coverage featured a mixture of questions
about the performance of this technology, its costs and benefits,
and the difficulties of managing it, with a liberal sprinkling of
reports on questions that were being answered. Thereafter the
 T he M e d ia E l it e

inherently open-ended management questions began to drown out

all others. While Three Mile Island raised new questions about
nuclear power in the public mind, the form new questions would
take was determined much earlier. And the form of the questions
goes a long way toward determining the shape of the answers.

an sw ers: There are always more questions than answers in news

on technological controversies. When an answer is discovered, or
a problem solved, it may momentarily make news. But once that
moment has passed, it is replaced by new controversies that crowd
their way into the news. In analyzing coverage, then, the main
consideration is not necessarily whether answers get reported, but
the kinds of answers that are sought in ongoing controversies.
The way we assess a new technology may depend greatly on
whether we can reasonably expect technological “ fixes” to help
solve current problems, or whether we must live indefinitely with
uncertainties and conflicts. In short, what kinds of outcomes can
be expected? Will the technology eventually do our bidding, or
must we adapt ourselves to its inherent uncertainties? In the terms
used here, are the questions confronting nuclear energy problems
that require technical solution? Or are they trans-scientific issues
that, at best, may submit to social or political resolution?
A technology as complex and as controversial as nuclear
power must involve both problems and issues, both technical and
political elements. But the particular mix of these elements, and
their distribution across the various topics in the nuclear debate,
are anything but preordained. Moreover, the distinction between
these two types of answers is often critical for assessing nuclear
power.
Our surveys of the technical literature and the scientific and
engineering communities suggest that three major topics are re­
garded primarily as political issues transcending scientific ap­
proaches: proliferation, waste disposal, and citizen participation.
The experts regard proliferation as a political issue not only be­
cause of its international character, but also because the creation
of weapons-grade materials is an unavoidable by-product of nu­
clear technology. As one Time article put it, “ But can anything
 Media Meltdown
really be done to stop nuclear proliferation? . . . Strategic and
political concerns work mightily against shutting down the
‘plutonium economy.’ But it can still be checked. One approach
might be to give international controls more power.” 44
Waste disposal is far more amenable to technical problem­
solving, and many technological questions have been raised and
resolved. Yet the Faustian bargain that demands many genera­
tions of vigilance seems unavoidable. Moreover, the burden
must fall mainly on a few localities, so that the entire nation
may benefit. Issues such as these are quintessential^ political,
as a Time article illustrates: “ The thominess of the disposal
problem was aptly summed up by one Senate Committee aide:
‘We don’t need to do it in my backyard,’ he said. ‘But we need
to do it.’ ” 45
Finally, citizen involvement in decision-making is the sine qua
non of political issues. There are costs as well as benefits to citizen
participation, but any cost-benefit calculus must itself reflect social
values and conflicts of interest that cannot be reduced to the
purely technical realm. Perhaps the most political of all questions
is, who should control? An n b c story on one dispute didn’t mince
words in presenting this perspective: “ For the people of New
Mexico this question: How much control do they have over the
project? How can they know which is the right decision? It’s a
problem for the people of New Mexico and for their political
leaders.” 46
By contrast, the remaining seven topics have major compo­
nents that can be addressed in technical terms. Scientists and
engineers can at least strive for technological solutions to prob­
lems such as fuel enrichment, fuel reprocessing, pollution, the
release of radioactivity during normal reactor operations and in
accidents, choosing plant sites, and protecting these sites against
thieves and terrorists.
Since the media concentrate on topics like reactor safety,
which the experts regard more as a problem area, one might
expect the coverage to focus on efforts to find solutions to such
technological problems. Yet just the opposite occurred. In all
seven media outlets, the potential answers to nuclear questions

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

were framed as social and political issues that can at best be

resolved.47
All seven outlets portrayed the answers to nuclear questions
more as social or political issues than as technical problems (see
Table 9). A t the newsweeklies, the margin exceeded five to one.
All media outlets agreed with the experts in treating most stories
on proliferation and citizen participation primarily as political
matters. The Times and the newsweeklies also portrayed waste
disposal predominantly in a political context, while the networks
gave a slight edge to the technical side of this topic (although most
broadcasts combined both elements).
The media’s deviations from the specialist community oc­
curred mostly on those topics in which the specialists look to the
technical realm for answers. A t the Times, fuel cycle adequacy
was the only topic whose answers mainly were sought in the
technical realm. Reactor safety turned into a virtual dead heat,
with issues edging out problems by 51 to 49 percent. Every other
topic consistently spilled over into the political arena. The story
was much the same at Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News. On only
two topics did problems edge out issues— risk assessment, on
which only four articles were published, and waste disposal, which
the technical literature ironically treats more as a social or politi­
cal issue.
The often maligned television networks came much closer to
the energy specialists than did any of the print outlets. They
mirrored the technical literature in looking mainly for technical

Table 9— Types of Answers Presented on Nuclear Safety

New York Times Magazines Television

Problem 42 9 34
Issue 58 48 42
Combination — 42 24
100% *99% 100%
Number of Cases 486 213 582

• T o ta l reflects ro u n d in g e rro r

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 Media Meltdown
solutions to problems dealing with reactor safety and safeguards,
health and environmental hazards, and risk assessment, while
presenting political resolutions for problems of proliferation, citi­
zen involvement, and waste disposal. The only major differences
cropped up on broadcasts dealing with the fuel cycle and plant
siting and licensing. The specialists regard these mainly as techni­
cal problems, while television presented them mostly as political
issues.
Despite the relatively good correspondence between television
and the experts on several topics, the overall pattern contains
more differences than similarities. When the specialists seek an­
swers to the questions raised by nuclear power, they primarily
look to the technical realm. The media, by contrast, tended to
present the greater uncertainties of political resolution as the best
we can hope for. This was particularly true in the print media, and
above all, at the newsweeklies. Thus, magazine journalism con­
tinued to frame nuclear energy topics in ways almost diametrically
opposed to the specialists’ approach.
Like the questions, the character of the answers in media
coverage changed over time. Moreover, the nature of the change
was quite similar, with the approach that most emphasized uncer­
tainty gradually gaining ascendancy. But whereas management
questions came to the fore in all media outlets at about the same
time, the timing for the changeover in answers varied widely.
In the newsweeklies, the political realm dominated the techni­
cal throughout the entire period under study. The only change
over time concerned the extent of its dominion. During the first
half of the 1970s, 30 percent of the magazine articles posed poten­
tial answers in political terms, compared to 10 percent that rele­
gated them to the technical realm. The majority of stories at that
time (60 percent) combined the two elements. From 1976 to 1978,
the proportion of “ pure” political solutions doubled, to 60 per­
cent, while the technical side dropped to only 4 percent. Since
then, the magazines have remained the realm of political issues
par excellence.
The mid-1970s were also a watershed for New York Times
coverage of nuclear uncertainties. From 1970 to 1975, a majority

195
 T he M e d ia E l it e

of Times stories looked for solutions in technical terms. Since then

the Times has presented political resolutions a majority of the
time. During the first six years of the study, problems outnum­
bered issues by 55 to 41 percent in the pages of the Times. There­
after issues outnumbered problems by 61 to 35 percent.
An even more dramatic shift took place on the airwaves,
though it came a bit earlier. From 1970 to 1972, television pre­
sented virtually no nuclear topics in terms of pure political issues.
Technical problems outnumbered issues by 42 to 4 percent. The
next three years witnessed a major reversal. Two out of three
broadcasts looked to political solutions, while the stories stressing
technical answers were almost halved, dropping to 22 percent.
From 1976 through 1983, issues easily outnumbered problems
every year but one. The exception was 1979, when t m i brought a
host of (mostly brief) stories about design problems. That year
stories posing technical solutions outnumbered those posing polit­
ical resolutions by 37 to 35 percent.
In sum, all media outlets shifted early on toward a more politi­
cal orientation. But the starting point, the timing, and the extent
of the change varied from one format to the next. We have fol­
lowed these shifts in some detail because they provide some impor­
tant evidence about nuclear coverage. First, they reinforce the
point that the coverage was not set in stone. Changes did occur
over time, and they again emphasized aspects that were less ame­
nable to definitive solutions— in this case the political realm. Once
again the inherently uncertain human element increasingly took
precedence, with the political displacing the technical dimension.
Equally important, though, was the varying pattem of changes
over time. The character of the news is not only communicated
through the events reported, but is colored by the journalists’
characterization of those events. It might be argued, for instance,
that the coverage became more political because the subject be­
came more political. (A note of caution may be needed here, if this
proposition seems self-evident. A political conflict between envi­
ronmental groups and industry over the safety of a reactor would
be coded as capable of technical solution, if the opponents objected
to alleged design inadequacies of some component. The process of
 Media Meltdown
conflict might be political while the solution remains in the techni­
cal realm. We coded the way answers were framed, not simply the
presence or absence of a dispute.)
How do we know that changes in the nuclear story over time
reflected changes in journalists’ perceptions above and beyond any
changes in the events they were reporting? The answer is that, at
a given time, different media outlets were reporting the same story
very differently. From 1970 through 1972, the New York Times and
the television news departments emphasized technical solutions,
while the newsmagazines favored political resolutions to the ques­
tions they raised. From 1973 through 1975, television discovered
the political dimension, while the Times stuck to its technical
stance. In 1979, all the print outlets emphasized the political ele­
ments of t m i and other nuclear stories, while television again
stepped up its coverage of the technical realm.
These variations represent the outcome of choices about how
to cover a changing story, and reasonable people may differ in
making such choices, even among a community of skilled profes­
sionals. The fact that different news organizations made different
choices at different times suggests that the story did not simply
impose itself on the media. It was mediated by the news judgments
of practicing journalists.
Story Slant. This is the aspect many people regard as the bottom
line of content analysis. In which direction does the coverage tilt?
Is it mostly pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, or evenly balanced? After
all is said and done, doesn’t it all come down to this value judg­
ment?
We think not. People ask too much of such shorthand assess­
ments of news stories, expecting them to convey the entire flavor
of the news in a single global judgment. A story’s slant may be less
important than the questions it asks, how it frames potential
answers, which sources it cites (and omits), and how it brings
expertise to bear on the subject matter. All these things may subtly
influence how the audience comes to view an issue, even if it rejects
a journalist’s conclusions. Readers may keep the road map even
as they bypass the destination. That is why our analysis tries to
traverse the entire route, rather than leapfrogging right to the end.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

Though its importance can be overstated, the tilt or slant of

a story is a significant element of the news. But deciding where it
lies can be deceptively difficult. Other studies have classified sto­
ries as pro- or anti-nuclear, positive or negative, tending to favor
or oppose nuclear energy, and so forth. The problem with such
classifications, as journalists are quick to point out, is that they
depend heavily on the events reported. When something goes
wrong at a nuclear reactor, such as a radiation leak, a report on
the problem will be bad news (hence anti-nuclear) almost by defi­
nition. Whether only the bad news is reported and the good news
ignored (the reactors that don’t have problems, the successful
stoppage of the leak) is another question fraught with its own
difficulties.
Consider a New York Times report that began, “ More than
2,600 gallons of low-level radioactive water spilled onto the floor
of a building at the Public Service Electric and Gas Company’s
nuclear power plant in Salem County.” 48 That might be consid­
ered negative or bad news, or perhaps news that leads a reader to
become more critical of nuclear energy. Industry advocates might
argue that such an occurrence should not be considered news at
all. Whatever else it may be, though, it is a strictly factual account­
ing without overt interpretation or judgment.
At issue here is how to differentiate the slant from the facts.
When people think of slanted or one-sided coverage, they usually
have in mind the “spin” the reporter adds to a story, not the tenor
of the facts reported. To minimize this problem, we gave particu­
lar attention to areas where journalists have the most discretion
in shaping their stories. These include the lead that draws atten­
tion to the story while stating its major theme, the closer that
summarizes a piece and draws conclusions about it, the use of
emotional or insinuational language, and the choice of sources
cited. The same event might easily produce a neutral or slanted
story, depending on how reporters and their editors or producers
choose to frame it with a lead and closer, whether their language
provides a neutral or emotional tone, and whether sources on both
sides of a controversy are represented.
Stories were coded as pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear, balanced
 Media Meltdown
(both sides about equally represented), or neutral (no tilt in either
direction). A good example of a pro-nuclear article, by these crite­
ria, appeared in Time during 1978. Opposing views were pre­
sented, only to be rejected: “ Irrational opposition to nuclear
power can only delay a solution to America’s energy problems.”
After noting the controversy over waste disposal, the weight of
expertise was invoked: “ the overwhelming majority [of scientists]
believe the waste disposal problem can be satisfactorily resolved.”
The article concluded “ the time to start building [nuclear] plants
is now. Otherwise, they will not be ready when the nation really
needs them.”4’
The lead paragraph from a 1973 Newsweek article was equally
direct in expressing a preference for nuclear development: “ But
the nation’s $3 billion nuclear energy program is almost certainly
the most viable long-term answer to the [energy crisis]— the key
question is how fast it can be speeded up.” 50
Introductions and conclusions such as these obviously go be­
yond reporting facts to suggest appropriate conclusions, and even
policy judgments, to be drawn from the facts. But the same tech­
niques can just as easily be used to paint a very different portrait
of nuclear power. A c b s report on a controversial nuclear plant
began with an alliterative anchor calling the project, “ overdue,
over budget, and overloaded with other problems.” This was fol­
lowed by a field reporter’s well-cadenced lead sentence: “ Seven
years behind schedule, a billion dollars over budget, and riddled
with reports of construction mistakes, cover-ups, employee fraud
and crime, [this reactor] is called by Congressional experts the best
example of how not to build a nuclear power plant.” 51 Similarly,
emotional language was used to great effect in a Newsweek piece
on t m i titled, “ In the Shadow of the Towers” :

With the crippled reactor still belching gusts of radiation,

hardly a soul except the Showalters was left on their abandoned
suburban block . . . When the bad dreams came true last week,
the people in the shadow responded with a mix of resignation
and alarm that somehow stopped short of panic, even as the
scarifying sights and sounds of crisis unfolded around them. A

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contagion of fear and anger spread through the countryside

. . . fear of an invisible plague . . ..52

It is also easy to bolster one side of an argument through the

selective use of quotations or references to authoritative sources.
For example, a Newsweek article on the failure of a California
initiative to ban nuclear plants began with a quotation from no less
a scientific icon than Albert Einstein: “ To the village square, we
must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come
America’s voice.” 53 This quote was followed by a remark from a
nuclear power lobbyist proclaiming victory over a distinctly un-
American sounding group of anti-nuke types: “ We have broken
the back of the opponents— that vast collection of food faddists,
perennial hitchers, deep-breathers, nature lovers and anti-Estab-
lishment counter-culturists who came together in California.”
Three years later, however, the same magazine ran a piece on an
anti-nuclear march on Washington that provided a forum for the
protesters.54 Those quoted included Richard Pollock of Critical
Mass (“ this will be the major social movement of the 1980’s” ),
activist minister William Sloane Coffin (“ You can’t trust the utili­
ties . . . and you can’t trust the regulatory agency . . . .” ), Daniel
Ellsberg, Dave McReynolds of the War Resisters League, and
others, with only one mild dissent from a Carter administration
aide.
As this pairing of articles shows, tilt cannot be adequately
assessed on the basis of a single article or an unsystematic recollec­
tion of apparently partisan examples. It must be based on an
exhaustive or representative reading of the materials, to determine
how much spin exists and whether pieces slanted in either direc­
tion cancel each other out.
Our systematic survey of the major media yielded results that
were consistently negative toward nuclear power. At six out of
seven media outlets, anti-nuclear stories outnumbered pro-nuclear
pieces, often by a wide margin. The closer one looks at the cover­
age, though, the more diversity one finds (see Table 10). There was
considerable variation in the amount of spin, the extent of its
one-sidedness, and the timing of its appearance.

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Table 10— Story Slant

N ew Y o r k Tim es M agazines Television

P ro-N uclear 7 25 17
A n ti-N u clear IO 46 42
N eutral/B alanced _83 _29 _4 i
100% 10 0% 100%
N um ber o f Cases 486 213 582

The New York Times featured the most even distribution of

one-sided stories, as well as the lowest proportion of stories tilted
in either direction. Only one Times story in six was tilted for or
against nuclear power. The majority of these were slanted in a
negative direction, although the difference was slight— io percent
were anti-nuclear and seven percent pro-nuclear.
By contrast, a substantial majority of television stories dis­
played spin, and the anti-nuclear side predominated by a margin
greater than two to one. The individual networks ranged from a
two to one negative margin at CBS (40 to 19 percent) to three to
one at NBC (47 to 15 percent).
The newsmagazines produced the most spin of any news for­
mat. Seventy-one percent of all magazine stories tilted in one
direction or the other. The direction of the tilt was strongly nega­
tive, by 46 to 25 percent. Unlike television, though, one outlet
differed sharply from the others. U.S. News and World Report
produced a plurality of pro-nuclear stories, by 40 to 33 percent.
This is hardly a massive pro-nuclear tilt, but it certainly set U.S.
News apart from its larger competitors.
A typically upbeat 1974 article began, “ While nuclear power
plants are a hotly debated issue in the U.S., for much of the rest
of the world there is just one question: How fast can new plants
be built and rushed into use?” 55The piece described nuclear power
as a “ kind of salvation” from soaring oil prices and quoted a “ top
expert” who said, “ Nuclear power is available and it’s getting
cheaper in relation to other energy sources.” Additional com­
ments were solicited from an Atomic Industrial Forum official

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and the president of Westinghouse Power Systems Company, the

world’s largest manufacturer of nuclear plants. Another pro-
nuclear lead read, “ Unless present facilities for processing ura­
nium are greatly expanded, there will not be enough atomic fuel
to run the nuclear power plants counted on to supply a growing
share of U.S. needs for electricity.” 56
In Time and Newsweek, by contrast, a majority of all stories
were tilted against nuclear power. The margin was greatest at
Newsweek, 51 to 17 percent, with Time close behind at 51 to 23
percent. That means the two largest newsmagazines were even
more anti-nuclear than the television networks.
To create an overall spin index, we subtracted the percentage
of negative from positive stories. By this measure, the major media
were arrayed as follows: U.S. News, + 7; New York Times, — 3;
television networks, — 25; Time and Newsweek, —31. The varying
extent of slanted coverage probably reflects the different traditions
of the three news formats. The New York Times has long been
America’s exemplar of self-consciously objective journalism. It
eschews emotion-laden or highly interpretive coverage in favor of
a low-key style and balanced presentation. The approach of the
newsweeklies is far different. Interpretive coverage has been their
hallmark since the format was created by Henry Luce, who
treated Time largely as an extension of his personal viewpoint.
Even with the passing of such media barons from the scene, the
weeklies retain a more subjective flavor than one normally en­
counters in the most respected daily newspapers.
This difference in tone can be illustrated by comparing two
leads from roughly contemporary stories on proliferation that
appeared in the New York Times and Newsweek, respectively. The
newspaper story, a lengthy front-page think piece, began, “ The
construction of nuclear reactors around the world for the produc­
tion of electricity and the resulting spread of material that could
be used for making atomic bombs are putting increasing pressure
on the United States to devise new policies on nuclear energy and
international control.” 57 The magazine led with a verse from a
Tom Lehrer song: “ The Lord’s our shepherd, says the psalm, /
But just in case we’d better get the bomb. / Who’s next?” 5*

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 Media Meltdown
Television news stands somewhere in between, though cer­
tainly closer to the style of magazine journalism. In the 1950s,
network newscasts were little more than wire service reports with
pictures. Since the sixties, television journalism has been evolving
toward its own genre of dramatic, personalized, subjective news.
So it is not surprising that television’s spin factor should be hot
on the heels of the magazines. A c b s story on missing uranium
began portentously, “ Modem life is rich in fuel to feed paranoid
fantasies. The theft of radioactive uranium has been the starting
point for countless books and movies and nightmares and this
week . . . life caught up with art.” 59
Even more variable than the amount of spin was its focus.
Although the three news formats all offered more negative than
positive spin, they distributed their one-sided coverage among
quite different topics. A t the Times, the fuel cycle was the only
topic treated in a largely positive light. Proliferation, waste dis­
posal, risk assessment, and reactor safety all elicited relatively
negative coverage. The magazines placed the problems of environ­
mental hazards in a mainly positive light, while reserving negative
coverage for health risks, reactor safety, safeguards, and citizen
participation. Television set the standard for consistently accen­
tuating the negative. Not a single topic came across positively over
the airwaves. There was rough parity among topics, with most
treated in an equally negative light.
Two features stand out from this potpourri of topical varia­
tions. First, anti-nuclear spin was not restricted to particular con­
cerns shared by all the major media. Rather, a more generalized
tendency toward anti-nuclear coverage seemed to attach itself to
different topics at different media outlets. Second, the critical
question of reactor safety generated a consistently negative tilt. It
was never the focus of the most severely anti-nuclear sentiments,
but it always attracted heavily negative coverage. In all three news
formats, the anti-nuclear stories on reactor safety outweighed the
pro-nuclear by margins of at least two to one.
The consistently negative coverage of reactor safety raises a
more general question of timing. To what extent did the media’s
negative view of nuclear energy stem from the accident at Three

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Mile Island? The answer reveals the first major clear-cut division
between print and broadcast media. In the Times and the maga­
zines, anti-nuclear spin can indeed be traced to t m i . On television,
however, t m i fit into a well-established pattern of anti-nuclear
coverage. At the Times its effect was transient; at the networks it
was negligible.
The briefest blip occurred in the otherwise balanced pages of
the Times. Aside from 1979, coverage there was evenhanded
throughout the period studied. In that exceptional year, anti­
nuclear pieces captured 15 percent of the Times' coverage, com­
pared to only 6 percent that were pro-nuclear. So the Times'
anti-nuclear tilt was attributable almost entirely to t m i .
A more striking and lasting change occurred at the newsmaga­
zines. Before t m i , the magazines were as evenhanded as the
Times. Afterward they were overwhelmingly anti-nuclear, out­
stripping even television’s tilt. From 1970 through 1978, anti­
nuclear stories at the magazines outnumbered their pro-nuclear
counterparts by a single percentage point (35 to 34 percent). Then,
in 1979, an anti-nuclear slant colored 56 percent of all articles,
compared to only 15 percent in the other direction. From 1980
through 1983, the anti-nuclear portion held steady at 56 percent,
while the pro-nuclear rose to only 20 percent. Thus, the magazines
shifted from a decade of balanced coverage of nuclear energy to
a three to one negative tilt in the post-TMi era.
No such shift was needed to bring the networks into the anti­
nuclear camp. As far back as the early 1970s, network news spin
was running eight to five against nuclear power (39 to 25 percent
through 1975). In the latter seventies, the anti-nuclear margin
increased to three to one, or 36 to 12 percent. The year of t m i , it
increased only slightly to 47 vs. 17 percent, and has changed little
since then.
To summarize, major media coverage of nuclear energy had a
markedly critical flavor. This anti-nuclear tone survived efforts to
separate the spin from the story. It emerged from the language
used, the sources cited, and the tone of the leads and closers
chosen. O f the seven outlets, only U.S. News and World Report
displayed a slightly pro-nuclear tilt. The New York Times had the

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 Media Meltdown
most evenly balanced coverage, with a slight nod toward the
negative. The other major newsmagazines and all three television
networks held a strongly anti-nuclear stance. For the print media,
this was a recent phenomenon, which apparently stemmed from
Three Mile Island. Television presented a predominantly anti­
nuclear tilt from the start.
Judging the Issues. Global judgments of a story’s overall slant are
common in content analysis. They are easy to make, if sometimes
harder to defend, and they catch the eye. Yet the highly specific
judgments within the story may be more significant in understand­
ing nuclear coverage.
How did the media assess the breeder reactor, the risks of
catastrophic accidents, the choice of waste disposal technologies,
and the many other hotly debated topics that, in the aggregate,
make up the nuclear debate? To find out, we analyzed every major
controversy on nuclear safety, coding every rationale for judging
each controversy, as well as the pro- or anti-nuclear tenor of each
judgment published or aired. For example, we identified four
major competing judgments about current reactor safety regu­
lations: current regulations are sufficient to ensure safety; the reg­
ulations are appropriate, but better enforcement is needed; the
regulations themselves need strengthening; or the regulations are
already overly burdensome. Each position has its advocates, and
each found expression in the stories analyzed.
Overall, we identified 151 areas of controversy. They ranged
from six separate disputes about nuclear safeguards (e.g., how
adequate is current safeguarding of nuclear materials in transit?)
to twenty-three areas of debate over reactor safety (e.g., how
significant are the safety risks of routine radioactive emissions
from nuclear facilities?). These controversies in turn gave rise to
1,425 judgments, almost ten per topic.
The most notable finding was the divergence between expert
assessments and the judgments rendered in the media. The media
judgments tended to be much more critical. Overall, 60 percent
of all judgments coded were negative, and 40 percent were positive
(see Table 11). For example, the technical literature treats water
pollution from reactors as a minor problem amenable to technical

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

Table n— Media Judgments of Nuclear Safety Issues

New York Times Magazines Television

Positive 45 45 34
Negative 55 _55 66
100% 100% 100%
Number of Cases 449 387 588

solutions. Yet the media judged this as being a major problem

fifteen times and as a minor problem only nine times. One Time
article concluded:

Along with radiation, critics of the reactor program are alarmed

about the effects of thermal pollution on marine life. The prob­
lem is that nuclear plants use cool water from rivers and bays,
and then return it hot---- [Heat] makes existing pollutants more
toxic, disturbs the reproduction cycle of fish and spurs the
growth of noxious blue-green algae. . . . All this suggests that
knowledgeable critics have a point in urging a reassessment of
the present nuclear program.40

This critical tone prevailed in nine out of the ten issue areas.
Only on questions of fuel cycle adequacy did positive assessments
outnumber negative ones. By contrast, negative judgments ap­
peared over 60 percent of the time on waste disposal, reached 70
percent on proliferation, and topped 80 percent on safeguards.
In the highly contested area of plant siting and licensing, one
key source of positive stories was public acceptance of existing
facilities. A U.S. News story on the Hanford Energy Center in
Washington state typified 17 positive pieces: “The welcome mat is
out in a Northwestern community for nuclear business others
don’t want. Result is a continuing boom— and strong local
pride.” 61 The story quotes one resident: “ I worry more about
traffic when riding my bicycle to work than I do about radiation.”
Such paeans to the peaceful atom were outweighed, however, by
mainly negative evaluations of other issues. Thus, media judg­
ments rejected, by a 24 to 13 margin, the industry’s charge that

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 Media Meltdown
current siting requirements are unduly cumbersome. One News­
week piece quoted Senator Edward Kennedy’s attack on a regula­
tory speed-up: “ It’s more important to build these plants safely
than to build them quickly.” “
Judgments in the media also favored, by a 17 to 7 margin, the
need to solve remaining safety problems prior to any industry
expansion, even if that requires a licensing moratorium. For exam­
ple, CBS News reported that, “ The Center for Science in the Public
Interest said [today] there are too many unanswered questions
about safety, and it said a moratorium would allow time to resolve
the questions in a manner that is more in accord with our moral
responsibilities.” 63 Table 8 showed that 95 percent of America’s
energy scientists reject such a moratorium. That is not to say that
this particular item was not newsworthy. But by presenting such
judgments over twice as often as the contrary position, the media
gave credence to a view with very little support in the scientific
community.
Nearly 10 percent of all pro-nuclear assessments concerned the
lack of alternatives to nuclear power. By the overwhelming mar­
gin of 53 to 3, judgments on the adequacy of alternative energy
sources came down on the side of continued nuclear development.
Typical of these was a New York Times story that quoted a group
of pro-nuclear scientists: “ There is no reasonable alternative to
increased reliance on nuclear power to solve our energy needs
. . . nuclear power offers a temporary easing of this worldwide need
for energy and time to seek more effective and permanent solu­
tions through other sources.” 64 And a Time essay posed the ques­
tion, “Where will the country get the energy to satisfy the need
[for electricity]?” After systematically rejecting the options of
coal, oil, natural gas, and solar energy, the essay concludes, “ In
short, after weighing the alternatives, nuclear power is neces­
sary.” 65
Yet this single pro-nuclear category could not balance out the
many other topics on which the judgments went the other way.
Some of these judgments seemed in line with the scientific commu­
nity’s views. For example, nearly half the energy scientists sur­
veyed termed human reliability problems very serious. Eighty

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percent of the media judgments stressed the significance of this

problem. In other areas, though, the coverage seemed to diverge
from the scientific consensus. For example, only one in four en­
ergy scientists portrayed the performance of emergency systems
in reactor accidents as a very serious problem. (The scientists were
polled a year after the Three Mile Island accident.) Yet nearly
two-thirds of the media judgments came to the opposite conclu­
sion. After t m i , for example, Time and Newsweek ran pieces
comparing the accident to the anti-nuclear movie, The China
Syndrome. Both magazines concluded that the real-life accident
was far more serious than the fictional version. Newsweek com­
mented:

Now the nation knows all too well about the China Syndrome,
reactor meltdowns, and life’s chilling ability to imitate art even
in the nuclear age---- Where life and art part company, the real
events proved more frightening.” “

One of the clearest differences between the experts and the

media appeared in overall assessments of reactor safety. In our
surveys, 58 percent of energy scientists categorized nuclear plants
as currently very safe, compared to only 3 percent who thought
them very unsafe, a margin of almost 20 to one. By contrast, over
63 percent of the media-based judgments presented safety risks as
unacceptable.
We were especially interested in how these judgments varied
across media outlets and over time. In both cases the results echo
the findings on story slant. Thus the New York Times, which
accounted for nearly one-third of all media judgments, presented
slightly more negative than positive assessments, by 55 to 45 per­
cent. Time and Newsweek were close to the overall media average
of 60 percent negative to 40 percent positive. The most negative
judgments were presented on television, where the ratio reached
two to one. And the only outlet to present more positive than
negative judgments was U.S. News, by a margin of 57 to 43 per­
cent. So the judgments presented in various media outlets stack up
to one another just like the overall spin: U.S. News is slightly

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 Media Meltdown
positive, the Times slightly negative, the other newsmagazines
decidedly so, and television news the most negative of all.
The same similarities appear in the changes from year to year.
During the first half of the 1970s, positive and negative judgments
were almost perfectly balanced. The years immediately prior to
t m i witnessed a slight shift toward more negative judgments, by
55 to 45 percent. In 1979, the anti-nuclear judgments outweighed
the pro-nuclear by a margin greater than two to one. Since then
the pendulum shifted back somewhat, to a margin of 42 percent
positive and 58 percent negative. Nuclear assessments were never
predominantly positive, and they have remained negative, in vary­
ing degrees, ever since 1976.
Why is it so significant that the judgments passed on nuclear
energy move in tandem with the overall spin imparted to news
stories? Because it suggests that these judgments are related to the
general orientation of the media rather than the opinions of energy
specialists. Story slant was coded on the basis of discretionary
elements such as language, sources, and leads, which give a story
its overall tone or flavor. The judgments, by contrast, are highly
specific assessments of topics that often permit direct comparison
with expert opinion. Yet the judgments presented in the media
were a poor match for the actual judgments of the scientific and
engineering communities. They provided a much better match
with the story elements that expressed the tone the journalist
wished to convey.
Sources and Experts. So far, the results of the content analysis
form a fairly consistent pattern. Scientists and engineers see nu­
clear energy primarily in terms of design and impact questions; the
media ask mainly management questions. The energy community
is most concerned with problems that call for technical solutions;
the media emphasize the political answers. Most energy specialists
regard nuclear power in a positive light; the media present it with
a negative spin, backed up by unfavorable judgments on specific
issues.
These findings raise some important questions about the
media’s transmission of expert opinion. If the energy community
and the media are so far apart, how did the latter portray the views

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of the former? To gain a sense of how independent scientists and

engineers fit into the overall pool of source material, academic
scientists and engineers (along with scientific bodies like the Na­
tional Academy of Sciences) were separated out from the welter
of government, industry, and interest group sources that were
cited in news stories.67
How often did the media present “ expert” testimony? Over
5,000 citations were coded from all sources. O f these, academic
scientists and engineers accounted for only 2 percent of those cited
on television and in the New York Times, and 5 percent of those
mentioned by the newsmagazines. That works out to about one
per year at each of the television networks.68
Moreover, the use of academic scientists and engineers de­
clined over time. In the early 1970s, they accounted for over one
source in ten cited by the networks and the newsmagazines. After
1976, they declined to less than half that number at the weeklies
and to only 1 percent at the networks. A similar decline took place
at the New York Times, from 4 percent of all sources in the early
1970s to only i percent a decade later.
Journalists might argue that their job is not to explain nuclear
energy but to report the news about it. And news is more likely
to revolve around government, industry, and interest groups than
college campuses. This argument contains some truth, although it
can easily become circular. It is journalists’ news judgments that
ultimately usher one source into a story and close the gate on
another. But the consensual definition of news does focus atten­
tion on events in the political and economic spheres, until some
noteworthy problem or breakthrough brings the experts’ esoteric
world into contact with that of the ordinary citizen. Whether this
should be so is itself a difficult value judgment. Indeed, the recent
increase in science reporting, as evidenced by a regular weekly
section in the New York Times, shows how such judgments can
change.
One need not judge the news decisions of journalists, however,
to ask a simple question of fact. Did the expert testimony pre­
sented in the media agree with the actual views of the energy
community? For the most part it did not. Instead, it reflected the

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 Media Meltdown
overall tenor of media coverage. Even the variations among views
cited or quoted in different media outlets reflected the variations
in coverage already observed among those outlets.
Thus, the academic experts cited by the networks and the
newsmagazines dealt primarily with management questions, while
those appearing in the New York Times were far more likely to
consider design and impact uncertainties, as well as questions that
have been resolved. When it came to framing answers, energy
scholars cited in the Times and the networks split their discussions
between the technical and political realms, while those appearing
in the newsmagazines strongly emphasized the latter dimension.
In addition, most university-based scientists and engineers
who were cited treated nuclear power primarily in a negative light,
although the ratios were far greater at the networks and Time and
Newsweek than at U.S. News and the New York Times. The Times
ran a story citing physicist Hans Bethe’s statement that it is “eight
times safer living next to a nuclear plant than in a brick house,”
because bricks give off eight times as much radiation as a nuclear
reactor.69 The story noted that Bethe was a Nobel laureate. By
contrast, a u c l a geologist appearing on nbc complained that
nuclear waste “ can get into the ground water table and I can see
the possibility of entire river basins that have to be essentially
abandoned. . . it is dangerous and I’m not at all happy with what’s
being done about it.” 70 Similarly, in a piece arguing that the nu­
clear industry “ is plagued with safety questions,” Newsweek
quoted a Lehigh University scientist who admitted, “ we simply
don’t have the technology to predict the safety of [reactor] ves­
sels.” 71
It may be unfair to judge the media’s presentation of expertise
only on the basis of academic scientists and engineers. Many such
scholars are highly reticent toward both journalistic inquiry and
public policy matters. They prefer to stick to their intellectual lasts
and shun public controversy. Indeed, our surveys revealed that
anti-nuclear scientists were far more likely than others to seek out
a public forum for their views.72 Thus reporters might gain access
to a minority viewpoint by default, since the pro-nuclear majority
would be less likely to seek them out.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

To gain a broader perspective on the media’s use of experts,

we widened the net to include all attributions of technical exper­
tise. This entailed coding every direct and indirect citation of a
scientist, engineer, or social scientist, regardless of affiliation, as
well as every view attributed to unnamed scientists or experts.
This resulted in a vast expansion of the expert category, which
increased nearly threefold at the New York Times, fourfold at the
newsweeklies, and sixfold at the networks. In other words, univer­
sity-based scientists and engineers represented a small minority of
the experts cited in the media. Most were associated with govern­
ment, industry, or public interest groups.
The views expressed by this larger group were even further
removed from those of the scientists and engineers we surveyed
(see Table 12). Among all sources designated as experts, there was
a further shift toward those who asked management questions and
looked for political answers. In the pages of the New York Times,
expert opinion shifted decisively into these categories, moving
away from the more even distributions generated by unaffiliated
academic experts. At the networks and newsweeklies, too, the
number of those advocating political answers exceeded those
proposing technical solutions.
What of their overall assessment of nuclear energy? At the
Times the proportion of experts with pro-nuclear assessments
slightly exceeded those on the anti-nuclear side, although most
continued to offer a balanced or neutral view. A t Time and News­
week the media-designated experts remained strongly anti­
nuclear, and at the networks the anti-nuclear margin increased to
over five to one. In fact, at AB C, NBC, and Newsweek, there were
over ten times as many stories citing anti-nuclear views as those
with pro-nuclear assessments.
Newsweek, for example, ran a piece on allegations by three t m i
engineers that the reactor operation and its major cleanup con­
tractor “ had overlooked safety checks and balances to meet
cleanup schedules and were wasting millions of dollars— at times
with the complicity of Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff­
ers.” 73 And a physicist interviewed by NBC concluded, “ I think it
will be necessary in the long run to abandon wide-scale use of

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T a b le 12— P o s itio n s T a k e n b y E x p e r ts C ite d in M e d ia

C overage
N ew Y o r k Tim es M agazines Television

Questions
A nsw ered 20 i 3
D esign 8 4 8
Im pact 26 16 24
M anagem ent 46 78 j >5
100% 99% * IO I% *
Answers
Techn ical 27 7 26
Political 73 31 27
Com bination — 62 47
100% 100% 100%
Slant
P ro-N uclear 9 17 11
A n ti-N u clear 7 40 62
N eutral/B alanced 43 _27
h
100% 100% 100%
N um ber o f Cases 154 253 133

• T o ta ls reflect ro u n d in g e rro r

n u c le a r e n e r g y fo r a n y p u r p o s e o th e r th a n p e rh a p s sc ie n tific re­
s e a r c h .” 74
O n c e a g a in , U.S. News d iv e r g e d s h a r p ly fr o m th e o th e r
n e w sm a g a z in e s. It p r o d u c e d a n e v e n sp lit o f p ro - a n d a n ti­
n u c le a r c ita tio n s. F o r e x a m p le , a 1979 U.S. News s to ry d isc u sse d
th e sc ie n tific d e b a te o v e r th e h e a lth ris k s o f lo w -le v e l ra d ia tio n .
It q u o te d th e c h a ir m a n o f th e N a tio n a l A c a d e m y o f S c ie n c e s
C o m m itte e o n B io lo g ic a l E ffe c ts o f I o n iz in g R a d ia tio n : “ A t lo w
d o s e s th e risk s a re v e r y sm a ll. T h e r e is a risk , b u t it ’s n o t th e en d
o f th e w o r ld .” 75 A fe w w e e k s e a rlie r, Newsweek ran a s im ila r
s to r y o n r a d ia tio n r is k s th a t a sse rte d , “ S o m e sc ie n tists th in k
[cu rre n t sa fe ty sta n d a rd s] u n d e re stim a te th e d a n g e r s o f lo w -le v e l
ra d ia tio n . T h o s e fe a rs a re b a c k e d b y re c e n t stu d ie s o f w o r k e r s
w h o h a v e re c e iv e d d o se s w e ll w ith in g o v e rn m e n t s ta n d a rd s .” 74

2«3
 T he M e d ia E l it e

The story cited a study of leukemia at Maine’s Portsmouth

Naval Shipyard, another of cancers at the Hanford nuclear facil­
ity in Washington state, and a British study linking X-ray ther­
apy to cancer. All three studies were very controversial, as the
article noted. But Newsweek included them in its story on radia­
tion; U.S. News did not.
In sum, the major media rarely presented the views of aca­
demic scientists and engineers who were nonaligned in the nuclear
debate. They were much more likely to rely on technical experts
associated with government, industry, or public policy groups. By
either definition, though, these sources reflected the media’s per­
spectives on the nuclear debate rather than those of the energy
community. Scientists and engineers cited in the media tended to
frame questions in terms of management, to propose answers that
demanded political resolutions, and to assess nuclear power nega­
tively.
This picture contrasts strongly with results from our surveys
of scientists and engineers, as well as the technical literature. Most
energy specialists are more concerned with design and impact
questions, regard most (though not all) uncertainties as capable of
technical solution, and assess nuclear power in a positive light.
Not only did experts cited in the media diverge markedly from the
survey findings, their views varied from one outlet to another in
ways that reflected each outlet’s general treatment of the topic.
Thus, the media seemed to rely on expert testimony more to
confirm their presentation of the nuclear debate than to inform it.

Conclusion— The Experts and the Media

Most of the news stories analyzed were a far cry from the apoca­
lyptic muckraking of “ The Fire Unleashed.” The major concern
at all media outlets was to report the facts and interpret them in
ways that made sense of a highly complex and controversial story.
Even on a topic as hotly contested as nuclear energy, the national
media are rarely given either to the “ new” personalized journalism
or old-fashioned advocacy journalism.
Nonetheless, this study of seven news organizations over four­
teen years uncovered a gap between the way energy specialists

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 Media Meltdown
conceive of this topic and the way the media report it. The differ­
ences occurred not only in how the media evaluated nuclear en­
ergy, but in how they structured the story— the questions they
asked, the answers they sought, and the sources of information
and expertise they used. One can recognize this divergence with­
out regarding the energy community’s perspective as definitive for
social policy. Technical expertise is only one component of deci­
sions on science policy. Safety assessments must be fit into a
decision calculus that includes political and philosophical judg­
ments, including such questions as the desirability of economic
growth and the acceptability of risk.
We conducted extensive polling of leading scientists and engi­
neers, as well as surveying the scientific and social scientific litera­
ture in the field. The results showed that most energy specialists
support nuclear development and regard current nuclear reactors
as safe. They see some serious problems, in areas such as waste
disposal, reactor maintenance, and proliferation. A t the same
time, most are confident they possess the knowledge to solve such
problems, most of which they regard as mainly technical matters.
In sharp contrast, major media coverage highlighted the un­
certainties attending nuclear power, even in areas where scientists
and engineers felt most secure in their problem-solving abilities.
In framing questions, the media dealt mainly with management
uncertainties, often ignoring the design and impact questions that
engaged the expert communities. Whereas the energy specialists
believe most problems are amenable to technical solutions, the
media concentrated on political resolutions, with their inherently
greater uncertainties.
These differences might be attributed to functional differences
in the roles of scientists and engineers, on one hand, and journal­
ists, on the other. That is, their professional responsibilities and
mind-sets might be expected to lead them, more or less automati­
cally, to perceive different aspects of the same phenomenon. There
is doubtless some truth in this. But it cannot be the whole answer,
because there were significant differences in coverage over time
and among different outlets during the same time period. The
latter is especially significant, because it cannot be attributed to

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events alone. If various news organizations report the same events

differently, this suggests that different news judgments are taking
place.
A major finding is the predominantly negative spin at most
outlets. When journalists’ interpretations, use of language, or
choice of sources were skewed in one direction, they usually fa­
vored the anti-nuclear side. We found only a slight anti-nuclear
tilt, and little spin overall, at the New York Times, while U.S. News
actually favored the pro-nuclear side. A t all other outlets coverage
was tilted toward the anti-nuclear perspective by a wide margin.
In the print media this slant seemed a response to the shock of
t m i . On television it was there from the start.

The major media’s emphasis on uncertainty in framing nuclear

issues was consistent with the skepticism leading journalists pro­
fessed in our survey. The preponderance of anti-nuclear spin may
also correspond to similar attitudes in the newsroom. For exam­
ple, we compared the attitudes at different media outlets and
found the greatest skepticism toward nuclear energy among televi­
sion reporters and producers. It was at the television networks
that anti-nuclear coverage proved the most pervasive and lasting.
None of this proves that journalists consciously set out to slant
their reportage against nuclear energy. As we have argued
throughout this book, the influence of perspectives and paradigms
is less direct than conservatives’ conspiracy theories often suggest.
Moreover, the contours of news stories are doubtless overdeter­
mined by the simultaneous influence of external events, structural
and organizational factors, and professional norms, as well as
personal attitudes.
It is probably impossible to separate out the impact of each
factor on the coverage. Consider the allegation on “The Fire
Unleashed” that the t m i accident has already resulted in many
cancer fatalities. In a gripping vignette, a local resident was shown
recounting a lengthy list of neighbors who had died of cancer, as
an on-screen graphic announced “ 20 cancer deaths, 19 current
cases.” Any such outcome is scientifically implausible, even apart
from the conclusions of bodies as diverse as the Presidential Com­
mission on t m i (“ Kemeny Commission” ), National Center for

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 Media Meltdown
Disease Control, General Accounting Office, and Pennsylvania
Governor’s Commission, which agreed that radiation damage was
negligible.77 The type and amount of radiation released during the
t m i accident could not have caused cancer deaths so rapidly. The

scientific debate on this issue concerned the possibility that can­

cers might appear many years after the event.
In light of such information, there are several possible explana­
tions for A B C ’ s airing of this charge. One is simple scientific igno­
rance. Since there was a debate about whether radiation from t m i
caused cancer, the production team may not have realized that
this referred to the statistical probability of a future increase in
cancer incidence. A second factor concerns the demands of the
medium. Television journalism works best with good visual mate­
rial, dramatic situations, and a personalizing element that makes
viewers feel involved with an individual shown on-screen. The
resident listing cancer deaths filled all these requirements, while
statistical probability estimates fulfill none of them.
There is also the possibility that the documentary team was
psychologically prepared to believe such charges by their own
attitudes toward nuclear energy. The television personnel in the
media elite survey were even more critical of nuclear power than
print journalists, and the content analysis recorded a “ spin factor”
of — 25 for a b c News, representing a predominance of anti­
nuclear over pro-nuclear stories there by a margin greater than
two to one.
One other finding highlights the differences between journal­
ists and energy specialists and also illustrates how newsmen’s
perspectives may subtly color their coverage. When the media’s
use of expert opinion was examined, the results reflected the views
of journalists better than those of the experts. Scientists, engineers,
and others designated as experts cited in news stories tended to
reflect the overall tenor of media coverage, even though this
clashed with the survey findings on the actual attitudes of energy
scientists and engineers.
Part of this discrepancy might be attributed to the exigencies
of news gathering. Reporters working on deadline cannot tele­
phone a random sample of scientists for information. They need

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sources who are readily available to provide background informa­

tion and quotable statements. Such sources are found more often
in government, industry, and public interest groups than in the
halls of academe. The relevance of this explanation is limited,
however, since the findings held true for academic scientists and
engineers who were cited.
If we return to the responses of leading journalists to the
survey question about reliable sources, as reported in Chapter
Three, we see that, given the opportunity to pick as many as they
wished, journalists selected anti-nuclear groups and individuals
over their pro-nuclear counterparts by nearly a two to one margin.
So the major media’s actual use of sources presumably reflects the
choices the journalists themselves said they would make in cover­
ing the nuclear story. These choices, in turn, were presumably
influenced by the mainly skeptical attitudes they held toward
nuclear energy.
Let us recap the structure of the argument. Surveys revealed
sharp differences between the energy group and journalists on
nuclear safety. America’s energy scientists and engineers largely
viewed this technology favorably and downplayed the uncertain­
ties involved in solving its problems. Major media journalists
(including key science journalists) were more skeptical toward
nuclear power and emphasized the uncertainties involved. When
asked where they would turn for reliable information on nuclear
power, the journalists picked mainly anti-nuclear sources, in line
with their own attitudes.
Finally, the content analysis of major media news stories from
1970 through 1983 showed that the coverage accords with the
perspectives of the journalists rather than those of the scientists
and engineers. Particularly telling was the media’s own use of
sources. In the aggregate, experts cited in news stories tended to
reflect the perspectives held by journalists, even when these con­
flicted with the perspectives revealed by our surveys. Moreover,
experts cited by the different media outlets presented perspectives
which varied according to each outlet’s general treatment of the
nuclear debate. Taken as a whole, this sequence of findings sug­

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 Media Meltdown
gests that media coverage of the nuclear debate was not unrelated
to journalists’ own attitudes toward nuclear energy.78
This is not a matter of partisan bias or anti-nuclear crusading.
It reflects a series of routine news judgments, of daily decisions
repeated over the course of several years. It is not conscious
intentions but common assumptions that quietly direct news cov­
erage toward the dominant perspectives of the newsroom. What­
ever the reasons, though, some crucial links seem to be missing in
the chain of information leading from scientists and engineers to
the general public. And over the years, the public increasingly has
come to share the media’s perspective on the nuclear debate.

Postscript on Chernobyl

A comment should be added on the recent accident at the Soviet

nuclear plant at Chernobyl. The information available is still
sketchy, but despite reports in the American press, we do not
really know the magnitude of the accident. Chernobyl may not
turn out to be as costly to human life as the non-nuclear disaster
at Bhopal.
Western scientists and engineers have long been critical of the
casualness with which the Soviets have dealt with nuclear safety
issues. Most Soviet nuclear plants, for example, are not protected
by massive containment structures. While the Chernobyl plant
may have included such a structure, we do not know the effective­
ness of its specifications.
Clearly, Chernobyl has raised new questions about nuclear
energy. However, this does not affect our analysis of media cover­
age of the issues. It is possible that the media (and anti-nuclear
energy groups) have been more correct in their assessments than
have the experts. But our contention is that journalists’ skepti­
cism, which is related to their broader social perspectives, has
resulted in a portrayal of nuclear safety issues which often differs
from that of most energy experts. That conclusion still stands.

219
 [Busing] is social therapy, and like personal
therapy, it is not easy.”
— P sychologist K en neth C lark , quoted in Time

“ Bus Teddy”
— Boston graffiti

T h e b u s in g controversy never grew too bitter for Johnny Carson

to joke about it. Columnist William Raspberry summarized one
“ Tonight Show” routine to make his own point about the debate:

T h e turbaned w onder puts the sealed envelope against the side

o f his head, ponders briefly, then intones: “ T h e answ er is: bus­
ing.’ *
U n lik e Johnny C arson ’s “ C a m a c k the M agnificent,” how ­
ever, there is no need to open the envelope to see w hat the
question was. W hen it com es to race and public education, the
answ er is alw ays: busing .1

After fifteen years of controversy, everyone knows the Su­

preme Court’s answer to school segregation is busing. Yet we may
have forgotten what the questions surrounding this issue were
initially. We may recall the catchwords of the busing debate—

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
racism, white flight, quality education, neighborhood schools. But
behind the catchwords lay an often technical and sometimes
heated scholarly debate about the assumptions and implications
of busing. Reviewing this debate is a prerequisite for judging
media coverage of this long-running social and political contro­
versy.

Busing: Goals and Outcomes

The Supreme Court’s Role. In the first eighteen years after Brown
v. Board of Education, every important Supreme Court opinion
on race relations and education concerned school systems in
southern or border states, where separation of the races previously
had been required by law. The existence of predominantly black
schools in the North was assumed to be a reflection only of resi­
dential patterns. Since there were few racially integrated neighbor­
hoods in the North, there were few racially integrated urban
schools. It was assumed that this de facto school segregation—
segregation existing for reasons other than government policy—
could not be affected by the courts. Courts cannot act where no
violation of law exists.
In 1973, however, the Supreme Court ruled on Keyes v. Denver
School District No. 1, its first desegregation case from a large
northern city. The Keyes decision was a turning point in the
evolution of the Court’s involvement in race and education. It
equated the segregative actions taken by officials in northern
school districts with those imposed by the southern states after
Reconstruction. This made the remedies approved in the rural
South, like busing and redistricting, instruments that now could
be used in Detroit, Chicago, or other northern cities.
Moreover, the legal requirement that the courts remedy depri­
vations of legal rights helped convert desegregation, a stance that
laws separating the races must be blotted out, to integration, one
holding that the law required racially mixed results. Until 1970,
the Constitution had been interpreted as invalidating all legal
distinctions based on race. For that reason, the courts were pro­
hibited from relying on race-conscious remedies to rectify legal
harm. But the Court, first in Charlotte, North Carolina, then in

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Denver, focused on assuring integration as evidence that the re­

sults of wrongful actions had been undone.
Throughout the remainder of the 1970s, the Keyes decision
was applied in many northern cities and its implications were
spelled out, as desegregation plans were adopted and imple­
mented. The Supreme Court refused, in 1974, to allow surburban
Detroit districts to be included in desegregation plans in the ab­
sence of evidence that they also had practiced intentionally seg­
regative policies.2The Court reaffirmed Keyes in the face of strong
criticism when it upheld lower court desegregation orders in
Columbus and Dayton, Ohio.3These court decisions and the ear­
lier Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimina­
tion in public accommodations, were enforced by the Justice De­
partment and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
This alliance of institutions had helped achieve a social revolution
in the South where, within a decade, virtually every aspect of daily
life was desegregated.
In northern city schools, the task was far more complicated.
In some cities, assignment procedures were adopted that set cer­
tain racial quotas for student bodies, integrated teaching staffs,
and sometimes even revised school curricula. This was to ensure
that each school had a distribution of blacks, whites, and (some­
times) other minorities reflecting the racial composition of the
entire school system. But given the size of most urban neighbor­
hoods, the principal device for complying with Keyes was busing
children into different school districts.
This widespread reliance on busing quickly became controver­
sial. In Boston and Louisville, especially from 1974 to 1976, vio­
lence accompanied the opening of school each September, as
angry parents protested student reassignments. Many cities ex­
perienced busing without violence, but opponents attacked it as
useless and even harmful to students. Many families moved out
of cities subject to court order, apparently to avoid the inevitabil­
ity of busing altogether. And throughout the decade, popular
confidence in the schools eroded.
Yet not all the activity on busing took place the courtroom or
on the streets. Busing opponents in Congress annually sought to

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
prohibit its use as a tool of racial integration by means of laws or
constitutional amendments. California voters passed a referendum
that prohibited busing in desegregation cases. By the end of the
decade, white exodus from school districts included in busing
plans made goals for integrating schools increasingly difficult to
achieve.
Having briefly surveyed the history of judicial attempts to
desegregate the public schools, let us examine the debate over the
results that busing achieved. School desegregation was undertaken
primarily to ensure that all Americans enjoy equality of opportu­
nity. Desegregation also focuses on educational outcomes. The
1954 Brown case asserted that segregated education had a “ detri­
mental effect” on minority children, inhibiting the motivation of
a child to learn, and thereby retarding educational and mental
development. Finally, school busing was undertaken to achieve a
society where social and legal distinctions based on race have no
place.
White Flight. Perhaps the most important achievement of the
courts since the Brown decision has been their success in eliminat­
ing southern dual school systems. But in the North, segregation
often worsened in the 1970s, despite efforts of the federal govern­
ment and the courts to eradicate it through busing programs.
Segregation was especially pronounced in large northern cities.4
Throughout the latter 1970s, social scientists debated whether
court-ordered desegregation actually encouraged the exodus of
whites from the public schools, just the opposite of what the courts
intended. The persistence of “ white flight,” an exodus that usually
increased once busing plans were started, is especially important
because it calls into question one major argument in support of
school busing: that integrated schools create educational benefits
for whites and blacks independent of the effect on minority
achievement. Some scholars argued that policies intended to en­
sure that blacks and whites study and learn together may instead
create majority black schools.
This conclusion was usually treated as an argument against
large-scale busing plans, though some called for even more inclu­
sive plans aimed at mostly white suburban school districts. The

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

most heated controversy, however, concerned whether white mi­

gration was really a product of busing’s adverse consequences on
the schools.
The white flight issue came to prominence in April 1975, when
sociologist James S. Coleman and two colleagues presented re­
search concluding that school desegregation caused a decline in
white enrollment in the public schools where busing was taking
place.5 In his famous 1966 report, Equal Educational Opportunity,
Coleman had appeared to throw the weight of social science be­
hind school integration. In this new research, he reached different
conclusions about its efficacy.
This finding quickly became a focus of controversy among
sociologists. Later the same year, Christine Rossell published a
study that seemed to deal a severe blow to Coleman’s white flight
thesis.6 Rossell found that the school districts with the highest
degree of desegregation experienced at most “ minimal” and “ tem­
porary” white flight. Moreover, the small white flight that did
occur took place before school opened in the first year of the
implementation of a desegregation plan. Thus, she concluded,
white flight occurs not from problems accompanying school
desegregation, but the fear of problems.
In 1978, however, Diane Ravitch published a damaging cri­
tique of Rossell’s methods.7 Ravitch’s examination of twenty-nine
large cities showed that absolute white exodus from inner-city
public schools was substantial. Probably the most sophisticated
study of white flight was completed by David Armor in 1979.*
After reviewing several major busing studies, Armor concluded
that substantial white flight did occur, especially during the first
year after the implementation of a desegregation plan.
By the end of the 1970s, white exodus as a response to busing
for racial balance had become a fact too obvious to deny. In Los
Angeles, for example, 60 percent of the 20,000 students involved
in a 1978 busing plan never showed up at the predominantly
minority schools to which they were assigned. When a second
desegregation plan was implemented in 1980, 40,000 fled the sys­
tem. A t least half the total decline in Los Angeles’ enrollment
during that period has been attributed to court-ordered busing.9

224
 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and many
other cities all lost at least 30 percent of their white students in
the 1970s.
A t the same time, political support for large-scale northern
busing began to erode. The Department of Justice under the Rea­
gan administration reversed its past stand in favor of school deseg­
regation and sided with the states of California and Washington
to defend state anti-busing laws. The Justice Department also
refused to pursue busing as a remedy in St. Louis and Chicago.
In 1981, it refused to appeal a court dismissal of a Carter adminis­
tration plan to desegregate the public schools in Houston by bus­
ing children from mostly white suburbs to schools in the central
cities.
Racism vs. Rational Concerns. In view of the evidence supporting
white flight, we must inevitably ask why so many whites aban­
doned cities where busing was implemented. One explanation may
be white racism. Supporters of busing argue that large numbers
of white children have always lived far enough from their schools
to require bus transportation each day, so white racism must be
at the root of parents’ objections. Some studies support this expla­
nation. In their 1979 study of white attitudes toward busing, David
Sears and his colleagues concluded that racism played a strong
role in white opposition.10
Other scholars point to evidence suggesting that racism is not
the primary factor in explaining this opposition. First, surveys
show that since 1954, racial tolerance and support for integration
have markedly increased among white Americans. Racial toler­
ance among whites has grown despite their consistent opposition
to busing. This opposition is strong even among white college
graduates, young people, and others expressing the highest levels
of racial tolerance. Although opposition to busing is not the pre­
dominant view of American blacks, it is still strong among mem­
bers of that group.11
But public opinion polls may be a poor indicator of racism.
Whites may say that they favor integration, but act differently
when integration takes place in their community and involves
their children. Sears adopted this point of view, suggesting that

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

white attitudes on racial matters vary by issue. Whites may be

tolerant on issues involving equal opportunity for blacks and for­
mal relationships, such as access to public accommodations, but
much less tolerant on more intimate types of interracial associa­
tions concerning marriage or close friendships. Sears and his col­
leagues used several measures for determining “ symbolic racism,”
including a belief in the intellectual superiority of whites and
opinions regarding racial protest. They found that symbolic rac­
ism is the most important determinant of white opposition to
busing.
Critics of the symbolic racism argument assert that not all the
supposed indicators of white racism actually measure racist atti­
tudes. For example, widely held white beliefs that the civil rights
movement was moving too fast, or that racial protest was hurting
the black cause, could be considered nonracist opinions about the
desirable pace of social change.
Another school of thought holds that white opposition to bus­
ing mainly reflects rational concerns about its costs and benefits.
Scholars like David Armor argue that white parents do not object
to racially integrated schools but to perceived social costs, such as
the loss of local schools and, especially, fear of exposing their
children to crime.12
Studies have shown that crime is a serious problem in Ameri­
can public schools.13 The problem is most acute in those schools
that are likely to be included in busing plans (urban public schools
located in high crime neighborhoods, with large numbers of mi­
nority students).14Therefore, according to this argument, parents’
perceptions that court-ordered busing to ghetto schools might
harm their children may reflect this concern for safety rather than
racist attitudes.
An advantage of the rational concerns argument is that it may
help explain opposition to busing among blacks. To explain white
opposition, moreover, it is not necessary to treat these two posi­
tions as mutually exclusive. The question is not whether racism
or rational concerns account solely for negative attitudes, but the
relative explanatory power of each. Even today, however, no con­

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
sensus has emerged among social scientists as to their relative
importance.15
Improving Minority School Achievement. Another goal of busing
is to improve educational outcomes for minority students. The
Supreme Court stated in its Brown decision that segregation gave
black pupils a sense of inferiority about themselves, thereby affect­
ing their performance in school. The Court cited social science
research in support of that conclusion.16 Works by Samuel
Stouffer,17 Morton Deutsch, and Mary Evans Collins18concluded
that interracial contact diminished white prejudice. These findings
provided the basis for an assumption by supporters of integration
that has continued until very recently: racial integration would
lead to improved black educational achievement and an improve­
ment in the inferior social status of blacks. It was an assumption
that went almost unquestioned in the North until the mid-1960s,
when these conclusions were cast into doubt. However, it pro­
vided much of the theoretical justification for the Brown case and
its progeny.
In 1966, a major survey of education was directed by James S.
Coleman. The Coleman report found that black students per­
formed at lower levels than white students in reading and mathe­
matics, in all regions and in all grades, and that black students had
lower aspirations, lower self-esteem about their academic ability,
and a more fatalistic attitude about their ability to change their
social and economic environment.
The report also noted that disadvantaged children of all races
performed slightly better on standardized tests when they at­
tended predominantly middle-class schools, and that middle-class
children did not perform worse in schools with large numbers of
poor students. These conclusions have often been cited in support
of school integration. A report of the United States Commission
on Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, 19was prem­
ised on the Coleman report. The commission found that educa­
tional outcomes for black students were influenced by several
socioeconomic factors— their home backgrounds, the quality of
education provided in the schools, and the social class of their

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

classmates.20These findings became a cornerstone of educational

policy in the following decade, as many educators sought to en­
courage school integration in order to improve black pupil
achievement.
As the focus of school desegregation shifted northward after
Keyes, however, some social scientists began to question the ben­
efits of school integration. In 1972, a study by David Armor found
that busing resulted in a decline in the grades received by black
students and no increase in achievement scores, compared to non-
bused control groups. Busing did not seem to affect the self-esteem
of black students, and it resulted in an overall decrease in black
support for integration. Armor concluded that large-scale court-
ordered busing programs were ineffective means of improving
either student achievement or interracial harmony.21
Thomas Pettigrew responded that Armor relied on an incom­
plete group of desegregation studies and that the resulting conclu­
sions were “ selectively negative.” Moreover, Pettigrew pointed
out that the “ critical conditions” under which busing and integra­
tion have taken place are so rarely present that it is impossible to
judge such programs on their own terms.22
Also in 1972, a large-scale study by Christopher Jencks and
others argued that income redistribution, not school reform, was
most likely to improve the lives of the poor.23 Other attempts to
study the effects of race and ethnicity on learning soon followed
these early efforts.24
In 1975, Nancy St. John published the most comprehensive
review of school integration studies to that time.25 She found that,
after more than a decade of research, there were no conclusive
results on the disputed relationship between school racial compo­
sition and academic achievement. Most studies concluded that
black educational and job aspirations were higher when the per­
centage of whites in the school was small, indicating that black
self-concept and black aspirations tended to be higher in segre­
gated schools. St. John concluded, “ It seems as though desegrega­
tion must be dysfunctional in some ways for minority youth.” 24
St. John’s analysis of the research concerning the effects of

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
integration on racial prejudice produced perhaps the most ambig­
uous conclusions of all. Her studies indicated that “ desegregation
sometimes reduces prejudice and promotes interracial friendship
and sometimes promotes, instead, stereotyping and interracial
cleavage and conflict.” 27 Whether such prejudice would diminish
or grow following integration depended on situational factors,
such as the nature of interracial contact and the black pupils’ sense
of cultural marginality.
In 1978, Walter Stephan did another survey of the literature on
the effects of integration on student achievement.28 He tested the
conclusion, used in social science testimony in the Brown case,
that desegregation would lead to more positive interracial atti­
tudes among both blacks and whites, would raise black self­
esteem, and would promote scholastic achievement. Stephan
found that over two-thirds of the studies showed that desegrega­
tion failed to produce unqualified positive results. His summary
agreed with St. John’s overall finding that desegregation rarely
harms black students, occasionally improves their scholastic
achievement, but generally has mixed outcomes.
The effects of desegregation on race relations are also ambigu­
ous. One survey of studies on this topic found that the process
promotes more amicable interracial contacts than under segrega­
tion,29but others disagree.30Finally, test results from cities around
the country lead to no firm conclusions about the relationship
between desegregation and achievement.31 Perhaps the most con­
cise summary of the effects of school desegregation on black
achievement, self-esteem, and aspirations was given by Coleman
in 1976. He concluded that, “ . . . school desegregation is seldom
harmful . . . sometimes beneficial, but not sufficiently so that
school desegregation can be a major policy instrument for increas­
ing black achievement and self-esteem.” 32
Such conclusions have produced important changes in the
form of remedial decrees that many judges have used in desegrega­
tion cases in the past few years. Some busing plans now contain
provisions for changing educational services offered in the schools,
as well as provisions for the reassignment and busing of students.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

For example, the remedial plan in Boston required that education­

ally outstanding “ magnet” schools be established. It paired Bos­
ton public schools with universities in the area in the hope that
these institutions of higher learning could help improve the pro­
grams offered.
This concern with educational reform is characteristic of other
cities currently undergoing court-ordered busing. But the empha­
sis on educational excellence reveals an important shift in the
judiciary’s thinking about desegregation. Twenty years earlier it
was assumed that integration improved the education offered mi­
nority children and cured the “ condition that offends the Consti­
tution.”
Busing in Retrospect. Busing was one of the great domestic con­
troversies of the 1970s, especially after the Supreme Court’s 1973
Keyes decision broadened a regional struggle into a nationwide
conflict. By the end of the 1970s, the bulk of scholarly studies had
concluded that busing was a key factor in white exodus from the
cities. Busing supporters often pointed to racism as the principal
motive for white flight. Some studies concluded that racism was
the most important determinant of white opposition to busing.
Other scholars argued that white opposition to busing was mainly
based on beliefs that mostly black schools have serious problems,
such as crime and poor student achievement rates. Busing also
violated strong attachments to neighborhood schools.
Another major goal of busing was to improve educational
achievement among minority children. As the focus of school
desegregation shifted northward in the 1970s, researchers could
find no consistent link between desegregation and improved edu­
cational achievement among minority children.
In brief, busing for school desegregation involved a myriad of
complexities that divided social scientists as well as parents and
children. Most researchers now agree that persistent white flight
at least partly defeated the intended goal of increased educational
equality. On other issues, the evidence is ambiguous and some­
times contradictory, and disagreements persist on the interpreta­
tion and implications of relevant data. Even today there is no

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
scholarly consensus on the primary motives of busing’s opponents
or the effects of busing on minority achievement.

Busing: The Coverage

Our study looked at coverage in four major media outlets from
1970 through 1979: The New Y ork Times, Tim e, the CBS evening
news, and the W ashington Post. The Tim es is the nation’s most
respected newspaper; T im e has the highest circulation among the
newsweeklies; and CBS enjoys the greatest viewership of the televi­
sion networks. The Post, a highly influential paper among Wash­
ington elites, was included because the busing issue generated so
much policy-oriented coverage in the nation’s capital.
Coverage of busing was so heavy that we could examine only
samples at all outlets except Tim e, where every article was coded.
At CBS one-third of all relevant broadcasts were selected ran­
domly. A t the newspapers, which generated the most coverage,
twelve weeks were selected randomly from each two-year period
from 1970-71 through 1978-79. All articles appearing during those
weeks were coded. (Analysis of Post coverage began in 1972, be­
cause no index existed for earlier articles.) This procedure permits
analysis of changes in the coverage over time. To ensure that the
sample did not miss coverage of important occurrences, it was
augmented by eleven key weeks representing such events as Presi­
dent Nixon’s 1972 anti-busing statement and the Denver and De­
troit Supreme Court decisions.
Even this partial sample yielded a massive amount of coverage.
We coded busing-related arguments and activities mentioned in
over 5,000 column inches of the New York Times, 1,500 inches
each from the Washington Post and Tim e, and seven hours of c b s
newscasts. Most of the news was concentrated in the early years
of the decade, before the busing story faded from view after 1975.

Arguments
We coded the major pro- and anti-busing arguments that domi­
nated the debate. The pro-busing arguments were grouped under
three major headings. First, proponents of the “equal education”

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

argument asserted that busing is necessary to realize the constitu­

tional rights of minorities to have an equal education, or to
counter the effects of segregation and racism.
The second major pro-busing argument claimed that busing
would promote racial harmony, both in school and in the wider
society. Thus, as contact between the races increased, interracial
tension and white prejudice would eventually decrease. The third
argument centered on improving minority performance in
desegregated schools. This argument might include evidence that
busing resulted in higher grades and test scores or better job and
college prospects for minority students.
Opponents to busing used four major arguments to make their
case. The first asserted that mandatory busing plans would cause
white parents to withdraw their children from the affected public
schools and place them in private schools or move to another,
unaffected school district. The second claimed that busing would
cause a general decline in the quality of education. This category
included assertions of falling grades or test scores or a deteriora­
tion of the learning environment.
A third anti-busing argument held that busing would weaken
the connection between community participation and the opera­
tion of the local school. This argument focused on the importance
of neighborhood or ethnic ties to local schools. It also included
claims about hardships, such as long bus rides, produced by send­
ing children to schools outside their community. The last argu­
ment asserted that busing would trigger increased racial tension
and violence in schools, or subject children to unsafe school envi­
ronments. This category included fears expressed by white parents
for the safety of their children in urban schools.
We coded both the frequency with which each argument was
presented and how it was evaluated— whether it was affirmed,
refuted, or no clear judgment was made concerning its validity.
The degree of support for each argument was measured by sub­
tracting the percentage of refutations (negative spin) from affirma­
tions (positive spin). For example, if an argument was affirmed 60
percent of the time and refuted 30 percent, with the remainder
unclear, the resulting index of support would be +30 (60 minus

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
30). Scores could range from +100, when the argument was al­
ways affirmed, to —100, when it was always refuted. If an argu­
ment was refuted equally as often as it was affirmed, the result
would be a score of zero.
This procedure revealed that the media usually presented ar­
guments without refutation. If they wanted to present both sides
of the busing debate, they usually did so by presenting a pro­
busing argument and balancing it with a different anti-busing
argument. Thus, with rare exceptions noted below, scores on the
“ spin index” were strongly positive.
We found that coverage of the busing debate produced a slight
but consistent tilt in favor of pro-busing arguments. A t all four
media outlets, the majority of arguments coded presented busing
in a favorable light. Overall, as Table 13 shows, pro-busing cover­
age accounted for 60 percent of the arguments at CBS, 59 percent
at Time, 58 percent at the New York Times, and 54 percent at the
Washington Post. 31

Table 13— Media Coverage of Busing Arguments

N ew Y o r k W ashington
Arguments Times Time Post CBS

Pro-busing
Equal Education 34% 30% 24% 43 %
Racial Harmony 12 19 14 17
Minority Performance 12 IO 16 0
Pro-Total: 58% 59% 54% 60%
Anti-busing
White Flight 12 17 27 11
Quality Education 5 6 9 8
Local Schools 13 11 IO 17
Violence/Discipline 13 _7 0 _5
Anti-Total: 43% 41% 46% 41%
Amount Coded 1.419' 582" 267' 84
N o te: N e w Y o r k T im e s a n d C B S p ercen tag e to tals reflect i percen t ro u n d in g error.
R a w to tals represen t c o lu m n in ch es for print so u rces an d n u m b e r o f a rgu m e n ts fo r te le vi­
sion.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

The anti-busing arguments were somewhat more likely to be

criticized when they did appear. As Table 14 shows, they averaged
+35 on the spin index measuring argument support, compared
with +48 for their pro-busing counterparts. This difference re­
flects the media’s rejection of the argument that busing was as­
sociated with violence or discipline problems in desegregated
schools. This was the only argument to receive a negative overall
score, indicating that it was refuted more often than affirmed.
The most coverage went to the equal education argument,
although claims of increased racial harmony and improved minor­
ity performance also received considerable attention. Among the
anti-busing arguments, the white flight phenomenon was the most
heavily covered, followed by concerns that local schools would be
undermined. The two other anti-busing arguments, which claimed
that busing would expose children to violence or impair educa­
tional quality, received scant attention.
Equal education. The argument that busing was necessary for
minorities to achieve equal educational opportunities claimed by
far the most attention. It received at least twice the coverage of

Table 14— Busing Coverage Argument Support Index

Arguments Mean Score*

Pro-busing
Equal Education +48%
Racial Harmony +68
Minority Performance +27
Total: +48
Anti-busing
White Flight + 57%
Quality Education + 52
Local Schools +36
Violence/Discipline -4
Total: + 35
• A v e r a g e sco re o n a rg u m en t su p p o rt in d ex a cro ss a ll fo u r m ed ia ou tle ts, w e ig h te d e q u a lly .
In d e x is co n stru cte d b y su b tra c tin g p ercen t o f n eg a tiv e c o v e ra g e fro m p ercen t o f p o sitive
co v era g e.

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 Reactin’, Writin’, and Rights
any other argument presented by CBS or the New York Times and
nearly twice the coverage that Time gave any other argument.
Only at the Post was coverage of the equal education argument
slightly exceeded by the space accorded to white flight.34
The equal education argument was presented in its purest form
in a 1972 Post article quoting U.S. Civil Rights Commission Chair­
man Theodore Herburgh. He argued that efforts to end busing
would “ strip away the constitutional right of all children to equal
educational opportunity.” 35 The implication was that busing was
the necessary means to the constitutionally mandated goal of
racial integration. Sometimes the notion of equal opportunity was
conveyed in very concrete terms, like those used by busing advo­
cates in Pontiac, Michigan, cited in Time:

School Superintendent O dell N ails is convinced that busing was

necessary to produce equal educational opportunities because it
focused the clou t o f concerned w hite parents on the condition
and equipm ent in schools that had been all black and largely
neglected. “ In the old days,” he says, “ black schools had to
borrow m icroscopes for tw o w eeks a year.” A d d s Principal
D a ry l L ee o f Jefferson Junior H igh: “ N o w , everyone shares in
the wealth and the poverty .” 34

The defense of busing as a means to educational equality also

included the idea that it was necessary because of our society’s
racism. For example, CBS broadcast a Louisville n a a c p official’s
charge that opposition to busing there came from “ racist elements
in the community who don’t want to see quality education” for
blacks.37
The core of the equal education argument was that busing
would fulfill the promise of the historic 1954 Brown decision,
which proclaimed that “ separate but equal” is inherently unequal.
In 1975, Time even interviewed Brown’s daughter Linda, now an
adult with children of her own. She made the link explicit: “To
get racial balance in the school system I would have my children
bused. This is what my father was fighting about 20 years ago.” 31
Racial Harmony. The claim that busing would increase racial
harmony received about the same amount of attention at all four

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

outlets. It ranked second to the equal education argument every­

where except at the Washington Post, where it placed fourth. The
amount of coverage devoted to this argument varied only from 12
percent at the New York Times to 18 percent at Time.
Television proved an excellent medium for illustrating racial
harmony in the schools. For example, a 1972 CBS broadcast
showed a group of black and white school children in Pontiac,
Michigan, the scene of earlier anti-busing violence, giving a school
concert. The words they sang were, “ Put a little love in your
heart.” 3’
In a similar vein, Time ran a story on a visit by Boston students
to a peacefully desegregated school in Charlotte, North Carolina.
It quoted a local high school student, “ We want you to know
we’ve learned a lot about judging anybody, black or white, as an
individual. It just took time.” 40
One New York Times story supplemented such examples of
harmonious relations with a statement of the argument that un­
derlay them. It quoted a Chicago mother, “ I think busing is a
healthy idea. It’s about time that blacks and whites started getting
together and a good way to start is through children.” 41 Another
Times piece nicely combined this rationale with an illustration
from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, the scene of
a famous struggle over integration in the 1950s:

B u t w h y has C en tral H igh, after years o f tum ult, gone so far

tow ard racial harm ony? . . ., tod a y’s black and w hite students
have been going to school together since the early grades. L ittle
R o c k abandoned tokenism in 1971 and began m assive desegrega­
tion w ith busing am id relatively m inor d istu rb a n c e .. . . “ W hen
the C en tral H igh T igers are on the field” [a black senior said],
“ everybody sitting on our side o f the stadium is a Tiger, regard­
less o f w hat color they are.” 42

Minority Achievement. The remaining pro-busing argument,

which stresses improved academic skills for minorities, received
about as much attention from the print media as the racial har­

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
mony argument. However, we couldn’t find a single CBS broadcast
on this topic. This surprising disparity might be attributed to the
difficulty of portraying this argument visually. Racial harmony
and equal access to educational opportunities are topics that lend
themselves to visual treatment, such as pictures of black and white
children attending school together. The controversy over minority
academic performance was more technical, often revolving
around interpretations of test scores. In any event, it was not
covered by CBS in the stories sampled.
Press coverage of this argument was exemplified by a 1972
summary in Time: “ School integration can accomplish a great
d e a l. . . researchers have verified that poor black children do at
least marginally better in white-majority classrooms, presumably
because they pick up their middle-class white schoolmates’ learn­
ing skills and attitudes toward education.” 43 A later Time article
extended this argument to allay concerns about declining per­
formance among whites. It quoted a Jacksonville, Florida, school
official: “ According to Associate Superintendent Don Johnson,
national test scores indicate that [busing for] desegregation has
resulted in ‘significant benefits for the black students and no loss
of achievement for the white student.’ ” 44 The New York Times
reported similar positive findings in Little Rock, Arkansas:

[The School Superintendent] said that m uch progress had been

m ade in closing the academ ic gap between w hite and black
students. B lacks now score considerably higher on tests and
whites score slightly better, he said. D esegregation has m ade
these gains com e easier, he said .45

White Flight. Among anti-busing arguments, claims of white

flight and threats to neighborhood schools each garnered consid­
erable media notice. (Neither could approach the attention given
the equal education argument in overall coverage.) O f the two, the
white migration argument occupied the greater share of the news,
largely on the basis of heavy coverage by the Washington Post. It
accounted for 27 percent of all argument coverage in that

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category, edging out the equal education argument by 3 percent.

It finished no higher than third at the other outlets but never fell
below 11 percent of total coverage at any of them.
Especially during the mid-1970s, readers encountered regular
recitations of dismal statistics detailing the resegregation of public
school systems, after busing plans triggered white migration. A
1975 Time article was typical of many:

Yet even in communities that have fully obeyed the courts, the
fear of busing often precipitates the flight of whites, who move
to the suburbs or take their children out of public schools to
escape desegregation. During the three years busing has been
used to desegregate the Atlanta schools, 40,000 white students
have fled the system and city schools have gone from 56% to
87% black. In Memphis, enrollment in private academies in­
creased from 13,000 in 1973, when a federal court ordered the
city schools to desegregate, to 35,000 today, while the public
school enrollment tipped from 50% black to 70% black. Even
in Charlotte, home of the most successful and widely acclaimed
busing plan in the U.S., enrollment in private academies has
more than doubled in the past five years of court-ordered bus­
ing.44

This was one topic on which the media presented an alleged

social cost of busing with little notice of the heated scholarly
debate. While the sociologists fought over statistical interpreta­
tions and research methods, the media took it for granted that
busing was a major cause of white migration from inner city areas.
Toward the end of the decade, Time even took a swipe at the
scholars for not believing the evidence before their own eyes:
“There is now considerable academic consensus that in large cities
a significant linkage exists between white flight and forced busing.
The fact that sociologists show signs of catching up with everyone
else’s common sense observation should be reassuring.” 4’
Nonetheless, a funny thing happened between the occurrence
of white flight and its reportage. Although we have treated this
phenomenon as an argument against busing, it was not always
portrayed in that light. Instead, it was often seen as a problem to

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
be overcome, or as evidence of white racism, rather than a reason
to change policies. Thus the W ashington Post quoted an n a a c p
representative, “ So we must halt the white flight and reverse it. We
want to attract middle-class whites and blacks in the suburbs and
those whose children are in private schools back to our public
schools. I think an enlightened school administration can bring
them back.” 48And a CBS reporter drew attention to alleged north­
ern hypocrisy over busing. He noted that, in Illinois, where the
first northern school districts were ordered to desegregate, many
whites took their children out of public schools. He called this an
“ irony,” since a recent Illinois survey said that most whites
wanted racial equality, but opposed busing.49
Neighborhood Schools. Concern over neighborhood schools was
the other anti-busing argument that received widespread atten­
tion. Although never a dominant argument, neither was it ever
ignored. Coverage ranged from a high of 17 percent at CBS to a low
of 10 percent at the Washington Post. For example, the New Y ork
Tim es quoted the black chairman of a parents’ advisory board in
Boston, “ I believe in neighborhood schools— [children] should be
able to get a good education anywhere. They should not be forced
to go elsewhere.” 30The Post presented a similar sentiment, more
bitterly expressed, from a white mother in suburban Chevy Chase,
Maryland: “They have destroyed the fabric of our schools. . . . I
don’t care what color the school is. I want my child close by.” 31
Two quotations from T im e illustrate the other facet of this
argument— anger over disruption of a neighborhood’s ethnic soli­
darity. As a white community leader in Boston put it, “ We are not
violent and racist. But we are fiercely loyal to our community.
. . . Now we’ve got to give it all up, everything we’ve worked years
for.” 32 A Chicago parent was even pithier: “ Busing means the
destruction of our neighborhoods, and we’re going to fight for our
survival.” 31
Quality Education. The argument that busing would impair edu­
cational quality received scant attention. It ranked last in coverage
at the New York Times, sixth at the Washington Post, and fifth at
CBS. Its share ranged from a low of 5 percent at the Tim es to a
high of only 9 percent at the Post. The latter reported that two

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

white parents were transferring their child to a private school in

the face of a busing plan, because “ they are afraid the quality of
education may deteriorate at Chevy Chase.” 54 Similarly, c b s gave
an angry Florida parent the opportunity to say that, because of
busing, “ the quality of education has gone right out the win­
dow.” 55 To cite one more exception to the generally low coverage,
Time provided a more detailed portrait of educational problems
in one city:

H orror stories about life in the c ity ’s public schools have in­
creased since 1974, w hen a local com m ission announced that
deteriorating schools w ere “ the m ost serious problem facing the
c ity .” W hile attem pting to m easure the abilities o f students,
Stanford U niversity sociologist Sanford D ornbu sch reported
that he found 6 2 % o f the black m ale students four years behind
w hites in reading ability b y the tenth grade. M an y students were
unable to read D o m b u sch ’s questionnaire. F earing that busing
their children w ill only bring them m ore poor education, some
blacks and m any C hinese have join ed whites in bitter resistance
to busing.56

This argument also produced a rare instance of negative spin,

a score of — 17 at Time. For example, a 1974 article on Boston
argued that busing’s negative impact paled before the general
inadequacy of the school system. Even without busing, the article
concluded, “ quality education” was a misnomer for what passed
for schooling in South Boston: “ As long as [substandard schools
like South Boston High] exist, neither blacks bused in to them
from the ghettos nor the whites who already attend them will have
a chance for a decent education.” 57
Violence. O f all seven arguments coded, concern about crime and
violence in the schools ranked last in coverage at the Post and
sixth at Time and CBS. A t the New York Times, it was clustered
with four other arguments receiving about equal attention. The
amount of coverage accorded this argument ranged from a high
of 13 percent at the New York Times, to half that amount at Time
and CBS, and less than 1 percent at the Washington Post.

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
One of the few Post stories that raised this issue concerned a
suburban Louisville mother who refused to allow her daughter to
be bused to an inner city school. The article quoted her as saying,
“ Our two kids went to Parkland Jr. High School when we lived
in the city. We had plenty of trouble there, trouble with discipline,
trouble with fights. . . . I wasn’t going to have my kids go to a
school like that so we moved out here.’’58
Two brief segments from Time stories illustrate other ways in
which this argument was voiced. One reported on a 1976 U.S. Civil
Rights Commission study that “frankly conceded that discipli­
nary problems have markedly increased in many of the desegre­
gated schools, with a disproportionate number of minority young­
sters subject to disciplinary measures, often suspensions and
expulsion.” 58 Another let a white Boston student speak for him­
self: “ How can you learn anything if you’re afraid of being
stabbed?” 60
Overall, though, such assertions occurred infrequently. More­
over, this argument was notable as the only one the media consis­
tently failed to present as believable. On the spin index, it scored
— 17 at the New York Times, zero at both the Washington Post and
CBS, and + 5 at Time. For example, a CBS story focused on
anti-busing sentiment in Pontiac, Michigan. First, the leader of a
parents’ anti-busing group said busing was promoting violence in
the schools. The reporter then rebutted this argument by citing
school statistics attesting to a dramatic drop in violent incidents.
The reporter concluded, “ The kids have learned to forget racial
hatred.” 61 The broadcast not only refuted the school violence
argument, but also implied that racial hatred was the real reason
behind anti-busing sentiment.
A New York Times report on Boston illustrates a different type
of refutation. Rather than citing statistics, the reporter adopted an
anecdotal approach:

O ver the back fences these days, H yd e P ark m others are trading
tales o f crim e and rape in black M attapan, although there is
plenty o f crim e in H yde Park. “ I w ou ld n’ t even drive through
that section,” said [Fran O n ish u k ].. . . I f M rs. O nishuk visited

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

M attapan, she w ou ld probably be surprised to find that m uch

o f the area is not unlike her ow n neighborhood. She w ou ld see
youn g black fathers trim m ing hedges and painting the shutters
o f sm all shingled houses and happy black children cycling and
rushing o ff to B oy Scout m eetings.“

Coverage Over Time. There were three distinct periods in the

coverage of pro- and anti-busing arguments. The first period,
1970-73, was dominated by pro-busing arguments generally and
especially concern over equal education. The second period, 1974-
75, showed an increasing number of anti-busing themes, particu­
larly that of white flight. The decade’s latter years, 1976-79,
showed both a general drop-off in coverage and a resurgence of
pro-busing themes. O f themes that persisted throughout the dec­
ade, the equal education argument almost continually dominated
coverage, followed by images of racial harmony. The only anti­
busing theme to emerge in more than one medium and time period
was white flight.
From 1970 to 1973, equal education was the major concern at
every media outlet. During these early years, the theme of racial
harmony placed second among arguments reported at Time and
the New York Times. Anti-busing arguments broke into the top
ranks only sporadically, at the Washington Post and CBS. A t the
Post, white flight emerged as the second most heavily covered
theme during 1972-73. A t CBS, the argument favoring local
schools was the second most heavily covered during 1970-71.
Many parents were shown objecting to busing not because of race
but because they wanted their children to attend neighborhood
schools.
It was not until the middle 1970s that anti-busing themes
threatened to dominate major media coverage. During 1974-75.
coverage of white flight surged ahead of equal education themes
at the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the fear of crime or violence
in the schools became the number one argument at the New York
Times, followed by coverage of white flight. Even during this
turbulent period, however, equal education and racial harmony
remained the themes most often covered by Time and CBS. During

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the latter half of the decade, these pro-busing themes reasserted

themselves everywhere, even as total coverage dropped sharply.
Thus, the upsurge of anti-busing arguments proved brief and
partial. The predominant argument was always the portrayal of
busing as the only means of assuring educational equality. Cover­
age of the claim that busing would eventually yield racial harmony
was nearly as pervasive. None of the anti-busing arguments at­
tained such consistent media attention. Concern over white flight
came closest, but busing began to fade from the media agenda
soon after this argument became newsworthy. Moreover, the de­
cline of pro-busing themes in 1974 and 1975 proved a temporary
hiatus. They dominated the discussion at all outlets at the decade’s
end, as they had at the outset.
Summary. Our examination of busing arguments focused on the
main ideas that pro- and anti-busing advocates used to make their
case. The case for busing centered on arguments that it was neces­
sary to give minority students equal educational opportunity, to
promote racial harmony, and to improve the achievement levels
of minority students. Opponents claimed that busing would cause
a decline in the quality of education, weaken neighborhood soli­
darity and community schools, and promote racial tension or
violence, jeopardizing the safety of school children. Later, they
argued that busing was causing whites to abandon the public
school system, leading to resegregation.
All four media outlets gave somewhat more coverage to the
pro-busing arguments, especially the theme of educational equal­
ity. Among anti-busing arguments, white flight received the most
attention. By contrast, claims of increased tension and violence
received the least coverage of all arguments. Moreover, the vio­
lence argument was the only one with a predominantly negative
spin. Thus, anti-busing arguments received not only less coverage
but also less credence than pro-busing ones.
The findings also argue against one fashionable interpretation
of media coverage— the “bad news bias,” or the notion that news
coverage of any public policy issue will be predominantly critical,
negative, or anti-establishment in tone. The media not only tended
to affirm the value of busing, despite widespread public opposition

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

to it, they also tended to affirm any argument they presented. So

we did not find much negativity, either with regard to busing
policy or as a general structural principle. When it came to busing,
the media were anything but nattering nabobs of negativism. In­
stead, our studies show they tended to accentuate the positive and
eliminate the negative.

Activities
Important as they are, the arguments are only one part of the
busing story. Much of the coverage described not the debates but
the activities associated with busing. The activities that were de­
scribed provided a framework for understanding and evaluating
the causes, implementation, and outcomes of busing plans. There­
fore, we examined the descriptive side of media coverage as well.
Most activities related to busing could be catalogued into
three major groups— legal, political, and school related. Legal
activities referred to any court decisions, orders, or other litiga­
tion procedures. We distinguished among four types of political
action: official, grassroots, nonviolent protest, and violent pro­
test.63 The third major group of activities concerned the func­
tioning or disruption of school operations. Under this major
heading were three categories— normal school routine, disrup­
tive incidents, and police security.64 Finally, other material such
as descriptions of city life or historical backgrounds were
grouped together in a residual category.
As Table 15 shows, the media treated busing primarily as a
political story and only secondarily as a legal story. Their coverage
belied traditional criticism of the news for emphasizing conflict,
disruption, and violence. Instead, they stressed the “ establish­
ment” side of the story, focusing on official political and legal
activity, rather than populist dissent or violence. Coverage of
school activities also stressed normalcy rather than disruption.
The media by no means ignored the violence that erupted in
such major trouble spots as Boston and Louisville. As a propor­
tion of overall coverage, however, violence and protest received
relatively little attention. The one exception to this pattern was

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights

Table 15— Media Coverage of Busing Activities

N ew Y o rk W ashington
A ctiv ity Tim es T im e Post CBS

Political
Official 42% 15% 4 1% 36%
G rassroots *
3 5 4
N onviolent 4 17 5 IO

Protest
V iolent Protest * 6 I 7
School
School R outine 9 18 3 20

R acial/V iolen t * 2 0
3
Incidents
Police/Security 5 I4 I 5
Legal 21 IS I? 17
Other 16 12 25 i

Total: 10 0 % 100% 10 0 % 100%

A m ou n t Coded 3,691" 1,0 0 4 * 1 ,2 0 9 * 282

•le ss th an i p ercen t

Time, which emphasized protest, school disruption, and police

security activities more than the other outlets.
Legal. Legal activities, such as court decisions, laid the ground­
work for the busing controversy. Yet, most legal reporting focused
on the impact of court decisions rather than the reasoning behind
legal debates. The media had difficulty explaining the subtleties
and technical details of legal behavior. Instead, court decisions
usually were portrayed as stimuli that produced significant conse­
quences. Ironically, the arena where busing arguments developed
generated the most formulaic and least diversified coverage.
Given their importance, legal activities claimed a modest
amount of space at all four outlets, ranging from only 15 percent
at Time to 21 percent at the New York Times. Even the types of
legal activities described had similar proportions of coverage at

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

the various outlets, e.g., court findings of segregation, busing

remedies proposed, appellate decisions promoting or limiting bus­
ing, administrative actions, and so forth. Coverage of legal activi­
ties often focused on major court decisions involving busing. On
television such stories were often restricted to brief summaries
read by anchors. They focused narrowly on the decision itself with
little or no attention to the legal reasoning behind a given ruling.
Political. By far the most coverage of busing focused on official
political activities. This facet of the busing story predominated at
every outlet except Time, where several activities received about
equal attention. Elsewhere it dwarfed coverage of every other
activity, receiving about twice as much attention as all legal issues.
Coverage often focused on federal legislation to ban busing or
diminish its impact, as well as official pronouncements and reac­
tions to busing controversies in particular locales. State and local
officials also received extensive coverage, as politicians, state agen­
cies, and local school boards grappled over court-ordered busing
plans.
Other political activities received surprisingly little coverage.
Grassroots activities, such as petitions and referenda, received
from i to 5 percent of the coverage at these outlets. Protest also
attracted scant attention, especially at the newspapers. The New
York Times gave only 4 percent of its coverage to nonviolent
protest, and less than 1 percent to violent protest. A t the Washing­
ton Post, the figures were 5 and 1 percent, respectively. It is almost
a truism that television emphasizes conflict and violence more
than print media, and c b s did give proportionately about twice as
much attention as the newspapers to nonviolent protest, 10 percent
of its total activity coverage. The network also devoted the most
attention of all outlets to violent protest. Yet that amounted to
only 7 percent of its coverage.
Nonetheless, CBS was not the most protest-oriented outlet in
our study. That distinction belonged to Time, which devoted fully
one-sixth of its coverage to nonviolent protest, and an additional
6 percent to violent protest. The magazine was the only outlet that
gave more coverage to protest than to official political activity.

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
Indeed, no other outlet devoted even half as much coverage to
grassroots protest as to official activity.
Especially interesting in light of Time's relatively heavy cover­
age of violence was its criticism of other media for playing down
violent activities associated with busing. In a 1975 story, Time
rebuked the Louisville, Kentucky, media for ignoring an incident
when police fired on a motorist, because they “ had adopted a set
of voluntary guidelines. . . to prevent an exacerbation of tension.”
The article noted that one local paper “finally printed the story
last week only after Time started checking on it.” 65
In sum, media coverage stressed official political activities over
grassroots actions and the disruptions of both violent and nonvio­
lent protest. The total of all these extra-institutional political ac­
tivities accounted for only one-sixth as much space as official
activity reported in the New York Times, one-fourth of that in the
Post, and just over one-half at CBS. Time's coverage was a notable
exception to this trend.
School Activities. The media focused on the least disruptive ele­
ments of busing not only in the political realm, but also in describ­
ing school activities. School routine predominated, very few vio­
lent or racial incidents at school were reported, and only Time
gave much coverage to police security activities. CBS did not have
a single story among those coded on disruptive school incidents,
and the New York Times gave it little more— less than 1 percent
of its total activity coverage. Such incidents accounted for only 2
percent of the coverage at the Post and 3 percent at Time.
In contrast, all media outlets gave heavy emphasis to routine
school activities. CBS devoted one-fifth of its coverage to school
routine, four times the coverage given to all reminders of disrup­
tive incidents and security measures. For example, in 1975 a c b s
correspondent reported that, after a year of busing in Denver,
fears of disruption were “ unfounded,” while pictures of children
doing lessons in the classroom were flashed on the screen.66
Eighteen percent of Time's coverage was devoted to routine
school activities. At the New York Times, it was half that, but still
almost twice as much as the coverage given school incidents and

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

police security. At the Post, only 3 percent of the coverage was of

school routine, but the amount given to incidents and security was
a fraction lower still. So the dominant impression was one of
normalcy, with less attention given to the negative impact of
busing on the everyday functioning of the schools.
A 1976 Washington Post vignette illustrates how routine school
activities can provide a framework for showing just how well
busing could work:

L ast T h u rsd ay m orning on the Silver Spring streets around

R osem ary H ills E lem entary School, tw o M on tgom ery C o u n ty
school buses rum bled by in opposite directions.
In one bus sat K ev in W ashington, a w ary R osem ary H ills
fourth grader w ho had joined 15 others to visit Larchm on t
E lem entary . . . as part o f a desegregation plan . . . K ev in began
to sm ile as his future classm ates jo v ia lly pum m elled each other
and asked him about R osem ary H ills sports.
In the other bus Stephen B erkeley . . . w ho w ill be sent to
R osem ary H ills this fall, spent m ost o f the bus trip laughing
uproariously and sitting on a classm ate.
T w o m onths after the M on tgom ery C o u n ty school board
approved its controversial grade level reorganization to desegre­
gate m ostly black R osem ary H ills, these tw o boys are taking it
in stride. K ev in . . . said o f L archm on t afterw ard: “ I think it was
nice.” Stephen . . . had announced to his m other the day before:
“ I ’m going to like it w hen I get there.” 67

Coverage Over Time, In both its early and later phases, coverage
at all outlets except Time was dominated by reports of official
political activities and, secondarily, school routine. The New York
Times and c b s gave the most coverage to these two types of
activities throughout the decade. A t the Post, official political
activities always predominated, though the second-ranked story
changed from year to year.
Time started out in lockstep with the other outlets, covering
primarily the doings of officialdom and school routine. But then
the disruptive activities associated with busing became more of a

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 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
factor. From 1972 to 1973, nonviolent protest became the second
most heavily covered topic there. During 1974 and 1975, nonvio­
lent protest took the top spot, followed by police security. Only
at this single media outlet, for this brief period, did the negative
side of the busing controversy dominate the coverage. After 1975,
coverage of nonviolent protest dropped off at Time, while school
routine became the top story.68
Thus, the media’s emphasis on normalcy and official channels
hardly varied throughout the decade, despite the rapid changes
and jagged discontinuities in the events surrounding the busing
controversy. Only Time gave more or less continuously heavy
coverage to protests against busing. Violence and protest were not
ignored, but they never dominated the news agenda.

Conclusion: The Media and Busing

The busing story began in the courts and ended in the schools and
the streets, with some detours through the corridors of power. For
all the weighty constitutional issues that were raised, however, the
judicial rationales generally took a back seat to their political
implications and their practical impact. There was substantial
coverage of court decisions, but the media had difficulty explain­
ing the subtleties and technical details of legal behavior. Typically,
the public learned much about the results of a judge’s decisions,
but far less about the reasoning behind it.
In covering the political side of the story, the media were more
at home with the familiar routines of hearings and press confer­
ences than with the grassroots clamor and chaos that often accom­
panied busing plans. Eruptions of protest and violence were cer­
tainly not ignored, but neither did they take over the coverage or
set its overall tone. Instead, the disruptive side of the story usually
bowed to the “ establishment” side represented by official political
activities. Inside the schools, the coverage emphasized normalcy
and the daily routine rather than the fear or the actuality of
disruption and racial incidents. The major newspapers gave espe­
cially sparse coverage to protest activities. The most protest-ori­
ented outlet was not a television network, as one might expect, but

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

a weekly newsmagazine. Time devoted proportionally four to five

times as much of its coverage to protest activities as did the New
York Times and Washington Post.
This discrepancy illustrates a more general point. News orga­
nizations had considerable discretion in covering such a long-
running and multifaceted story. By focusing on conflict and pro­
test, Time broke the mold of coverage that usually emphasized
established procedures and the orderly implementation of busing
plans. Even during the middle of the 1970s, when ugly conflicts
erupted in Boston, Louisville, and elsewhere, only Time featured
protest ahead of official political activities.
Time's coverage was more than an exception that proved the
rule. It was also the exception that disproved the “ mirror” theory
of media coverage. If events dictated the coverage, if protest got
short shrift because it was in short supply, then how do we explain
Time’s continual emphasis on this side of the story? The answer,
of course, is a difference in news agendas, whatever the reasons
behind it.
In addition, the busing story did not lend support to the notion
that the press follows public opinion. Busing was rejected by
overwhelming majorities of whites, as well as substantial minori­
ties of blacks.69Yet every media outlet we studied gave a majority
of its coverage to arguments in favor of busing. Moreover, anti­
busing arguments were the only ones that were ever refuted a
majority of the time they appeared.
News media gave particular attention to the argument that
busing was necessary to provide equal educational opportunities
for minority children. They also gave moderate coverage to claims
that busing would improve minority achievement levels and con­
tribute to racial harmony in the long run. O f the major anti-busing
arguments, claims of white flight and neighborhood disruption
received substantial coverage. Arguments that busing would im­
pair quality education or contribute to school crime and violence
largely were ignored.
A separate issue is the credence the media attached to these
assertions. As a rule, arguments rarely were refuted. Balanced
stories tended to provide arguments from both camps rather than

250
 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
presenting two sides of one argument. Nevertheless, the only argu­
ments to be primarily refuted were those that blamed busing for
declining educational quality and rising school crime and vio­
lence. These anti-busing arguments, especially the latter, thus re­
ceived not only the least coverage but the most negative coverage.
The media’s presentation of these arguments can also be mea­
sured against the scholarly literature on them. The evidence on
busing’s contribution to racial harmony and improved minority
performance is mixed, with substantial data both supporting and
contradicting these claims. The equal education argument is a bit
more complex. Scholars like Armor and Coleman argued that this
theoretical benefit was vitiated by white flight and subsequent
resegregation. Yet the media affirmed both the equal education
and white flight arguments, despite substantial (if temporary)
scholarly controversy over the latter. An explanation for this
apparent paradox lies in the media’s treatment of white migration
as an obstacle but not necessarily an argument against busing.
Many stories acknowledged the fact of white flight but not the
implication that it undermined the educational equality busing
was supposed to provide.
Finally, the unique skepticism attached to warnings of school
crime and violence appears unwarranted in light of the scholarly
literature. This is a controversial topic, which is attributed to
symbolic racism by some scholars but to rational fears and accu­
rate perceptions by others. Although it is no more heated than
disputes over minority performance or the implications of white
flight for educational equality, the violence argument was un­
matched in its negative reception by the media. The implication
was that parental opposition to busing on these grounds expressed
underlying racist sentiments rather than rational fears for their
children’s safety. This facet of the coverage was in keeping with
a more general tendency to downplay fears or threats of school
violence or disruption. Both in the activities covered and the
arguments presented, this angle consistently was overshadowed by
more positive themes.
This pattern of coverage runs counter to another widespread
explanation of media behavior— the bad news bias. We found that

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the major media often dismissed or reinterpreted the so-called bad

news about busing. In both the political arena and the classroom,
they emphasized order rather than disorder, established channels
for protest rather than spontaneous outbursts, and the importance
of the end goal (integration) rather than the weakness of the means
(busing). When busing moved north in the mid-1970s, the ensuing
social conflict was duly chronicled, though often from the perspec­
tive of new obstacles that needed to be overcome. As the adverse
consequences of busing continued to escalate, however, the cover­
age fell off1dramatically, and what was left returned to the early
themes of official political activities and school routine, equal
education and racial harmony.
On the surface, this coverage seems anything but adversarial.
On the contrary, it reminds us of the leftist “ hegemony” theorists
who argue that the American media reinforce the established
order and play down the conflict and the discontent that might
threaten it. Unfortunately for this line of criticism, the “ establish­
ment” being upheld here had itself ordered massive social disloca­
tion in the name of racial justice. Insofar as they supported this
effort, the media aligned themselves with the forces of change and
against more traditional or conservative elements in American
society.
In short, media coverage of busing cannot be explained as
either a mirror of reality or a reflection of public opinion. Journal­
ists were neither the purveyors of a bad news bias nor the hand­
maidens of the conservative establishment. Our impression is that
they attempted to act as responsible citizens in helping their coun­
try adapt to reforms that were, in their view, necessary and long
overdue, despite the short-term conflict and disruption. Thus,
their coverage may reflect not mass opinion but the enlightened
opinion of liberal intellectuals in universities, think tanks, and
federal courtrooms.
The history of major media involvement in racial issues should
also be considered. A decade earlier, many leading journalists cut
their teeth on the long-running story of the civil rights movement.
They brought tales of racial injustice in the South to the attention
of the nation and helped speed social reform. Is it any wonder that

252
 Readin’, Writin’, and Rights
they should treat busing as an extension of the same story, to be
covered from the same angle, as a struggle for justice against
entrenched forces of racism and ignorance?
This was less a matter of advocacy journalism than an accumu­
lation of ordinary daily decisions— what events to cover and how
to explain them, what arguments to present and when to seek out
the other side. Such decisions, as we have seen, are filtered through
the perspectives and motivations of even the most professional
journalist. Perhaps without anyone’s conscious intention, the col­
lective result was to emphasize the benefits of busing a bit more
than the costs, to focus on the successes a bit more than the
failures. Eventually, as the problems multiplied and the answers
seemed less and less certain, the response was to move on to other,
less troubling stories.

253
 “ G A O Study Asserts That Oil Companies
Worsened Shortage”
— New York Times, September 14, 1979

“ G A O Says Oil Firms Aren’t To Be Blamed for

Recent Shortage”
— Wall Street Journal, September 14, 1979

T he gu est speaker was a former network correspondent now

working for a multinational oil company. The audience of college
students, familiar with his previous occupation, could only be
disillusioned by his current job. So he took the bull by the horns.
He began, “ I want to tell you right up front that I work for an
oil company now.” He capitalized the next words with his hands
and eyebrows: “That’s BIG OIL. As in O RG AN IZED CRIM E.”
Such defensiveness is understandable, in light of public atti­
tudes toward the oil business. Since the energy crises of the 1970s,
suspicion and hostility toward the oil industry have far out­
weighed any antipathy Americans feel toward big business in
general. One study found that, out of twenty-three national polls
comparing various industries since 1976, the oil industry drew the
most negative ratings fifteen times. In several other polls, petro­

254
 Looking for J.R.
leum finished barely ahead of tobacco as the public’s least favorite
industry. The oil industry was chosen most often as too big and
powerful, having high profits, not open and frank, uninterested in
its customers’ well-being, and unwilling to balance profits with the
public interest.1
The view of the oil companies as a monopolistic and profit-rich
industry dates from the days of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard
Oil Trust. Despite increasing government regulation and the new
power of the OPEC countries, criticism and distrust of the industry
became more widespread than ever during the 1970s. As oil prices
and profits rose dramatically, the case against the oil companies
was strengthened in the eyes of the public.
The populist tradition in American politics, in part a reaction
to the Standard Trust, was bolstered by the experiences of the late
1960s and early 1970s. Distrust of both government and business
became commonplace with the revelations of Watergate, illegal
campaign contributions, and corporate bribery abroad. Following
the oil embargo of 1973, news stories on the industry, which previ­
ously had been confined to newspapers’ financial sections, began
to appear on front pages and nightly broadcasts. In this climate,
the oil companies became a natural focus of public and media
scrutiny.
Public concern has focused on three major topics: the high
degree of industry concentration or monopoly, the level of profits,
and the manipulation of supply to maintain high prices. These
three issues are closely linked in economic theory. For example,
monopolistic control of a market allows a single producer to
manipulate supply to maintain artificially high prices. This creates
“excess” profits beyond those obtained in a competitive market.
This study will first examine each of these topics, in light of
the evidence provided by academic and other technical studies.
Then it will look at how the national media have covered the same
issues.

“ Obscene” Profits
Critics have long held that the oil industry’s high degree of con­
centration earned companies excess profits. This charge did not

255
 T he M e d ia E l it e

evoke popular concern or attention prior to the 1973 oil embargo.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, oil prices remained low and
relatively stable in the United States. For example, in 1950 the
average retail price for regular gasoline was twenty cents per
gallon. By 1972, the price had risen to only twenty-five cents per
gallon. Corrected for inflation, this actually represents a decline
of nearly 30 percent. Crude oil prices followed similar trends
during this period.2
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, production of domestic oil
was increasing, and supplies were viewed as ample for the foresee­
able future. By the early 1970s, however, the trends in supply and
demand began to move in the opposite direction. Demand in­
creased as a result of economic expansion following the Vietnam
War, increasing gasoline use, and new environmental regulations
that encouraged a shift from coal to oil. A t the same time, oil
production in both the United States and Canada peaked and then
declined. By 1972, most people involved in the oil industry realized
that shortages were a real possibility. The United States had be­
come a net importer of oil, relying on the Arab countries for 1.2
million barrels per day by 1973.
Then, between October 1973 and January 1974, the opec coun­
tries raised the price of crude oil almost fourfold, from $3.00 to
$11.65 Per barrel. A simultaneous embargo on shipments to the
United States reduced OPEC-supplied oil by 98 percent. This
amounted to a 7.4 percent drop in total U.S. supply, which exacer­
bated the price increases still further.3
The public had just recovered from this onslaught when the oil
companies’ 1973 earnings reports were released. During the third
quarter of 1973, Exxon’s profits increased 80 percent over the same
quarter of 1972, G u lfs earnings rose 91 percent, and other compa­
nies posted increases of similar magnitudes.4 Faced with a public
uproar, industry spokesmen argued that the high profits were
deceptive. They asserted that, first, 1972 had been a particularly
bad year for them, so that 1973 profits appeared large by compari­
son. Second, the dollar was devalued in 1973, increasing the value
of foreign investments denominated in other currencies. Third,
rapid inflation had artificially boosted profit reports. Finally,

256
 Looking for J.R.
OPEC’s quadrupling o f oil prices sharply increased the value o f oil
com pany inventories and reserves.
Industry explanations fell largely on deaf ears, as continuing
increases of prices and profits stirred public ire and congressional
investigations. Yet the issue is by no means clear-cut. Financial
analysts have long regarded the oil industry as one of the more
complex segments of the economy. To assess the arguments over
“ obscene” profits, we will review some major studies of industry
profits.
To understand the issues involved, we must first discuss the
concept and measurement of profitability. In accounting terms,
profits are the net income of a business after operating expenses,
capital costs, and taxes have been subtracted. Net income is an
absolute amount. However, profits can also be measured as a
relative amount; A reported increase in profits gains new meaning
with reference to the investment, sales, or asset base necessary to
produce the profit. A firm may enjoy an increase in profits while
retaining a profit rate equal to or lower than that of the previous
year, due to changes in the firm’s net worth. Therefore, in our
discussion, the profit rate will be variously referred to as the return
on owner’s equity, net assets, or net worth.
One element of the industry’s defense concerned the effects of
inflation on profits. The rapid inflation of the 1970s resulted in
dramatic increases in the profit rates of most industries. To some
extent, however, these increases were illusory, due to the effects
of inflation on traditional accounting methods. Goods valued at
lower “historical” or original costs were sold at higher inflated
prices. This created the appearance of a substantial increase in
earnings. However, this profit was only temporary, for the inven­
tory had to be replaced at the higher current and future costs.
Inflation also distorts the calculation of depreciation allowances
and the estimation of net worth.5 Moreover, like consumer in­
comes, corporate earnings suffer a loss of real purchasing power
due to inflation.
The dramatic impact of inflation on profits is illustrated by
Commerce Department studies.6 Corporate earnings in 1978, for
example, indicated an average increase of 17 percent from the 1977

257
 T he M e d ia E l it e

figures. The Commerce Department’s adjustments for inventory

gains reduced this increase to less than 3 percent. Yet even this
gain was expressed in current dollars. Expressed in constant dol­
lars this 3 percent increase actually became a 4 percent decrease.
Finally, the increased business volume in 1978 masked what First
National City Bank ( f n c b ) estimated as a real per-unit decrease
of 9 percent.7 Similar results were obtained by economist George
Terborgh in a study of 1976 corporate profits.8For the oil compa­
nies these findings have a special significance. The OPEC price
increases distorted inventory holdings in the same way as infla­
tion. The increases clearly represented a windfall for the compa­
nies. On the other hand, their stocks had to be replenished at
higher prices.9
Although charges of excess profits first attracted widespread
attention in the early 1970s, it is useful to evaluate the industry’s
performance over a longer period to capture the long-term trends.
If oil companies enjoy excess profits by virtue of their market
control, their profits should be consistently higher than those for
other industries. One of the most reliable sources of information
on oil company profitability is the annual corporate earnings sur­
vey prepared by the f n c b .10 These data reveal that oil industry
profit rates are comparable to the so-called normal rate of profit
for industry since 1950, as expressed by the average rate for all U.S.
manufacturing industries. The profit rate for the petroleum indus­
try was just over 1 percent above the average for all manufacturing
industries during the early 1950s. From 1955 through 1969, how­
ever, it was usually less than the overall average. The oil industry
recovered in the 1970s, with an average profit of less than 1 percent
above that of all manufacturing industries. During the thirty-year
period from 1950 through 1979, yearly profits of the petroleum
companies finished above the average for manufacturing indus­
tries fifteen times and below average fifteen times.
One can also compare profitability in a somewhat different
fashion, by ranking the oil industry’s profit margin against that of
other major industries. A Senate Finance Committee report
ranked the profitability of twenty-five industries from 1963
through 1972, based on f n c b data.11 During that entire decade just

258
 Looking for J.R.
prior to the energy crisis, the oil industry averaged fourteenth in
profits out of the twenty-five. It dropped as low as eighteenth in
the yearly ratings and rose as high as eighth place.
Comparable data from f n c b reports for the 1973 through 1979
period show that the first oil shock in 1974 rocketed petroleum to
the second-best profit margin of all industries listed. Then, in 1979,
for the only time in the seventeen-year period, the oil industry
claimed the top position, with profits reaching a postwar high of
nearly 23 percent. Those two years, however, were the exception.
In three of the four years between the two oil crises, the industry
ranked sixteenth or lower. As a result, its average profit ranking
for the 1973-79 period rose to ninth place among the twenty-five
industries cited.
The Senate Finance Committee also contrasted the profitabil­
ity of oil and gas producers (i.e., crude production only) with that
of the integrated companies (i.e., those dealing with all aspects of
production). The integrated firms (both international and domes­
tic), such as Mobil and Exxon, had consistently lower profit rates
than the crude producers.12The four largest integrated companies,
however, have been consistently more profitable than their smaller
integrated competitors. The difference was usually 2 or 3 percent
and never exceeded 4 percent prior to 1974.
Why were the largest integrated companies more profitable?
Several factors may come into play. First, the four largest compa­
nies are international firms, while many of the others are domestic.
International companies have historically earned a higher rate of
profit due to the lower cost of foreign oil (prior to 1973) and price
controls on the domestically drilled product. Second, they also
enjoy certain tax advantages. Third, the larger firms in any indus­
try should exhibit higher profit rates due to economies of scale
resulting from the size of their operations and their greater effi­
ciency in production. Thus, they are better able to utilize the
advantages enjoyed by all integrated companies.13
A second source of information on oil company earnings is
provided by Shyam Sunder’s survey of industry profits from 1961
to 1975.14 Sunder used both equity- and value-weighted measures
of profitability. An equity-weighted measure gives equal statistical

259
 T he M e d ia E l it e

weight to each firm, regardless of size. A value-weighted measure

weighs the data from each firm in proportion to its relative impor­
tance in the industry. In his survey, the true measure of profitabil­
ity for the entire industry lies somewhere between the two.
As with the f n c b study, Sunder’s data indicate that petroleum
industry profitability was below average from 1962 to 1969. From
1970 to 1971, it was above average, only to fall again in 1972 to 1973.
In 1973, the rate of profit increased sharply, peaking in 1974 and
then dropping just as sharply in 1975, although remaining above
the average for other industries. The overall 1961 to 1975 average
profit rates for oil vs. all other industries were 10.3 percent vs. 10.4
percent (equity-weighted) and 11.9 percent vs. 12.0 percent (value-
weighted). The similarity between the figures suggests, again, that
profitability for the oil companies was no greater than that of other
industries. Sunder concluded that the sharp increase in profits
occasioned by o p e c price increases permitted the oil companies to
make up for nearly a decade of lower than average profits during
the 1960s.
Several economists have commented on the problems of com­
paring the accounting data of different companies.15As an alterna­
tive to accounting calculations, Sunder examined a variety of
stock market-based measures of profit. Although not without
problems, market-based measures permit adjustments for risk dif­
ferentials and eliminate some difficulties of data interpretation.
The element of risk is reflected in the market price of a stock. The
price changes in response to how investors perceive the industry’s
performance and future prospects. Sunder concluded that the oil
industry’s performance was better than average for firms listed in
the New York Stock Exchange. However, he cautioned against
“ placing too much confidence” in these results because of the
industry’s “ high volatility.” 16
Edward J. Mitchell also examined oil industry profits using a
stock market-based measure.17 He calculated the profits of oil
company common stockholders and compared this rate of return
with that of the Standard and Poor 500 Stock Composite Index.
During the 1953-72 period, Mitchell found that none of the
twenty-one domestic oil companies equalled the Standard and

260
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Poor 500’s rate of return. In fact, after i960, these producers
earned less than half that. Finally, the eight internationals earned
an average return of more than 20 percent below the Standard and
Poor index for 1953-72.
Overall, these data on oil industry profitability show no evi­
dence of a sustained high rate of profit above the average level for
United States manufacturing industries. They do indicate, how­
ever, that the profitability of the integrated international compa­
nies has at times exceeded that of other types of oil companies.
Whether a certain level of profit is appropriate or “ obscene” is a
political judgment, not an economic one. Economic analysis
shows only that oil industry profitability has not been unusually
high over the long term, despite windfall profits from the energy
crisis.

The “ Oilogopoly”
Is the oil industry an oligopoly, in which a few large firms control
the production, refining, transport, or marketing of oil?1* Without
question, the large multinational, integrated firms have long
wielded great power in the world oil market. By the same token,
however, their power is not as extensive as it once was. These
“ Seven Sisters” did control the world market for oil in the pre-
World War II period. In 1953, the Justice Department filed the
International Petroleum Cartel suit against five companies for
allegedly conspiring to fix prices and withhold supply. It took no
further action until 1968, when the suit against one of the compa­
nies was dismissed. Eventually, the government decided not to
prosecute. This decision reflected the international expansion of
independent producers and refiners and the imposition of import
quotas for foreign oil in 1959. But such decisions inevitably reflect
political concerns. What do the economic analyses show?
The degree of oil industry concentration can be measured in
terms of either the ease of market entry or the percentage of
market shares controlled by the leading firms. Market entry may
be hindered by a variety of barriers. These include structural
barriers, such as the special technical knowledge needed for pro­
duction, high entry costs, and large economies of scale. Other

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

barriers can result from government policies, international poli­

tics, circumstances of the time, or anticompetitive industry prac­
tices. The oil industry exhibits each of these potential barriers to
some degree. In practice, though, they may not prohibit the entry
of new firms.
Thus, a House Committee on Banking and Currency staff
report found that the number of companies operating in the Mid­
dle East grew steadily from eight in 1940 to nearly a hundred in
1974.19These figures refer only to the increase in producing compa­
nies. In other areas of the industry, the entrance of new firms was
equally pronounced. Economist Neil Jacoby reports that between
1953 and 1972 “ . . . more than three hundred private companies
and more than fifty different government owned companies en­
tered the foreign oil industry de novo or significantly expanded
their participation in it.” 20
John Blair, one of the industry’s foremost critics, rejects the
view that entrance opportunities for independents expanded over
the years. According to Blair, ‘‘Opportunities for the entrance of
newcomers have from time to time made their appearance. But,
generally speaking, the efforts of newcomers to gain a viable foot­
hold have either been frustrated, or, if initially successful, short­
lived.” 21
Blair supports his argument with numerous case studies.
Nonetheless, the overall industry trend seems to suggest increased
participation by additional firms.22After World War II, the num­
ber of firms increased in all segments of the industry (i.e., produc­
tion, refining, transport, and marketing/distribution). The new
firms did not specialize in any particular segment. The largest
increase, however, was in the area of production and exploration.
These changes reflect the emerging preference of host govern­
ments for a variety of concessionaires. Producing countries be­
came reluctant to award oil development rights to a few large
firms, as they sought a more influential role in developing their
natural resources. The original practice of granting long-term
concessions to the Seven Sisters had political origins. It reflected
their entry into the Middle East when European countries still
maintained colonial relationships with the host governments.

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Advances in petroleum technology also encouraged competi­
tion. Innovations such as catalytic reforming made it possible for
small-scale companies to compete with the larger firms.23 Finally,
postwar increases in demand, as Europe rebuilt and the develop­
ing nations embarked on ambitious modernization programs,
made investment opportunities brighter.
A second measure of industrial concentration is the degree of
the market controlled by the largest firms. Jacoby found that the
combined market share for the four largest firms (the usual mea­
sure) averaged 40 percent for all U.S. manufacturing industries in
1970. In the oil industry, the top four firms had 27 percent of crude
oil production, 35 percent of crude oil sales, 34 percent of gasoline­
refining capacity, and 30 percent of gasoline sales. Nor did any one
firm hover over the others. The largest was Exxon, which ac­
counted for 12 percent of crude oil reserves and about 9 percent
of both crude production and refining capacity.24Jacoby rated oil
industry concentration “ low” at the four-firm level and “moder­
ately low” at the eight-firm level.25
The level of concentration had declined significantly in the
years preceding the energy crisis. During 1953-72, Seven Sisters
on-paper control of concession areas declined from 64 percent to
only 24 percent of the market. Their control of proven reserves
dropped from 92 to 67 percent, and their refining capacity was cut
from 73 to 49 percent.26 In the domestic oil industry during this
period, the degree of concentration remained relatively stable. For
example, in 1965 the eight largest firms accounted for 39 percent
of total production. Their share rose to 42 percent by 1974. Their
refining capacity constituted 53 percent of the total in both years.27
The largest firms did increase or maintain their shares in both
production and refining from 1965 to 1974. Equally significant,
though, was the emergence of the independent refiner after 1965.
Independents are absent from domestic production partly because
there are few new areas suitable for production in the United
States. The newly leased areas tend to be offshore or in such
inhospitable environments as Alaska’s North Slope. Smaller com­
panies often lack the financial and technical resources for these
operations. It was in crude production that the independents made

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their greatest inroads into the foreign market. In the international

market there was a decline in concentration of crude production
during this period.
Many oil industry analysts support the view that concentra­
tion ratios have declined over the past thirty years.28 However,
some critics, notably Walter Adams, Joel Dirlam, and Walter
Measday, contend that the ratios are increasing. The apparent
contradiction stems from the specific ratios used by each group.
The critics base their argument on a Federal Trade Commission
( f t c ) report indicating that the eight largest companies accounted
for almost as large a share of North American crude production
in 1973 as did the largest twenty firms in 1955.29 Other analysts
argue that concentration ratios have increased in the domestic
market because producers have given up concessions that are no
longer profitable. Domestic production has been declining since
the early 1970s, as have reserves since the early 1960s. Concentra­
tion will increase as fewer companies are left with profitable hold­
ings.
Finally, economic opinion on this issue has been examined
systematically. In 1975, Barbara Hobbie polled academic econo­
mists and journalists on their attitudes toward charges of oil in­
dustry monopoly and proposals for divestiture.50 The economists
she surveyed had testified before congressional committees or pub­
lished extensively on oil economics; the journalists were mostly
editors from large-circulation newspapers and periodicals.
Hobbie found that 76 percent of these economists rejected the
charge that the major oil companies possess monopoly power in
any stage of the oil business. By contrast, 54 percent of the journal­
ists agreed with this allegation. As to specific operations, Hobbie
concluded, “ in all cases— production, refining, marketing, tank­
ers, pipelines, and other energy areas— the economists perceived
fewer monopoly problems than did the journalists.” 51
On the broader question of whether the major integrated com­
panies “ make it difficult” for independent companies to compete,
two out of three economists (67 percent) disagreed, while two out
of three journalists (68 percent) agreed. Finally, a majority of
economists agreed that there was a “ consensus among economic

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experts” against divestiture. Only a third of the journalists saw it
that way.
Overall, this survey of economists, like the concentration com­
parisons over time and across industries, offers little support for
the current portrayal of petroleum as a monopolistic or oligopolis­
tic industry. On the other hand, this image was more appropriate
in the pre-World War II era, and case studies demonstrate that
anticompetitive structures and practices have existed in particular
instances.
We have not evaluated the argument that the vital nature of
the oil industry demands stricter criteria in deciding what level of
concentration harms the public interest. This is a matter of social
philosophy rather than purely economic analysis. We conclude
only that current concentration rates in the oil industry do not
diverge markedly from those in other manufacturing industries.

Manipulating Supply
O f all charges levied against the oil companies, that of manipulat­
ing supply is the most defensible. Throughout the industry’s his­
tory, the companies have always tried to control the supply of oil
on the market at any given time. In response, it may be argued that
their efforts partly stem from the technical nature of production,
the uncertainty of supply over the long term, and the disruptive
effects of new and unexpected sources for oil on its price.
Although the cost of drilling oil is low compared to its histori­
cal selling price, the industry must always search for new sources
of supply. Since oil is an exhaustible resource, the risk of an
unsuccessful search increases over time. In addition, costs of drill­
ing are initially high, drop after pumping begins, but then increase
along with output. As each barrel is pumped from a well, declining
well pressure makes the recovery of the next barrel more expen­
sive. The rate of pumping the oil also affects the cost. The faster
the rate of exploitation, the quicker costs increase. The storage
costs of excess supplies are also quite high. Thus, any new supplies
are generally put on the market. Each company must be con­
stantly on the lookout for new sources of supply lest its competi­
tors get the jump on it. So each company also runs the risk that

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new supplies will be found before the market has expanded suffi­
ciently to absorb them.32
One solution to these problems would be for each company to
produce only enough to meet its current needs. This was made
impossible, however, by the property rights in the original major
producing country, the United States. Here the right to exploit
underground resources belongs to the owner of the surface land.
Oil pools, unfortunately, do not conform to the shape of individual
ownership plots. By the time the oil boom hit the lucrative Texas
oil fields in the early twentieth century, the land had already been
divided among individual owners. Since large pools could be
drilled successfully with only one well, producers sought to econo­
mize on land costs by leasing the smallest plot possible.
The law of capture ruled that the oil in any given field (often
several hundred square miles) belonged to the individual who
pumped it out. Therefore, each producer sought to pump as much
oil as possible from a common pool shared with rivals. Rational
pumping by an individual only ensured that oil would be drained
off by competitors. As new supplies flooded the market, each
producer tried to dispose of his portion as quickly as possible in
order to pump more. Prices dropped drastically, forcing many
producers into bankruptcy. This is what gave the industry its early
boom-or-bust character. Federal antitrust regulations prevented
producers from banding together to control supply.
In the 1920s, after the discoveries of vast oil resources in the
Middle East, the host governments retained the right to lease all
underground resources. Fearful of overproduction, the Middle
East producing companies formed a cartel to control the potential
surplus. Each agreed to refrain from competition in markets al­
ready supplied by another cartel partner. Excess supplies, beyond
those needed in existing markets, were pumped only for new
markets or those supplied by noncartel companies. By 1932, all
future Seven Sisters companies except one had become partici­
pants in this cartel. They engaged in various anticompetitive prac­
tices aimed at maintaining their market domination and control­
ling independent companies’ access to refiners and marketers.33
The specter of cheap Middle East oil flooding the U.S. market

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prompted domestic producers to seek a solution to their own
problems of supply. Thus, producing states of the Southwest
formed an interstate compact that limited each state to producing
no more oil than it had in 1928. The individual states would then
ration their allotments among producers operating within their
borders. In time, this so-called pro-rationing scheme came to focus
solely on maintaining prices.
These practices severely restricted free competition. The oper­
ation of the cartel during the 1930s enabled the Seven Sisters to
maintain higher than average profit rates, since the price of oil
always far exceeded its true costs. However, it can also be argued
that production restrictions served consumer interests as well. If
a well is drilled too quickly, the ultimate amount of recoverable
reserves decreases. The production quotas thus encouraged ratio­
nal exploitation of the well and kept costs down.
The international cartel operated throughout the 1930s. It was
informally abandoned with the approach of World War II and
never re-established. After the war, the international companies
did not need the cartel, for its provisions had become internalized
by each company as customary' operating procedures. In addition,
successful national cartels had developed. There was tacit accep­
tance of the companies’ common interest in controlling supply.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the increase in world demand
for oil laid to rest most fears of overproduction. The old fears were
raised again by increased competition from the independents and
demands of the host countries for more rapid production to in­
crease their tax and royalty payments. But the changing structure
of the world oil market in the late 1960s prevented new supply
problems.
After 1965, growth of demand for oil exceeded growth of sup­
ply. The Texas oilfields were reaching their productive peaks and
would soon begin to decline. Thus, the pro-rationing scheme
ceased to have any meaning for price maintenance. Instead, price
controls on domestic oil were used to keep expensive Texas oil
competitive with Middle East oil. Oil import quotas, in effect from
1959 until April 1973, were also partly designed to protect the
domestic oil industry. By limiting the amount of foreign oil that

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could be imported into the United States, the government ensured

the market shares of the domestic producers. Had foreign oil been
freely imported during this period, prices for oil products would
have been lower.
Thus, until 1973, domestic and international producers did
actively manipulate the supply of oil, in order to increase and
stabilize its price. Critics point to such practices as price squeez­
ing, denial of supplies, and production manipulation. Since the
OPEC oil embargo of 1973, however, control of supply has mostly
passed from the oil companies to the producing countries.
Nonetheless, concerns over industry manipulation persist. The
simultaneous shocks of supply shortages and price increases led
to charges that the companies withheld supplies in order to justify
planned price increases. Conversely, industry supporters argue
that the shortages led to higher prices, particularly since o p e c
tended to combine production cutbacks with price increases. It is
also unclear how much control the oil companies had over the
OPEC price increases of October 1973. The bulk of the OPEC oil was
produced by the major international oil companies,34and the mag­
nitude of the October increase was in part due to the companies’
reluctance to meet earlier government demands for a somewhat
smaller increase.35
During the past decade, the federal government has subjected
industry performance to close and periodic scrutiny. Price in­
creases and supply shortages are investigated routinely by the
Department of Energy, the General Accounting Office (g a o ), the
Congress, and the Federal Trade Commission. The government
has also taken a more active role in determining how crude sup­
plies are refined.
Charges of company misconduct over the past several years
have proliferated. The g a o , for example, investigated the oil com­
panies to determine whether they manipulated the Iranian cutoff
of oil in 1978-79 for their own benefit. The g a o concluded that the
Iranian cutoff was exacerbated by a simultaneous drop in domestic
production, but noted that such a drop was normal for that time
of year. Furthermore, it found no evidence that the oil companies
created the U.S. oil shortage.36

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Several companies have been charged with improper pricing
policies under a variety of government regulations, and they have
sometimes made large settlements or agreed to forgo increases.”
The companies claim the problem is one of interpreting complex
and ambiguous government guidelines.18
In sum, industry critics are justified in charging the oil compa­
nies with manipulation of supply prior to 1973. Since that time,
however, the companies have had less opportunity to control
supply. That prerogative has largely passed to o p e c . In addition,
the effects of pre-1973 manipulation may not have been entirely
negative. Supply manipulation is usually criticized for misallocat-
ing resources and producing artificially high prices. In the classic
case of a monopolized or highly concentrated industry, supply is
curtailed below the level of demand that would otherwise prevail.
But the oil companies maintain they curtailed supply only to the
level of expected demand. They sought to expand rather than
contain their markets. If the demand for oil rose, the companies
were willing to increase their supply. During this period, the price
of oil was also quite stable and low relative to the prices of other
goods.
Thus, while supply manipulation did occur, there are argu­
ments supporting the oil companies as well. These concern both
the effects of and the decreased possibilities for manipulation after
1973-
Summary
Economic studies of the oil industry tend to argue against reach­
ing quick judgments about allegations of obscene profits,
oligopoly, or current supply manipulation. For example, profits
increased dramatically during the 1970s. On the other hand, indus­
try profitability over the past thirty years has been no higher than
that of other industries. Similarly, the oil industry has been highly
concentrated in years past. However, the concentration levels
seem to have declined during the postwar period. At the same
time, the number of firms operating in the oil industry has in­
creased. The current level of concentration is comparable to that
of other manufacturing industries.

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Control of supply, long a primary goal of the largest compa­

nies, is no longer solely in their hands, due to the current interna­
tional political context. Supply manipulation unquestionably be­
nefited the companies by keeping prices up. It can also be argued,
however, that this did not significantly harm consumers. Without
supply control, producers would have been forced into destructive
competition in order to protect their investments, with supply and
price subject to erratic fluctuations. Additionally, technical char­
acteristics of oil production arguably required a coherent plan for
exploitation to maximize the ultimate supply and m in im iz e costs.
In short, the historical evidence is mixed, and recent trends
have rendered some charges less relevant than they once were.
These analyses do not preclude criticism of oil company practices.
Nor do they exonerate the industry executives of venal or even
illegal dealings. But they do demonstrate the complexities in­
volved in generalizing about industry profits, competition, and
supply control. By the 1960s, the old image of a monopolized,
profit-rich oil industry had become a matter of serious debate
among economists. In the post-OPEC era, the debate continues. Is
the oil companies’ public image deserved, or are the companies
suffering for the sins of their fathers? To find out, let us turn to
the media coverage.

Media Coverage o f the Oil Industry

In examining media coverage of the oil companies, this study
focused on three areas in which they were frequently criticized:
profits, competition, and supply manipulation. We examined all
stories dealing primarily with these topics in the New York Times,
Time, and the three major television networks from 1973 through
1980. This time period was chosen to include the two oil shocks
of 1973-74 and 1979.
Many other influences affect these issues, such as price con­
trols, windfall profit taxes, OPEC, import quotas, international
treaties, environmental issues, depletion allowances, et cetera.
However, we maintained a narrow focus in order to compare
media coverage of these three specific issues with the scholarly and
expert analyses discussed above.

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Coders examined 118 articles from the New York Times, and
52 from Time, as well as 63 broadcasts at ABC, 102 at CBS, and 65
at NBC — a total of 400 stories. To better reflect the historical
context of these reports, most findings are broken out separately
for three time periods: the first oil crisis during 1973-74, the in­
terim period from 1975 through 1978, and the second crisis and its
aftermath in 1979 and 1980.

Profit
Did the media simply report increasing profits during the oil
crises, or did they judge these profits excessive? Did they note the
lower profits during the interim years? Was profitability related to
inflation or net worth, the performance of other industries, or
other periods of history?
Profit Level. A ll outlets reported heavily on increased profits
during the crisis periods (see Table 16). Even though profits fell
during the interim period, however, the print media continued to
report increased profits. Overall, Time reported increased profits
in fifteen out of seventeen articles on profits (88 percent), and the
New York Times did so in thirty-five out of fifty stories, or 70
percent. Most of the remaining pieces were neutral or balanced.
Only four stories reported decreased or unchanged profits— two
during the interim and two during the second crisis. Even in the
years when profits were down, attention focused on earlier in­
creases, as in a 1977 Time article: “ Few can forget how in their
annual reports for 1974, the oil companies showed hefty increases

Table 16— Media Coverage of Oil Industry Profit Reports

New York Times Time Television

Increased Profit 70% 88% 85%

Decreased/U nchanged 6 6 5
Neutral 20 0 IO
Balanced _4 6 0
100% 100% 100%
Number of Stories 50 18 97
 T he M e d ia E l it e

in their profits over the preceding year: Exxon up 28.6%, Gulf up

33%, Mobil up 23.3%.” 39
The networks also reported almost exclusively on increased oil
company profits in 85 percent of all broadcasts. However, the
networks significantly changed their viewpoints during 1974-77.
Only one broadcast during the interim concerned increased
profits, compared to four reports of lowered profits, thereby fol­
lowing the actual trends of oil company profits. Note, however,
the sharp dropoff in profits reports during those years. In contrast,
only one televised report during either oil crisis period dealt with
decreased profits, compared to eighty-one broadcasts on profit
increases. For example, a 1974 a b c broadcast called one 60 percent
profit increase “ a jump so big as to prove almost embarrassing.” 40
When all media coverage is combined, reports on increased
profits outweighed stories on decreases by a margin of nearly
fifteen to one. Stories on increases outnumbered those on de­
creases even during the 1975 to 1978 period, which saw substantial
dropoffs in the industry’s profit margin.
Profit Evaluation. Were profits deemed justified, partially jus­
tified, or unjustified? Supportive explanations of oil company
profits ranged from expert analysis to company executives’ deni­
als. Thus, a New York Times story justified profits with reference
to financial analysts’ findings: “ But, despite the widely held opin­
ion that the big oil companies’ profits are too great, the findings
of financial specialists . . . almost uniformly indicate other­
wise . . .” 41
On a b c , a Texaco spokesman justified high profits by citing the
high cost of replacing current stocks: “ Oil prices must go up
further in the future because it is becoming much more costly to
replace the crude oil and reserves that we have . . . .” 42 And CBS
aired a different industry argument: “ G ulf President B.R. Dorsey
said that even higher profits may be needed to encourage the
search for new oil sources.” 43
Criticism ranged from charges of profiteering to discussions of
how much profit is reasonable. High profits were sometimes linked
to accusations of an oil crisis hoax. As one New York Times article
put it, “ the embattled industry appears indecisive and ineffectual

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in combating charges that they are reaping enormous profits from
a crisis of their own making.” 44
The companies’ high profits were also contrasted to the aver­
age citizen’s difficulties in paying higher oil prices. ABC quoted a
senator who called the profits, “ . . . a travesty when people are
paying through the nose for home heating oil and gasoline.” 45And
CBS showed Senator Henry Jackson using a phrase that became a
famous rallying cry against the industry: “ I want to see a reason­
able profit, a fair profit, but we can’t tolerate obscene profits.” 46
All outlets also carried stories characterizing the profits as
partly justified. These combinations of criticism and support often
described profits as excessive but explainable, or as legitimate but
high enough to require governmental regulation. A 1979 Time
article shows how explanation could be combined with criticism:

O il industry profits for this quarter are expected to rise any­

w here from 20% to 40 % above last year’s. A m o n g the reasons
— inventories acquired at last year’s prices are becom ing m ore
valuable as o p e c pushes up the w orld w id e cost o f crude.
A few com panies seem destined to reap an absolute em bar­
rassment o f r ic h e s. . . Says [A shland Oil] C hairm an O rin A tk in s
. . . “ W h at is good for A shlan d O il is good for the cou n try.” A s
alw ays, the ultim ate victim s are the nation’s consum ers. . . .47

The majority of profit reports (59 percent) did not ask whether
the amounts were justified or provided arguments on both sides.
Among those that did take a position, 23 percent were critical,
while 14 percent defended the profit margins, and 4 percent pre­
sented them as partly justified. The most negative coverage came
during the two oil crisis periods, particularly the first, when criti­
cal reports dominated by nearly a two to one margin. The cover­
age then ebbed and evened out until the second oil shock, when
it swung in a negative direction again, although not as sharply as
before.
The print media in particular shifted over time toward greater
acceptance of oil company profits. This shift was strongest at
Time, where oil company profits were reported in a balanced or

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neutral manner during both the first oil crisis and the interim
period. The second oil crisis saw Time defending oil company
profits as fully or partly justified twice as often as it criticized
unjustified profits. However, the New York Times took the posi­
tion that profits were unjustified during both crises. The ratio of
criticism to support there during the first crisis exceeded three to
one. Throughout the interim, the New York Times switched to
defending industry profits more often than not. But the Times
returned to criticism of profits with the second crisis.
While the print media gradually softened their criticism of oil
company profits, the networks maintained a neutral or balanced
stance throughout 1973-80. When the networks did broadcast
one-sided reports, they carried an almost equal number represent­
ing each position. The only shift over time in broadcasts was
toward more neutral reports.
Context of Profits. Simple statements of justification or criticism
hardly exhaust the complexities o f profit reports. Corporate profit­
ability seemed less extreme when examined in the contexts de­
scribed above (net worth and return on investment, impact of
inflation, comparison with other industries, and historical con­
text). These contexts, among others, give perspective to the figures
being reported. Were they included along with the profit reports?
Did the media utilize some of the analytical tools of the trade for
the economic reports? Or did they simply report raw facts without
contextual tools that would make them more meaningful?
First, we coded whether news reports linked profits with net
worth or return on investment. These factors tend to moderate a
high profit report, because a firm can enjoy increased profits while
having an equal or lower profit rate due to changes in net worth
or investment. However, the print media took these factors into
account in less than one-third of their reports on profits (31 per­
cent). On television, net worth or return on investment were men­
tioned in only 11 percent of the broadcasts covering profits. The
few times this context was considered by the media, it did lessen
the perception of high profits, as in this New York Times report
during the 1979 period of high profits: “ But the oil companies
insist that, even under the current favorable market conditions,

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industry profits are not excessive. In the second quarter . . . the
return on the $99 billion of invested capital of stockholders was
19.4 percent.” 4*
Another important contextual factor is inflation. After ac­
counting for inflation, real profit decreased significantly during the
1970s. Nevertheless, inflation was almost never tied to profit re­
ports. O f all media outlets examined, only the New York Times
and CBS ever reported any linkage between oil company profits
and inflation. Both carried one such story during each crisis. That
produced a total of four stories tying inflation to oil company
profits out of a possible 164 stories.
One also gains a broader perspective when an industry’s profits
are compared with those of other industries during the same time
period. Overall, oil industry profits did not prove excessively high
in comparison with other U.S. industries during the 1970s. This
was brought out frequently when the media did provide profit
comparisons. However, reporting on this issue was relatively rare.
It figured in only 12 broadcasts and 23 articles throughout the
period studied, or 20 percent of all relevant stories.
All outlets presented comparative perspectives most fre­
quently during the second oil crisis. But the New York Times split
with the others over how the oil companies stacked up relative to
other industries. During the first oil shock, the Times emphasized
that oil company profits were equal to or lower than those of other
industries. Thereafter, though, the Times presented petroleum
profits as higher than the norm. A 1979 article is typical: “ Global
revenues of these eight companies alone, each of them among the
largest corporations in the world, exceeded $203 billion last year,
dwarfing those of the Big Three American auto manufacturers
. . . or the steel industry. . . .” 49
At the networks and Time, this shift was reversed. They
treated oil profits as higher than the industrial average early on,
then portrayed the companies’ profit levels as no better than aver­
age after 1974. One 1979 Time story concluded,

Are the companies earning excessive profits? Not really. True,

they take advantage of overly generous tax credits on their

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foreign earnings. What is more, their profits rise automatically

whenever prices are kicked up by O P E C . With all that, oil firms
last year earned only 4.5% on their revenues, vs. 5.25% earned
by all U.S. industry.50

Finally, we coded whether profit reports were placed in histori­

cal (pre-1970) context. When profits are examined over time, oil
industry profitability does not appear so excessive. However, only
8 percent of the television reports on profits provided any histori­
cal context. That includes only two broadcasts during the last six
years of the study. The print media did not do much better. They
provided historical contexts in only one in six articles on profits,
mostly in the New York Times.
Thus, the mitigating contexts of high oil company profits were
addressed rarely. These factors were considered most often during
the second oil crisis. Just over half of all industry comparisons and
historical analyses were observed during the second oil crisis,
while only about 30 percent of such reports were made during the
first crisis. There was also a slight rise in the number of stories
tying inflation and net worth/retum on investment to profit.
Therefore, there may be a linkage between depth of reporting and
a more balanced perspective, since media criticism diminished
after the first oil crisis. This may also reflect the life cycle of media
coverage of a long-term controversy. Reporters may have bal­
anced their coverage as they gained experience and knowledge of
the issue.

Competition
How did the media cover the issues that support or refute accusa­
tions of monopolistic or oligopolistic practices? How deeply did
they go into important details, and how often did they place the
facts in comparative or historical context? To find out, we posed
a series of highly specific questions: Did a story portray market
entry as easy or difficult? If difficult, who received the blame? Was
the oil industry’s competitiveness seen as high or low, as increas­
ing or decreasing?
Charges of monopoly or oligopoly are supported by evidence

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of industry control over price and supply, both domestic and
international. So we asked how industry control over these factors
was reported. Some contexts of these stories were also considered.
Did the media compare oil company competition to that of other
industries? Was competitiveness assessed relative to earlier (pre-
I97°) periods? Finally, overall assessments of oil company compe­
tition were coded. To what extent did the media criticize oil
company practices, and to what extent did they defend them?
Market Entry. Ease of market entry is an important determinant
of competitiveness. Was market entry for the oil industry reported
as easy or difficult from 1973 to 1980?
O f 15 pieces that covered market entry, 12 were from the New
York Times. Seven articles appeared during the first oil crisis, and
all but one identified market entry as difficult. The Times main­
tained its judgment of market entry as difficult in three out of the
five remaining articles, thus reporting difficulty in nine out of 12
articles overall. The three remaining stories at other outlets also
portrayed market entry as difficult. Therefore, this judgment
represents 75 percent of the limited media coverage on market
entry.
The paucity of stories on market entry (only 15 out of 274
stories on competitiveness) deprived the public of relevant analyti­
cal details that might help assess oil industry competitiveness.
This topic was especially ignored by the networks. They ran only
one market entry story (on CBS) throughout the study period.
Where the media covered market entry as “ difficult,” we asked
who they blamed— the oil companies, other parties or factors, or
no one. Difficulty of market entry is a complex phenomenon. It
can be linked to economic conditions, government policies, inter­
national politics, and the nature of the industry, as well as an­
ticompetitive practices. However, in all but two of the New York
Times’ twelve articles, blame was assigned to the oil companies.
Time and CBS also blamed the oil companies in their three reports.
So the media blamed only oil company behavior for market entry
difficulties 88 percent of the time.
For example, a Times report mentioned that, “ the major oil
concerns had tried to prevent the smaller independents from

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getting access to the huge, low-cost Middle East oil reserves.” 51

Similarly, Time cited extensive charges by longtime industry critic
John Blair: “ Blair discovered a pattern of price fixing and cozy
marketing arrangements by which the big companies divided up
the world for their own gain and tried to ruin any small indepen­
dent firm that sought to cut prices or intrude on their turf.” 52The
repetition of such charges, whether true or not, was rarely bal­
anced with rebuttals or other perspectives on market entry diffi­
culties.
Competition/Concentration. All media outlets portrayed the oil
industry primarily as uncompetitive or highly concentrated. This
perspective was especially pronounced during the first oil crisis,
though the coverage became more balanced as time passed.
Twenty-eight out of 50 reports (56 percent) during the first oil
crisis pictured competition as decreasing or low. Only one story
(2 percent) reported high competition in 1973-74, with the rest
neutral or balanced. Typical of early negative coverage was a
Times story citing Senator Walter Mondale’s allegations of in­
creasing industry concentration. He concluded, in a statement,
“This is a trend which, if allowed to go unchecked, might com­
pletely destroy competition within the oil industry.” 53
This view moderated somewhat over time, so that about one-
third of all later reports during the interim lull and the second oil
crisis portrayed competition as low or concentration as high. This
proportionate change, however, was accompanied by a slackening
of coverage. Print articles portraying a competitive environment
increased from none at all during the first crisis to only two in the
interim and three during the second crisis. A t the same time,
reports of low or decreasing competition diminished from thirteen
during the first crisis to three in the lull and five during the second
crisis. Typical of these was a 1978 New York Times article, which
presented evidence of increasing competitiveness:

Some of the oil industry’s traditional leaders in gasoline sales

have seen their market share fall off sharply in the last year or
so, while some of the industry’s traditional also-rans have

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pushed their way to the top. And simultaneously, the major oil
companies as a group have lost business to the smaller inte­
grated oil companies and the independents.54

Television also moderated its reporting of anticompetitive

practices over time. The networks shifted from heavy coverage
stressing a lack of competition during the first crisis to primarily
neutral or balanced broadcasts thereafter.
There was far more coverage of competition during the first oil
crisis than in later years. Print coverage dropped from 33 articles
on competition in the first crisis to 11 during the lull and 14 in the
second crisis. Network coverage fell even more dramatically, from
17 broadcasts during the first crisis to 8 during the lull and only
2 during the second crisis. Thus, the anticompetitive perspective
early on was followed not by an alternative or more balanced view
but by the gradual disappearance of the issue.
Were the media losing interest in the charges of monopoly and
oligopoly, or were their analyses shifting to other areas? To find
out, we turned to industry control of price and supply. Such
practices are primary indicators that antitrust laws are being vi­
olated, or are about to be violated. We coded all stories dealing
with industry control over prices, domestic supply, and interna­
tional supply.
Price Control. When opinions were expressed in media coverage,
industry control over prices was asserted more often than refuted.
This was especially true during the first oil crisis, when this charge
was upheld over twice as often as it was rebutted. Coverage shifted
to defend the industry’s lack of control over price during 1975-78,
but tilted back again toward supporting charges of price control
during the second oil shock. In all, 28 percent of the stories
accused the industry of controlling prices, and 21 percent denied
this, with the remainder neutral or balanced.
This overall picture masks significant variation from one outlet
to another. In particular, the three television networks’ percep­
tions varied sharply, a b c reported both views equally throughout
í 973- 8 o , CBS shifted to reporting industry control during the

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second oil crisis, and n b c emphasized industry control of prices

at all times. The shift at CBS culminated in stories like the follow­
ing, in which there was no doubt of industry price control: “ In
another study released today, d o e says the top 15 companies were
guilty of massive overcharges in the 3 years after the 1973 Arab
oil embargo.” 55Yet television news did maintain a high percentage
of neutral or balanced reports. In fact, these constituted solid
majorities during both crisis periods.
There were similar differences between the print media. The
New York Times portrayed the oil industry as controlling prices
more often than not during both oil crises, but to a diminishing
degree. Reports of industry control predominated by a four to one
ratio during the first crisis, but by only a slight plurality during
the second. By contrast, Time maintained steady coverage empha­
sizing no industry control over prices throughout 1973-80. In fact,
Time reported industry control in only one story out of thirty-
three. Time couched almost two-thirds of its articles in neutral or
balanced terms. Overall, this topic illustrates the degree to which
national media outlets can present quite different perspectives on
a controversy.
Domestic Supply Control. Coverage of industry control of domes­
tic supply followed a similar pattern over time. All media outlets
affirmed industry control over domestic supply most frequently
during the first oil crisis. Industry control arguments decreased
during the mid-1970s, then increased again in the second oil crisis.
Overall, these stories alleged industry control over domestic oil
supplies four times more often than they exonerated the industry.
The New York Times published 57 articles touching on this
topic, almost half of all Times articles coded. By contrast, Time
covered it in only 11 articles. During the first crisis, the Times
indicted the oil industry seven times as often as it vindicated
industry practices. An early Times article demonstrates the argu­
ment of domestic supply control by industry: “ The regional unit
of the Federal Energy Office here is investigating what its director
yesterday termed the suspicious sale of millions of gallons of
heating oil by wholesalers that he called ‘the dirty dozen.’ ” 54
Thereafter, the paper’s coverage was almost evenly divided be­

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tween the two positions. For example, this piece presents control
over domestic supply as a matter of opinion:

If shortages occur, the public will blame the industry and Gov­
ernment; the industry will blame the Administration and Con­
gress; the Administration will blame the industry and Congress,
while Congress will blame the industry and the Administration.
Ascribing the blame is a difficult and possibly a worthless exer­
cise. . . .57

Time, on the other hand, kept mainly to neutral or balanced

articles throughout 1973-80. The heaviest criticism came from
television, which tempered its charges only slightly as time went
on. During the first crisis, charges of domestic supply manipula­
tion outnumbered rebuttals by a ten to one margin. During the
1975-78 lull, the margin dropped to two to one. The second crisis
brought another surge of criticism, raising the anti-industry mar­
gin back up to four to one.
International Supply Control. Industry control over international
supply was a different story. The print media provided a nearly
equal number of articles on each viewpoint during the first oil
crisis, and thereafter shifted dramatically toward the industry’s
position. During the second crisis, every article accusing the com­
panies of such control was outweighed by eight articles exonerat­
ing the industry. Thus, a 1974 New York Times article indicated
a significant degree of industry control over international supply:

To this day the opec countries do not sell directly to the Ash-
lands and Citgos and the European and Japanese refiners in any
significant volume. Thus such refiners cannot shop around in
the opec for the best prices; they have to go to Exxon, Shell,
Texaco.5'

By 1979, the Times was far more likely to attribute supply

control to o p e c rather than the oil companies: “ It is already
apparent [that o p e c ] has managed to keep the oil market tight
despite having almost doubled world prices in less than a year.

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And now, they say, there are signs that OPEC may succeed in
coordinating production cutbacks next year---- ” 59Television was,
if anything, even less sympathetic to such accusations. Through­
out the entire period only two of eighteen broadcasts supported
charges of industry control.
Thus, media coverage of industry control over price and sup­
ply came in two distinct phases. The first crisis brought forth
criticism of the oil companies on all fronts, with little credence
given the defenses they offered. During the second crisis, criticism
of domestic supply control was somewhat muted, and the cover­
age supported the oil companies’ position on international supply.
This turnabout was probably linked to increased media awareness
of OPEC’s role in controlling price and supply. Unlike some other
disputes over monopolistic practices, coverage of these variables
decreased only slightly over time.
So the issue of “ oilogopoly” was still alive during the second
crisis, although in a different form. No longer were the media
concerned with the industry’s internal dynamics. Who controlled
what was a more important concern during the second oil crisis.
Contexts of Competition. Two key pieces of contextual informa­
tion— competition relative to other industries and in historical
perspective— provide broader perspectives that sometimes place
industry practices in a more favorable light. However, only 5
articles or broadcasts out of 274 compared the oil industry’s com­
petitiveness with that of other industries. Four of these placed
petroleum in the low to moderate competition range, and none
portrayed the industry as highly competitive.
Only slightly more attention was given to the historical context
of oil company competition— a total of eleven stories across all
media, including eight by the New York Times. All but two of
these appeared during the first oil crisis. Thus, once again, impor­
tant contextual information was left virtually unaddressed by the
media. And once again, television coverage was even more sketchy
than print.
“ Oilogopoly?” Finally, we coded all stories dealing with the in­
dustry’s competitiveness for their general perspective on this
topic. Stories were placed in the anticompetition camp if they

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asserted that the oil industry was engaging in monopolistic or
oligopolistic practices or moving in that direction; portrayed the
industry as noncompetitive, or becoming increasingly so; or other­
wise charged that small producers were being driven out of busi­
ness. Stories were classified as procompetitive if they described the
industry as nonmonopolistic or nonoligopolistic, or becoming less
so; denied that the companies were engaging in such practices; or
otherwise portrayed the industry as currently or increasingly com­
petitive. As usual, balanced or neutral categories were also in­
cluded (see Table 17).
Both print and broadcast media gave far more coverage to the
charges of monopoly, although they became more balanced over
time. The most striking shift occurred at the New York Times.
During the first crisis, the Times presented the noncompetitive
case over three times as often as the competitive view. For exam­
ple, a 1973 article cited a Federal Trade Commission study which
concluded that, “ the major oil companies have behaved in a man­
ner similar to a classical monopolist: they have attempted to in­
crease profits by restricting output.” 60
During the mid 1970s, however, both sides were equally repre­
sented. By the second crisis, the Times made a complete turn­
around, portraying the industry as competitive twice as often as
the converse. For example, the following article refutes the image
of a powerful monopolistic oil industry: “ Before the embargo and

Table 17— Media’s Overall Assessment of Oil Industry

Competition
New York Times Time Television

Monopolistic 32% 3% 18%

Nonmonopolistic 21 8 3
Neutral 24 26 59
Balanced _*3 64 20
100% IO I% * 100%
Number of Stories 96 39 140

•R e fle c ts ro u n d in g e rro r

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

1973 price explosion, the Seven Sisters pumped and marketed most
exporters’ oil at fixed prices under long-term contracts. Today,
they control barely 42 percent. . . . [The Sisters] find their role
diminished to that of hired hands.” 61
Compared to this turnabout, Time was a model of consist­
ency, running mainly balanced stories throughout the study.
Television’s coverage was more one-sided, although the net­
works, too, gradually discovered the competitive side of the ar­
gument. A majority of all broadcasts were neutral. When a point
of view was presented, however, the anticompetitive perspective
tended to dominate. During the first oil shock, televised charges
of monopolistic practices outnumbered rebuttals by a fifteen to
one margin.
As the crisis receded, while the print media were offering
balanced coverage, the critics still prevailed over the airwaves by
a six to one ratio. During the second crisis, when the Times was
favoring the proponents of industry competitiveness, television
continued to offer the opponents a two to one edge. Overall, T V
news presented portrayals of monopoly or oligopoly about six
times as often as pictures of competition. For example, in 1974 CBS
interviewed an “ oil industry analyst,” who charged that, “ We’re
being ripped off by the oil companies with the blessings of the
federal government. . .
Combining print and broadcast reports revealed three general
trends in media portrayals of oil industry competition. First, the
majority of all news reports were neutral or balanced on this issue.
Second, when one viewpoint did prevail, it was much more likely
to be the anticompetitive perspective. Finally, there was a signifi­
cant shift on this issue over time toward the proponents of a
competitive industry. During the first crisis, the monopoly view
predominated by almost a five to one margin. For the next few
years, the competitive view ran a much closer second. By the
second crisis, it finally came out on top.

Supply Manipulation
Supply manipulation implies a callous indifference to the public
interest. It includes accusations that oil companies suppressed

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production, withheld supplies, exported oil despite domestic
shortages, and even helped create an oil crisis as a hoax for their
own ends.
How did the media cover such charges (see Table 18)? Print
and television outlets devoted an equal number of stories to them
— 77 apiece, or 154 overall. The tenor of their coverage was also
quite similar, presenting charges about twice as often as rebuttals.
Forty-nine percent of print media stories supported supply mani­
pulation charges, compared to 25 percent that rejected the
charges, with the rest neutral or balanced.
This disparity was most evident at the New York Times, where
56 percent of all articles backed up allegations of manipulation
and only 23 percent rebutted them. For example, one Times story
asked, “ are the major oil companies creating a false shortage to
raise prices and profits and drive small ‘independent’ companies
. . . to the wall?” 65 The article went on to quote Wisconsin Repre­
sentative Les Aspin, “ There is little doubt that the so-called gaso­
line shortage in the Midwest is just a big lousy gimmick foisted
on consumers to bilk them for billions in increased gasoline
prices.”
Time was more evenhanded, presenting the promanipulation
argument only slightly more often than its opposite, by 36 to 28
percent. For example, one article defended the industry against
charges of creating a “ phony” oil shortage: “ Are the companies
creating a phony shortage? No. The crisis is real . . . . Are the
companies hoarding gasoline to raise the price? No. They are

Table 18— Media’s Assessment of Oil Industry Supply

Manipulation
N e w Y o r k T im es T im e T ele v isio n

M a n ip u la te s S u p p ly 56% 36% 44%

D o e s N o t M a n ip u la te 23 28 16
N e u tra l IO 0 14
B a la n ce d II _3 <> 26
100% 100% 100%
N u m b e r o f S tories 52 25 77

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

rebuilding their inventories. . . .” 64 As usual, television was a

source of heavy criticism. Whereas accusations of manipulation
roughly doubled denials in print, the margin rose to nearly three
to one at the networks (44 to 16 percent).
The coverage on this issue was both heaviest and most negative
during the first oil crisis. By the mid-1970s, it became more bal­
anced. Over half of all stories on supply manipulation appeared
during the initial oil shock of 1973-74. During those years, charges
exceeded rebuttals by margins of over five to one at the New York
Times and nine to one at the networks. Only Time provided
relatively balanced coverage early on.
After this period, the Times maintained a precise 50-50 split
in pro- and antimanipulation stories. Television changed more
gradually. The promanipulation edge dropped to around three to
one during the mid-1970s and almost disappeared altogether dur­
ing the second crisis.
Even as the media lent a more sympathetic ear to the indus­
try’s side, they provided less and less historical information that
might help the public understand their shift in perspective. Only
one story in seven provided any historical context for the debate
on supply manipulation, and most of these appeared during the
first oil shock. Once again, television proved the most superficial
news source. Only 5 percent of all broadcasts (4 out of 77) supplied
any historical background for viewers.
As on most questions related to profit and competition, media
coverage on supply manipulation was heavily critical of the oil
industry during the first oil shock but somewhat more balanced
thereafter. Overall, the critics prevailed over the industry’s de­
fenders. Only one outlet, Time magazine, gave about equal cover­
age to both positions. Finally, the media paid little (and, in this
case, dwindling) attention to contextual information that might
have provided a better longer-range perspective on the hotly con­
tested events of the moment.

W ho’s to Blame?
Finally, we sought a broader perspective on how the media cov­
ered the oil companies’ role in the energy crisis. Coders noted

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every instance in which someone was deemed responsible for
problems associated with the oil crises. In the 400 stories coded,
there were 473 instances where responsibility was clearly assessed
for a problem under discussion. They comprised five categories of
culprits: the oil companies, the U.S. government, o p e c or other
oil-producing countries, consumers, and all others (ranging from
environmentalists to state governments to the weather).
Where did responsibility for the oil crises and their attendant
problems lie? Most often, the media laid the blame at the oil
industry’s door (see Table 19). The answer was the same at all
outlets except Time, which found the federal government just as
culpable as the oil companies. Each received 32 percent of all
mentions, compared to 24 percent for the oil-producing coun­
tries.65Elsewhere it was no contest; the companies shouldered over
40 percent of the blame in the pages of the New York Times,
double the proportion assigned to both o p e c and the government.
At the networks the spread was even greater. Television fixed
the blame on the oil companies exactly half the time. The govern­
ment finished a distant second at 20 percent, and o p e c trailed
behind with 15 percent. The three networks moved closely in
tandem; the share of responsibility they assigned the oil companies
varied only 3 percent, from 48 percent at a b c to 51 percent at
NBC. For example, a CBS story concluded, “ A large part of the
blame for declining heating oil supplies rests with the major oil

Table 19— Blame Assigned for Causing Energy Problems

New York Times Time Television

Oil Companies 4 1% 32% 50%

OPEC 21 24 •5
Government
U .S. 20 32 20
Consumers 6 6 3
Others 12 _5 J3
100% 99% * IO I% *

Number of Stories 90 48 133

•ro u n d in g e rro r

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

companies . . . for the past three months the oil companies have
produced two gallons of more profitable gasoline for every one
gallon of heating oil, despite Federal Emergency Preparedness
Agency pleas for more oil.” 66
Trends over time followed previous patterns, with one excep­
tion. Four of the five media outlets blamed the companies some­
what less as time went on, although they remained the principal
target. For example, the proportion of responsibility the Times
assigned to the industry dropped by 9 percent from the first to the
second crisis; OPEC picked up the slack. The exception to this
trend was at CBS. There the blame affixed to the oil companies
jumped 25 percent from the first to the second crisis, c b s pointed
to the oil industry over two-thirds of the time it assigned responsi­
bility during the second crisis. This was the most striking instance
in the study of one network diverging from the others. Even at a b c
and NBC, however, the oil industry remained the main repository
of responsibility throughout the study.

Conclusion: M ajor Media vs. Big Oil

This study began by surveying economic analyses of oil industry
profitability, concentration and competition, and price and supply
practices. It then analyzed media coverage of the same topics
during the energy crisis years of 1973 through 1980. A brief review
of the findings follows.
Profits. The media featured heavy coverage of soaring oil industry
profits during both oil shocks. The amount of coverage fell sharply
during the four-year interim, when profits were down. Even dur­
ing that period of lower profit margins, the print media continued
to publish reports mainly stressing the large amounts of money oil
companies were making. Overall, reports of profit increases out­
numbered decreases by almost fifteen to one.
The media often cast a jaundiced eye on oil industry profits.
During the first oil crisis, the level of profits was presented as
unjustified twice as often as it was justified. After that, the two
views were given about equal weight, until the second crisis
brought another upsurge of criticism. The New York Times led the
criticism, while Time magazine was least critical.

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This largely negative portrayal of industry profits was also
notable for what it failed to include. There was little coverage of
several factors that provide contexts for ameliorating the apparent
magnitude of profits. Despite heightened public concern over in­
flation during the 1970s, the effects of inflation on oil company
profits rarely were addressed. Nor were profit margins usually
linked to a firm’s net worth or return on investment, a common
tool economists use in assessing profitability. Finally, oil company
profits rarely were compared to those of other industries or previ­
ous time periods.
Competition. Media treatment of industry competition followed a
similar pattern of initial harsh criticism moderating over time,
with historical or comparative perspective lacking. Market entry
was portrayed as difficult and perceived as the fault of the major
companies rather than due to any structural factors. This issue
was rarely broached outside the pages of the New York Times, or
after 1974. The industry was portrayed as noncompetitive or
becoming less so, especially during the first oil crisis. There­
after, coverage of this issue, too, diminished rapidly, especially at
the networks.
Charges of price and supply control elicited more continuous
coverage throughout the 1970s. During the first oil crisis, the
media supported charges of industry price-fixing by a two to one
ratio. They supported allegations of domestic supply controls by
a margin exceeding eight to one. Only charges of international
supply control were rejected from the outset, by a smaller margin.
The coverage became less critical of the industry on all these
issues with the passage of time. However, it exonerated the oil
companies only from the charge of control over international
supplies, as OPEC’s primacy in this sphere was noted increasingly.
Yet the media remained critical of industry attempts to control
domestic oil supplies. For the entire period studied this charge got
about four times the coverage given to industry rebuttals. In light
of these findings on specific issues, it is not surprising that overall
media assessments of oil industry competition came down on the
side of the “ oiligopoly,” by a margin of over two to one. During
the first oil crisis few stories portrayed the industry as competitive.

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

During the second crisis, the print media stressed competitive

factors over anticompetitive elements, and the margin enjoyed by
the anticompetitive perspective on television narrowed sharply.
Despite this shift, the massive early coverage ensured the overall
primacy of the anticompetitive view, as did the lack of compara­
tive or historical context in most articles and broadcasts.
Supply Manipulation. The media consistently covered charges
that the oil industry tried to manipulate supplies to enhance their
profits at the public’s expense. Overall, these allegations received
about twice the coverage of rebuttals. Time provided the most
balanced coverage, while the New York Times and the networks
provided almost equally sharp criticism. The largest number of
stories ran during the first oil shock, when negative pieces pre­
vailed over positive ones by margins of five to one at the Times
and nine to one over the airwaves. During the second crisis, by
contrast, coverage at all outlets was relatively balanced.
Blame. Assessments of blame fell right into line with the findings
on more specific issues. The oil industry received most of the
blame that was meted out, especially during the first energy crisis.
Time parceled out equal measures of blame to industry and gov­
ernment. A t the networks and the New York Times, the compa­
nies were held responsible for problems more often than anyone
else.
These findings are consistent across many controversial topics.
The media were primarily critical of the oil companies in areas
ranging from profits and anticompetitive practices to allegations
that they created the energy crisis, exacerbated it, or callously
turned it to their advantage.
The criticisms generally were sharpest during the first crisis
period of 1973-74, then moderated during the second oil shock of
1979. On most issues the New York Times led the criticism, fol­
lowed by the television networks. Time featured the least negative
coverage.
On several issues, this negative coverage brought the media’s
portrayal of the oil companies into conflict with the technical
literature on industry profitability and competitiveness. For exam-

290
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pie, heavy coverage of soaring profits during 1974 and 1979 was
never balanced by pieces on much lower profits during other
years, or petroleum’s moderate long-term profitability relative to
other industries. In fact, stories often focused on high profits even
during years when profits had decreased. Similarly, the media’s
emphasis on industry concentration and lack of competition gave
short shrift to the economic literature questioning the image of a
highly concentrated industry and showing increased opportunities
for market entry.
Media coverage of these issues was hindered by a persistent
failure to provide a broader context on controversies of the mo­
ment, in the form of comparative data, historical perspective, or
explanations of the complicated analytical concepts discussed
here. It was also weakened by a paucity of expert testimony that
might have provided such perspectives. Out of nearly 1,500
sources cited in the stories coded, only 24, or 1.6 percent, were
independent researchers based at universities or think tanks.
This is especially important in light of Barbara Hobbie’s sur­
veys. She found that journalists not only were significantly more
critical of the oil industry than academic experts; they also por­
trayed economic opinion as more divided than it actually was.
Thus, the coverage seemed to reflect journalists’ perspectives more
than those of economists.67
Journalists attempting to deal with this complex and contro­
versial story were confronted with a welter of contradictory asser­
tions coming from government, industry, and angry consumers.
Faced with daily deadlines, and lacking independent expert opin­
ion, it would not be surprising if they tended to fall back on
populist mistrust of “big oil” dating back to the early years of the
century. This interpretation is supported by the consistency of
critical coverage across various topics, despite the sometimes very
different perspectives available in the scholarly literature.
The equally consistent shift to more balanced coverage and
increased supportive contextual information over time suggests
that reporters may have gradually become more attuned to the
complexities of these topics, and thereby more able to present both
 T he M e d ia E l it e

sides of the issues. If so, this study may do more than demonstrate
journalists’ tendencies to project their own assumptions into the
news. It may also show their willingness to alter those assump­
tions in the face of new information and changing circumstances.

292
 A N D THAT’S THE WAY IT IS . . .

“ Would I be a journalist everyone could trust if

every time politicians or, God help us,
sociologists told us how to do our job I said, ‘Oh
yes, master, we’ll do just as you say’?”
— Dan Rather, quoted in the Washington Post

D a n R a t h e r ’ s irritation is understandable. The news media

often bring cries of outrage from critics who have little else in
common. Conservatives decry the media’s liberal bias and try to
combat it by buying CBS. Liberals call for opening up the news to
the underrepresented perspectives of women and minorities. Radi­
cals want the news to concentrate on what should be happening,
instead of the “conservative” standard of what is happening.1
Journalists and academics join the fray with a seemingly continu­
ous series of conferences and symposia that seek to improve the
profession and its public image. To paraphrase Marx, the critics
have attempted to change the media. The point, however, is to
understand it.
Our goal has been to understand the relationship between
journalists’ perspectives and their product, in the context of the
media’s changing role in American society. To accomplish this we
have combined the approaches of social theory and social science,
the methods of survey research and content analysis, and the

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perspectives of political sociology and social psychology. What are

the results?
The demographics are clear. The media elite are a homoge­
neous and cosmopolitan group, who were raised at some distance
from the social and cultural traditions of small-town middle
America. Drawn mainly from big cities in the northeast and north
central states, their parents tended to be well off, highly educated
members of the upper middle class. Most have moved away from
any religious heritage, and very few are regular churchgoers. In
short, the typical leading journalist is the very model of the mod­
em eastern urbanite.
The dominant perspective of this group is equally apparent.
Today’s leading journalists are politically liberal and alienated
from traditional norms and institutions. Most place themselves to
the left of center and regularly vote the Democratic ticket. Yet
theirs is not the New Deal liberalism of the underprivileged, but
the contemporary social liberalism of the urban sophisticate. They
favor a strong welfare state within a capitalist framework. They
differ most from the general public, however, on the divisive social
issues that have emerged since the 1960s— abortion, gay rights,
affirmative action, et cetera. Many are alienated from the “ sys­
tem” and quite critical of America’s world role. They would like
to strip traditional powerbrokers of their influence and empower
black leaders, consumer groups, intellectuals, and . . . the media.
These characteristics will likely become more pronounced in
the future. Journalists from the post-Watergate generation place
themselves well to the left of their older colleagues. Moreover,
students at the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism take a
quantum leap beyond their elders in criticizing America’s eco­
nomic and political institutions, while sharing their rejection of
traditional social and cultural norms. They also profess admira­
tion for liberal public figures and media organs, but disapprove of
conservative newsmakers and news outlets.
None of this proves that media coverage is biased. The whole
notion of bias has become a straw man that obscures the far less
obvious (and less nefarious) processes that mediate between jour­
nalists’ perspectives and their product. Psychological tests show

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 And That’s the Way It Is . . .

how their outlooks can unconsciously operate to shape their con­

ceptions of the news. First, in selecting sources they consider
reliable on nuclear energy, welfare reform, consumer protection,
and the environment, their choices accord with their own perspec­
tives on business and government.
Second, to a statistically significant degree, leading journalists
tend to perceive elements of social controversies in terms that
correspond to their own attitudes. The journalists and a business
control group were shown specially constructed news stories deal­
ing with topics like affirmative action, bribery in international
business practices, and the income gap between blacks and whites.
After reading the same stories, the journalists were more likely to
recall a rising racial income gap and the businessmen to remember
a declining one; the media elite differentially perceived threats to
affirmative action where the business group observed reverse dis­
crimination; the newspeople more often stressed business immor­
ality while the executives emphasized unfair standards. The two
groups were asked to summarize the stories, not to evaluate the
issues involved. But the results show how unconscious evaluation
can sometimes help determine perception. Remembering is choos­
ing to remember, though the choice takes us unawares.
This process is not only confined to the political realm. Selec­
tive perceptions of controversial cues are emblematic of the many
ways we each construct reality for ourselves, projecting yester­
day’s judgments onto today’s events. To show how journalists
spontaneously attribute certain characteristics to various social
groups and relationships, we probed their apperceptions, the un­
conscious fantasies they bring to their understanding of the social
world. Their responses to the Thematic Apperception Test may
show how leading journalists sometimes fill in the gaps between
what they know and what they assume when confronting a new
situation. When their t a t stories contained socially relevant
themes, figures of authority tended to evoke fantasies about the
abuse of power in the form of greedy businessmen, deceitful law­
yers, conniving politicians, intimidating policemen, and sadistic
military superiors. Conversely, socially relevant stories tended to
portray the average man as the victim of malevolent higher-ups

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or an uncaring social system. Once again, these themes and images

differed significantly from those produced by corporate executives
who saw the same pictures.
In sum, the media elite’s conscious opinions seem to be partly
reflected in the ways they subconsciously structure social reality.
These findings show how pure journalistic objectivity is unattain­
able, since even the conscious effort to be objective takes place
within a mental picture of the world already conditioned, to some
degree, by one’s beliefs about it. The main question is, are journal­
ists’ attitudes and preconceptions consistent with the portrait of
social reality that they paint for their audience?
Our study addressed major media coverage of three long-run­
ning and controversial stories— nuclear power, busing for racial
integration, and the oil industry’s role in the energy crisis. After
summarizing technical or scholarly knowledge on each topic, we
examined its long-term national media coverage. In each instance
the coverage diverged from the expert assessments in the direction
of the media elite’s own perspectives. If journalists’ sympathies
can sometimes override expert evidence, they presumably also
influence coverage on the many topics where such evidence is
either missing or irrelevant to the story.
Even according to an arbitrary standard requiring that each
side receive equal coverage, the results were consistently one­
sided. The media gave greater weight to the anti-nuclear than the
pro-nuclear side. They gave greater credence to the advocates of
busing than its opponents. They were more sympathetic to the
critics of the oil industry than its supporters. In every instance the
coverage followed neither the middle path nor the expert evidence.
Instead, it veered in the direction one would expect on the basis
of the attitude surveys and psychological tests. This is never a case
of taking an entirely different path, in the manner of advocacy
journalism. But when the road forks, and the signposts are un­
clear, journalists tend to follow their instincts, those inner road
maps that mark out routes of ingrained expectation.
How do these findings comport with the common observation
that journalists are non-ideological? The thinking of American
journalists tends toward the concrete rather than the abstract and

296
 And That’s the Way It Is . . .

centers on personalities rather than ideas. Moreover, they tend to

prize such virtues as pragmatism and adaptability. These traits
seem the antithesis of the ideologue. Thus, Stephen Hess con­
cludes from his survey that Washington reporters are mainly
apolitical.2
Certainly many journalists are anti-ideological in the sense
that they mistrust people guided primarily by closed systems of
thought. But one need not be an ideologue to uphold, consciously
or unconsciously, some set of values. Everyone partakes some­
what of ideology in the broader sense of reference points that guide
efforts to assign meaning and value to the social world. Journalists
sometimes believe their work immune to such influences, because
of their preference for the immediate and concrete. But by reject­
ing the inevitable limitations of any closed system o f thought, they
do not transcend the influence of values altogether.
An aversion to abstractions and philosophical issues may leave
only unquestioned assumptions that are experienced as instinct.
Many journalists who fancy themselves tough-minded pragma­
tists are instead captives of conventional wisdom, carriers of intel­
lectual currents whose validity is taken for granted. As sociologist
Barbara Phillips has written, “ Daily journalism discourages its
practitioners from recognizing that taken-for-granted assump­
tions and personal predilections cast their unreflective shadows on
reportage . . . . The upshot of journalists’ nontheoretic way to
knowledge is that they cannot transmit ‘philosophic insight’ to the
public because they themselves do not approach the world from
a reflective, theoretical mental attitude.” 3
This is not only a matter of ideology, even in the broad sense
of value systems or paradigms. Journalists’ personality traits may
also affect their approach to the news. Relative to the control
group of business executives, the media elite scored high on t a t
measures of the need for power, fear of power, and narcissism;
their scores were comparatively low on the need for achievement
and (to a slight degree) the capacity for personal intimacy. In the
absence of baseline scores from a national random sample, we
cannot be certain of this group’s psychological distinctiveness. As
a speculative exercise, however, this motivational profile might

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add to an understanding o f some widely noted features of contem­

porary national journalism. For example, such tendencies could
help explain propensities toward negativism, an adversarial pos­
ture, and the identification of one’s professional interests with the
public interest. More broadly, the ideological currents of contem­
porary journalism may be more fully understood in conjunction
with their emotional or motivational wellsprings.
Both mind-set and motivation are probably the products of
larger social and intellectual currents that journalists do not create
but carry and amplify. Thus, various liberal themes, negativism,
and bad news bias may all express a cosmopolitan cultural milieu
and modernist sensibility that values change, stimulation, and
liberation from the bonds of authority and tradition. If the news
highlights these themes, this is not the product of ideological
commitment, in the narrow sense; rather, it reflects a cast of mind
that, recalling Walter Lippmann’s image, “ is like the beam of a
searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and
then another out of darkness into vision.”4
Washington Post editor Meg Greenfield recently followed the
course of that beam as a juror in the Pulitzer Prize competition.
She reported on the difference between the America of her every­
day experience and that described by her profession:

“ Out there”— wherever that is— people may be smiling and

humming . . . but the world according to journalism is, on the
contrary, a surpassingly bleak place. A Martian reading about
it might in fact suppose America to be composed entirely of
abused minorities living in squalid and sadistically-run state
mental hospitals, except for a small elite of venal businessmen
and county commissioners who are profiting from the unfortu­
nates’ misery.5

Greenfield argues that political liberalism is not the agent of

“ the vast discrepancy between the sunny surface preoccupations
of American middle-class life and the depiction of a society beset
by crime and pain.” 6 Disavowing any “crude political motiva­
tion,” she attributes it instead to the “ endemically anti-authority”

298
 And That’s the Way It Is . . .

outlook of journalists. And whence comes the mistrust of author­

ity? She chalks it up to professional experience.
Yet experience may structure the journalist’s perspective less
than the perspective structures the experience. Our data on both
the media elite and journalism students suggest that this anti­
authority outlook reflects a pre-existing temperament that brings
young people to this profession. This temperament seems rein­
forced more often than created by professional experience.
Genuine attitude conversion undoubtedly occurs. But what
journalists perceive as the lessons of experience may also reflect
the hidden influence of group norms. All learning takes place
within paradigms that structure the learning experience. So, dis­
covering new realities may mean reinterpreting one’s own experi­
ences to conform to the dominant paradigm. As media critic
Edward J. Epstein writes of television news staffers:

Producers who tend to read the same newspapers . . . and news

magazines, commute to the same area of [New York] City and
discuss with friends the same agenda of problems can be ex­
pected to share a similar perspective on the critical themes of
the day.7

None of this invalidates Greenfield’s central point: Liberalism,

in the sense of a narrow political agenda, is not all that is at work
here. It is one element of a broader cast of mind among journalists.
Probably just as important, for example, is the desire to exert
moral power, as patrons of outsiders and victims with whom they
identify, against traditional restrictions and institutional author­
ity. Thus, after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Los Angeles
Times publisher Otis Chandler lamented, “ There’s no one who
represents us anymore.” Asked whom he meant by “ us,” he re­
plied, “The black and the young and the poor.” '
The usual cast of villains will certainly include venal business­
men and bloodthirsty generals, but it can also encompass unfeel­
ing government bureaucrats and corrupt labor leaders. All are
seen as part of an establishment that is morally obtuse at best, and
an enemy of humane and enlightened values at worst. Somehow,

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 T he M e d ia E l it e

the mavericks and whistleblowers protect America’s greatness

from the failings of its leaders. In this vision of social reality, the
liberal agenda should prevail over its conservative counterpart,
but the difference may only be evident over the long term, and
many stories will fall into neither camp.
For example, Michael Robinson attempted to classify one hun­
dred days of network news feature stories as either liberal or
conservative.9 He found that only one in four contained political
“ spin.” However, the remaining imbalance was mainly liberal, by
margins of two to one at a b c and four to one at NBC; c b s was
evenly balanced. Such studies, though useful, are limited by both
the brief time frame and the necessity to classify coverage accord­
ing to ideological categories. Political engagement is most likely
to take hold among journalists when its partisan character is least
evident to them. As Robinson has noted, on “ blatantly partisan
topics . . . such as Democrats vs. Republicans or liberals vs.
conservatives . . . [journalists] will be most likely to have their
‘guard up.’ . . . But, in other instances, their understanding will
be lacking and a relationship between [their personal] background
and story slant will appear.” 10
To discover when and how this happens in specific instances
should be a major focus of news content research. The studies
reported in Chapters Six through Eight provide some answers, but
the task must be ongoing. To be sure, there is no lack of current
opinion on the nature of journalists’ values and their relation to
news coverage. But most scholarly research has been limited by
the lack of either empirical procedures or theoretical context.
Some studies have told us what journalists think, others have
focused on what they say or write, and still others have tried to
make sense of what it all means. Without a research design that
puts the three elements together, the result is inevitable disagree­
ment and partly overlapping, partly competing, explanations.
What has been missing is an integrated approach that exam­
ines the changing relationship between newspeople and the news
product by using the tools of social science to test hypotheses
generated by social theory. To carry out this research agenda, we
have placed data from opinion polls, psychological tests, and con­

300
 And That’s the Way It Is . . .

tent analyses in the service of the sociology of knowledge. These

data suggest that (i) subjective elements are inherent in news
coverage; (2) recent changes in American society and the journal­
istic profession have magnified these elements and shaped their
direction; (3) as a result, the current intellectual and emotional
milieu of the national media is expressed in news coverage of
long-term social controversies.
This is not advocacy journalism; still less is it partisan prosely­
tizing. It is an irony of the whole bias debate that the American
media’s very aspiration to objectivity has sensitized critics to even
minor deviations from this norm. Indeed, both the aspiration and
the criticism reflect the American political tradition’s truncated
ideological spectrum, and its claim to a single overarching vision
of social reality. Even as today’s journalists assert their right to
greater interpretive freedom, they find it difficult to admit to the
partiality all interpretation entails. But if all perspectives cast both
light and shadow on reality, the danger lies in identifying a partial
viewpoint with the common good and the whole truth. As one
old-fashioned newsman noted in 1911, “ truth must be stalked from
a point of view.” 11
This issue has been given new urgency by the rise of a national
news network and, with it, the creation of a new media elite— the
influential professionals who staff that network. This group shares
a distinctive sensibility that informs its reportage, all the more so
insofar as it goes unrecognized. Even when self-awareness exists,
powerful impediments to significant change in journalists’ behav­
ior remain. These barriers range from the pressures of deadlines
to the need for defenses against outside critics.12
Nevertheless, unless journalists take responsibility for their
creative role in shaping the news, they will remain mired in a
debate over bias that is as misleading as it is acrimonious. As Ted
Koppel recently told a gathering of his peers, “ It’s easy to be
seduced into believing that what we’re doing is just fine; after all,
we get money, fame, and to a certain degree even influence. But
money, fame, and influence without responsibility are the assets
of a courtesan. We must accept responsibility for what we do, and
we must think occasionally of the future.” 13

301
 Survey Research Procedures
The Sample. To construct the sample of national media journalists, we
began by creating lists of all individuals who had a significant input into
the news product at each organization selected. This criterion excluded
low-level personnel, such as interns and researchers, as well as executives
with purely financial responsibilities.
Lists of all relevant employees, including print reporters and editors,
broadcast production staffs and on-camera personnel, and executives
with news responsibilities, were then created. Names were drawn from
organizational telephone directories, newspaper and magazine mast­
heads and bylines, and television newscast credits. The lists were then
examined for accuracy by journalists at the various organizations and
were revised and updated according to their suggestions.
The completed lists were matched against a computer-generated list
of random numbers to produce a random sample. This technique of
randomization was selected to permit inferences about the entire popula­
tion of national media journalists, i.e., the media elite as defined in this
book. We decided against stratifying the sample according to organiza­
tion, job function, or other such criteria, because our primary research
interest was to characterize the entire population rather than to compare
such subgroups. This approach also obviated any need for mathematical
weighting procedures in presenting the findings.
The Research Instrument. This consisted of standard demographic
and attitude questionnaires, a test of selective perception and retention,
and the Thematic Apperception Test. The demographic and attitude
items are discussed in Chapter Two. They were drawn mainly from
major polls, a forced-choice value selection test developed by political
scientist Ronald Inglehart, and a survey of elites directed by political
scientist Sidney Verba and sponsored jointly by Harvard University and
the Washington Post.
The test of selective perception is discussed in Chapter Three. It
consisted of four newspaper stories, which were altered slightly to high­
light the issues reported. For example, unfamiliar names of sources were

302
 Appendix
deleted, and some purely local features of nationally relevant stories were
eliminated. The goal was to present information about social controver­
sies in news story formats to test for selective recall of that information.
The Thematic Apperception Test consisted of the five pictures repro­
duced in Chapters Three and Four. Respondents were asked to create
fictional stories about the characters shown. The test instructions were
taken directly from standard manuals for survey administration of this
test. This usage of the tat is appropriate for making statistical inferences
about groups of respondents but not for clinical evaluation of individuals.
The Interview. The research instrument was administered through
in-person interviews conducted by professional interviewers. The inter­
views were supervised and the data collected by Response Analysis, a
survey research organization in Princeton, New Jersey.
Prior to the survey, we conducted interviewer training sessions in
cooperation with the Response Analysis project directors. The instru­
ment was pretested among journalists at a daily newspaper and a televi­
sion news department in Philadelphia. The instrument and interview
procedures were then revised on the basis of interviewer and respondent
comments.
For the survey, respondents were first contacted through letters re­
questing an interview. Interviewers then followed up by telephone to
arrange an appointment. The interviews averaged about one hour in
length. They were structured to provide similar stimuli (such as inter­
viewer instructions) to all respondents. The general procedure was to
hand the respondent a card containing each item, record the response
(e.g., agree or disagree) on the interview protocol, and then take back the
card. In order to avoid item placement bias, the attitude items were
presented in random order by shuffling the cards prior to each interview.
The tat was administered early in the interview, so that responses
were not contaminated by subjects’ varying reactions to the rest of the
instrument. Respondents could either write their stories or dictate them
into a tape recorder. Most chose the former option; for those who chose
dictation, the interviewer left the room until the respondent was finished.
A t the conclusion of the interview, the protocol and tat stories were
placed in an envelope and sealed. Interviewers were instructed to answer
frequently encountered questions with standard responses. They referred
all other questions or concerns by respondents to the study directors.
Data Preparation. The interview protocols were returned to Response
Analysis, where the data were collated and computerized. Responses to
the psychological tests were duplicated, assigned identification numbers,
and returned to us for coding. As described in the text, this material was
subjected to blind scoring by teams of trained coders. The resulting codes
were then returned to Response Analysis for data entry. When the data

303
 Appendix
entry was complete, we received the results in the form of a computer
tape and codebook.
The subcontracting of data collection and preparation ensured that we
could not, however unintentionally, bias the results through our partici­
pation in these phases of the project. To permit independent assessment
of the research instrument and data analysis, tapes and codebooks have
been placed on file with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
at the University of Connecticut. Some of the data have been deleted or
combined to protect the anonymity of respondents.
Item Wording. The complete wording of the attitude items listed in
Table 2 follows. Respondents were asked to choose either “ strongly
agree,” “ somewhat agree,” “ somewhat disagree,” or “ strongly disagree”
in response to each item.
1. Big corporations should be taken out of private ownership and run
in the public interest.
2. Under a fair economic system, people with more ability should earn
higher salaries.
3. The American private enterprise system is generally fair to working
people.
4. Less government regulation of business would be good for the
country.
5. The government should work to reduce substantially the income
gap between the rich and the poor.
6. It is not the proper role of government to ensure that everyone has
a job.
7. The structure of our society causes most people to feel alienated.
8. The United States needs a complete restructuring of its basic insti­
tutions.
9. All political systems are basically repressive, because they concen­
trate power and authority in a few hands.
10. The American legal system mainly favors the wealthy.
11. Our environmental problems are not as serious as people have been
led to believe.
12. Strong affirmative action measures should be used in job hiring to
ensure black representation.
13. The government should not attempt to regulate people’s sexual
practices.

304
 Appendix
14. It is a woman’s right to decide whether or not to have an abortion.
15. It is wrong for adults of the same sex to have sexual relations.
16. Lesbians and homosexuals should not be allowed to teach in public
schools.
17. It is wrong for a married person to have sexual relations with
someone other than his or her spouse.
18. American economic exploitation has contributed to Third World
poverty.
19. It is immoral for the United States to use so much of the world’s
resources while so many nations remain impoverished.
20. The main goal of U.S. foreign policy has been to protect U.S.
business interests.
21. It is sometimes necessary for the c i a to protect U.S. interests by
undermining hostile governments.

305
 Preface
1. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1956).
2. Descriptions of our survey methods can also be found in S.R.
Lichter and S. Rothman, “ Scientists' Attitudes Toward Nuclear
Energy," Nature 305, no. 8 (September 1983), 91-94; S. Rothman,
“ Ideology, Authoritarianism and Mental Health,” Political Psy­
chology 5, no. 3 (September 1984), 341-63; and S. Rothman and S.R.
Lichter, “ Personality, Ideology and Worldview: A Comparison of
Media and Business Elites,” British Journal of Political Science 15,
no. i (1984), 29-49.
3. See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this point. In addition,
media content is most likely to achieve lasting effects on political
learning over time. See Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, “ Return to the
Concept of Powerful Mass Media,” in Radio and TV Culture
Research Institute, Studies of Broadcasting (Tokyo: Nippon Hoso
Kyokai, 1973), 67-112; The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion— Our
Social Skin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Chapter 1
1. Herbert Stein, “ Rating Presidents,” Fortune (August 5,1985), 115.
2. On the historical dominance of the ideology of liberalism in the
United States, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); Bialer and Sophia Sluzar, eds.,
Sources of Contemporary Radicalism (Boulder, Colorado: West-
view Press, 1977), 31-149); S.M. Lipset, “ Radicalism or Reformism:
The Sources of Working Class Politics,” American Political Science
Review 77 (1983), 1—18, and Stanley Rothman, “ Intellectuals and the
American Political System,” in S.M. Lipset, ed., Emerging Coali­
tions in American Society (San Francisco: Institute for Contempo­
rary Studies, 1978), 325-52. This interpretation of American history
is by no means universally accepted but, as Lipset copiously docu­
ments, it is an interpretation that many leading students of Ameri­
can and comparative history, including Marxist and neo-Marxist
historians, do support.

306
 Notes
3. So pervasive is the influence of its tradition that it is widely re­
garded as the “ American ideology.” See, for example, Everett
Ladd, Jr., The American Polity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985),
63-67.
4. See the discussions and citations in Stanley Rothman, “The Mass
Media in Post-Industrial America,” in S.M. Lipset, ed., The Third
Century: America as a Post Industrial Society (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979), 345-88; George N. Gordon, The Com­
munications Revolution (New York: Hastings House Publishers,
1979); and Robert Desmond, The Information Process (Iowa City:
The University of Iowa Press, 1978).
5. For discussions of European-American differences, see Rothman,
Mass Media; Stanley Rothman, European Society and Politics (In­
dianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1970), 257-76; Arthur Williams, Broad­
casting and Democracy in West Germany (London: Grenada Pub­
lishing, 1976); Anthony Smith, The Shadow in the Cave (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1973); Edward Ploman, Broadcasting in Sweden
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976); and James B. Chris­
toph, “ The Press and Politics in Britain and America,” Political
Quarterly 34 (April-June 1963), 137-50.
6. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books,
1978). See also Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2
vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), I, 181-90.
7. In a “ Lockean” individualistic society, only individuals were to be
represented by political parties. The representation of group inter­
ests was considered illegitimate. For an interesting contrast be­
tween American and British attitudes, see Samuel Beer, British
Politics in the Collectivist Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).
For comparisons with France and Germany, see Rothman, Euro­
pean Society and Politics.
8. Schudson, Discovering the News, 6.
9. Ibid., 7.
10. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 181-90.
11. Schudson, Discovering the News; David Halberstam, The Powers
That Be (New York: Dell Publishing, 1980); Erik Bamouw,
Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975);
Philip French, The Movie Moguls (Chicago: Henry A. Regnery,
1971)-
12. Quoted in Schudson, Discovering the News, 153.
13. Thomas Patterson and Ronald Abeles, “ Mass Communication and
the 1976 Presidential Elections,” Items 29 (June 1975), 1.
14. For a discussion on the effects of television as television which
draws upon some of Marshall McCluhan’s work with less

307
 Notes
hyperbole, see Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985).
15. Richard Merelman, Making Something of Ourselves (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984).
16. Ibid., 30.
17. Edward J. Epstein, News from Nowhere (New York: Random
House, 1973), 37.
18. See, for example, Carol H. Weiss, “ What America’s Leaders
Read,” Public Opinion Quarterly 38 (Spring 1974), 1-21; Michael
Robinson and Maura Clancey, “ King of the Hill,” Washington
Journalism Review (July-August 1983), 46-49; Leon V. Sigal, Re­
porters and Officials (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1973).
19. Roper Organization, Evolving Public Attitudes toward Television
and Other Mass Media /959-/980 (New York: Television Informa­
tion Office, 1981).
20. Lynne Cheney, “ Who Watches Public Television?” Washing­
tonian, February 1986, 144.
21. Weiss, “ America’s Leaders.”
22. William Rivers, “The Correspondents After 25 Years,” Columbia
Journalism Review 1 (Spring 1962), 4-10.
23. The statistics are from Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
24. Eric Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: A l­
fred A. Knopf, 1979).
25. Epstein, News from Nowhere, 219-20.
26. David Halberstam, “ Starting Out to Be a Famous Reporter,” Es­
quire, November 1981, 74.
27. For a discussion, see Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 491.
28. S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman, “ The Media and National
Defense,” in R. Pfalzgraff and U. Ra’anan, eds., National Security
Policy: The Decision-Making Process (New York: Archon, 1984).
29. Peter Braestrup, Big Story (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1977)-
30. Harris polls show that the proportion of the public expressing “ a
great deal of confidence” in the press dropped from 30 percent in
1973 to as low as 16 percent in 1981. See S.M. Lipset and William
Schneider, The Confidence Gap (New York: Free Press, 1983),
48-49.
31. American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newspaper Credibility:
Building Reader Trust (New York: a s n e , 1985).
32. Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion:
The President, the Press, and the Polls during Watergate (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

308
 Notes
33. David Gergen, “ The Message to the Media,“ Public Opinion
(April-May 1984).
34. The decline is documented in Lipset and Schneider, The Confidence
Gap. In the past few years attitudes toward American institutions
and leadership groups have stabilized and even become slightly
more positive.
35. The People and The Press (Los Angeles: Times Mirror, 1986), 4, 57.
36. “ Year-Long Times Mirror/Gallup Survey Finds Public Trust of
Media High But Independence in Doubt,” Times Mirror News
Release, January 15, 1986, 7.
37. Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 491.
38. For the former, see the various publications of the Media Institute,
for example, Chemical Risks: Facts, Fears and the Media (Wash­
ington, D.C.: Media Institute, 1985); and Punch, Counterpunch: 60
Minutes vs. Illinois Power Company (Washington, D.C.: Media
Institute, 1981). For the latter, see Television: Corporate Americans
Game (New York: Union Media Monitoring Project, 1982).
39. For the former, see Joshua Muravchik, “ Misreporting Lebanon,“
Policy Review (Winter 1982/83). For the latter, see Edmund Gha-
reeb, Split Vision (Washington, D.C.: Arab-American Affairs
Council, 1983). Evidence on both sides appears in William C.
Adams, ed., Television Coverage of the Middle East (Norwood,
N.J.: Ablex, 1981).
40. For the former, see Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1986). For the latter, Soviet Disinformation and
the News (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1985).
41. Sample titles from recent issues are, “ The Media: Freedom’s Shield
or Achilles Heel,” AIM Report 14 (December 1985); and “ You Pay
for Red Propaganda,” AIM Report 15 (January 1986).
42. In addition to Parenti, Inventing Reality, see Herbert Schiller, The
Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); and Todd Gitlin,
The Whole World is Watching (Berkeley, CA: University of Cali­
fornia Press, 1980).
For discussions of various radical perspectives on the media see
Michael Gurevitch et al., eds., Culture, Society and the Media
(London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1982; Peter Dreier, “ Capitalists
vs. the Media: An Analysis of an Ideological Mobilization
Among Business Leaders,” in Media, Culture and Society 4
(April 1982), in-32, and Peter Dreier, “The Position of the Press
in the U.S. Power Structure,” Social Problems 29 (February
1982), 298-310.
43. Albert Hunt, “ Media Bias is in the Eye of the Beholder,” Wall
Street Journal, July 23, 1985.

309
 Notes
44. Thomas Griffith, “ The Benefits of Surveillance,” Time, December
2, 1985, 83.
45. For introductions into the voluminous literature on the sociology
of knowledge, see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New
York: International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scien­
tific Method, 1936); and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The
Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1967). An
approach that incorporates psychoanalytic insights is found in
Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt, The Wish to Be Free (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969).
46. Hunt, “ Media Bias.,,

Chapter 2
1. The interviews were conducted for us during 1979 and 1980 by
Response Analysis, a survey research firm in Princeton, N.J. The
public broadcasting sample included public affairs staffers at p b s
and three major producing stations ( w n e t , w e t a , w g b h ) , along
with independent producers whose work has appeared on P B S out­
lets. We originally reported the number of cases as 240. However,
we later ascertained that two respondents who completed the inter­
view had declined to answer virtually every question. Therefore,
they were dropped from the analysis.
2. Seventy-six percent of those contacted completed the interview.
This response rate was high enough to ensure that our findings
provide reliable insights into the composition and perspective of
this group.
Many journalists are uneasy about the term elite, although they
might be more at ease with appellations like successful or leading
journalists. We use this term in descriptive fashion to refer to the
members of the most important media organizations in America.
By this definition, a reporter at the New York Times qualifies, while
the editors and publishers of the Miami Herald or the Boston Globe
do not, although they undoubtedly could be included under an­
other definition. We have already discussed the rationale for our
approach, which flows from theoretical concerns about the chang­
ing role of the national media in American society.
3. The business sample included top- and middle-level executives
from three Fortune 500 industrial firms, and one firm each drawn
from Fortune lists of the fifty leading American retail outlets,
banks, and public utilities. In each case, we developed a randomly
based sample of top and middle-management personnel from offi­
cial company lists. The response rate among this group was 95
percent. We can identify the media outlets sampled because person­
 Notes
nel were interviewed as individuals. We approached the business
firms as organizations, however, and a requirement for their coop­
eration in each case was a promise of anonymity. Our statements
about the nature of our samples and response rates can be verified
by Response Analysis, the independent survey research organiza­
tion that conducted the interviews for us.
4. Dorn Bonafede, “ The Washington Press— Competing for Power
with the Federal Government,“ National Journal April 17, 1982.
5. Washington Post, April 4, 1984.
6. Jacob Weissberg, “ The Buckrakers,“ New Republic, January 27,
1986, 16-18.
7. Jody Powell, Washington Post, May 31, 1983.
8. James Deakin, Straight Stuff (New York: William Morrow and
Co., 1984), 340- 41-
9. Washington Post, May 7, 1984.
10. Deakin, Straight Stuff 340-41.
11. Cited in Deakin, Straight Stuff, 345.
12. Ben Bagdikian, “ Professional Personnel and Organizational Struc­
tures in the Mass Media,“ in W. P. Davison and F.T.C. Yu, eds.,
Mass Communications Research (New York: Praeger, 1974), 135.
13. Cited in Deakin, Straight Stuff, 345.
14. Henry Fairlie, “ How Journalists Get Rich,“ Washingtonian, A u­
gust 1983, 81—86.
15. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, “ Never Eat the Rubber
Chicken,“ Washingtonian, January 1983, 58, 62, 63.
16. Washington Post, August 3, 1983.
17. Fairlie, “ How Journalists Get Rich,“ 86.
18. Bagdikian, “ Professional Personnel,“ 81.
19. Charlotte Hays and Jonathan Rowe, “ Reporters: The New Wash­
ington Elite,“ Washington Monthly, July-August 1985, 21.
20. Ibid., 22.
21. Washington Post, February 28, 1984.
22. This distinction was originally applied to network and wire service
journalists in Michael Robinson and Margaret Sheehan, Over the
Wire and On TV (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983).
23. Joseph Kraft, “ The Imperial Media,“ Commentary, May 1981, 39,
42-
24. No more than 2 percent ever voted for third-party candidates.
25. Everett Ladd, Jr., “The New Lines Are Drawn,“ Public Opinion,
July/August 1978, 48-53.
26. Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, “ Personality, Ideology
and Worldview: A Study of Two Elites,“ British Journal of Political
Science 15 (Fall 1984), 1—21.

311
 Notes
27. Kraft, “ The Imperial Media,“ 42.
28. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­
ton University Press, 1977).
29. Barry Sussman, “ Media Leaders Want Less Influence,“ Washing­
ton Post, September 29, 1976.
30. The Gallup poll results are reproduced in Public Opinion, A pril-
May 1985, 35.
31. Washington Post, September 29, 1976.
32. Stephen Hess, The Washington Reporters (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings Institution, 1981).
33. J.W.C. Johnstone, E.J. Slawski, and W.W. Bowman, The Newspeo­
ple (Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1976).
34. Fred J. Evans, “ The Conflict Surveyed,” Business Forum 9 (Spring
1984) , 18.
35. G. Cleveland Wilhoit, David Weaver, and Richard Gray, The
American Journalist (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press,
1985) -
36. Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1985.
37. William Schneider and I.A. Lewis, “ Views on the News,” Public
Opinion, August/September 1985, 7.
38. Ibid., 8.
39. Ibid., 7.
40. Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1985.
41. Schneider and Lewis, “ Views on the News,” 8.
42. Leo Rosten, The Washington Correspondents (New York: Har-
court, Brace, 1937), 191.
43. Ibid., 352.
44. William Rivers, “ The Correspondents after 25 Years,” Columbia
Journalism Review 1 (Spring 1962), 5.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Hess, The Washington Reporters, 5.
48. Quoted in Robinson and Sheehan, Over the Wire and On TV, 277.
49. Ben Bagdikian, “ Professional Personnel,” 134.
50. Tom Teepen, “ Press’ Liberalism Is Force-Fed,” Atlanta Constitu­
tion, May 22, 1985.
51. The response rate was 60 percent. The sample excluded Bagehot
and Mid-career Fellows.
52. To help ascertain whether the students’ liberalism was attributable
to their youth, we compared them to a random sample of forty
students at New York University’s Graduate School of Business.
This provides a comparison analogous to that of media and busi­
ness elites, while eliminating the influence of generational effects.

312
 Notes
The two student groups are also roughly matched for background
characteristics: both share differentially northeastern, urban, up­
per-status, and Jewish backgrounds. Despite these similarities, the
journalism students prove the more liberal. On most issues the
differences are roughly as great between the two student groups as
those we found between their adult counterparts. Thus, the atti­
tudes of aspiring journalists and businessmen already diverge
sharply. This supports the hypothesis that journalists tend to ac­
quire their liberal outlooks more at home than on the job.
53. Daniel P. Moynihan, “ The Presidency and the Press,” Commen­
tary, March 1971, 43.
54. Richard Harwood, Washington Post, April 12, 1971.
55. New York Times, June 8, 1984.
56. Timothy Crouse, The Boys on the Bus (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1974), 244.
57. David Halberstam, “ Starting Out to Be a Famous Reporter,” Es­
quire, November 1981, 74.
58. Deakin, Straight Stuff, 328.
59. Stephen Hess, “ Washington Reporters,” Society, May/June 1981,
57-
Chapter 3
1. Walter Cronkite, quoted in Playboy, June 1973, 26.
2. For a provocative and original attempt to understand both journal­
ism and politics in terms of the imaginative reconstruction of real­
ity, see Dan Nimmo and James Combs, Mediated Political Realities
(New York: Longman, 1983). Our own analysis is compatible with
much of their theoretical framework, without necessarily requiring
such complete subjectivism.
3. The survey was conducted before the Reagan administration
dramatically altered the role and activities of formerly activist
agencies like the e p a and o s h a .
4. This topic was not included in the original interviews. We decided
to add it later because of the directions the research had taken.
Several months after interviewing leading journalists and business­
men, we began a separate survey of scientists’ attitudes toward
nuclear energy. This survey is described in detail in Chapter Six.
The purpose was to compare media coverage of nuclear power
with expert opinion on the same subject. By learning about journal­
ists’ attitudes as well, we could determine whether their coverage
more closely resembled the experts’ views or their own. That re­
quired returning to the same journalists who were originally inter­
viewed and asking them additional questions about nuclear energy.

313
 Notes
Sixty-five percent of the original sample responded. Their atti­
tudes are discussed in Chapter Six. Here we summarize only their
listing of sources they consider reliable. Because no comparable
data were gathered for businessmen, attention shifts to the journal­
ists’ choice of pro-nuclear vs. anti-nuclear services.
5. Joseph Kraft, “ Reagan Beats the Press,” Washington Post, August
2, 1983.
6. The notion that people tend to process new information partly in
terms of pre-existing attitudes and sympathies is well documented,
although the underlying psychological principles are still debated,
as is the extent to which cognitive consistency governs behavior.
See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1957); David Sears and Jonathan Freed­
man, “ Selective Exposure to Information: A Critical Review,”
Public Opinion Quarterly 31 (1967), 194-213; Roger Brown, Social
Psychology (New York: Free Press, 1965), 549-609; W.P. Davison,
J. Boylan, and F.T.C. Yu, Mass Media: Systems and Effects (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 131-58.
7. Scores on this index ranged from — 2 to + 6. The result was a
moderate linear relationship (gamma = .46, tau = .33, p < .001),
in which different cut-points for the high and low categories pro­
duced very similar tabular differences between the two groups. In
the table shown, net scores of two or more were placed in the high
category, and net negative scores and scores of zero were placed in
the low category.
8. Bill Kovach, “ Values Behind the News,” (symposium held at
American University, Washington, D.C., December 6, 1983).
9. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 5.
10. Warren Breed, “ Social Control in the Newsroom.” Social Forces
33 (May 1955), 326-35.
11. See also D.L. Altheide and R.P. Snow, Media Logic (New York:
Sage, 1979); Epstein, News from Nowhere; Bernard Roshco, News-
making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Gaye Tuch-
man, Making News (New York: Free Press, 1978); Herbert Gans,
Deciding What's News (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). Gans
does not hold strictly to this approach but presents it as more
persuasive than attitude-centered theories.
12. See, for example, Gans, Deciding What's News, 78; Epstein, News
from Nowhere, 7-8.
13. Wilhoit et al., in The American Journalist, report differences of
only 2 to 3 percent between executives and staffers who placed
themselves on the political Left. A decade earlier, Johnston et al.,
in The Newspeople, found that executives at prominent organiza­

314
 Notes
tions were substantially more likely to describe themselves as Left-
leaning (by 73 to 53 percent). A t nonprominent organizations they
found the reverse, with only 25 percent of the executives choosing
a Left orientation, compared to 41 percent of the staffers. The
pollsters for the Los Angeles Times survey note that editors-in-chief
were more conservative than reporters, although no figures are
presented (Schneider and Lewis, “ Views on the News,” 8).
14. Epstein, News from Nowhere, 272.
15. Ibid, 233.
16. Roshco, Newsmaking, 105.
17. Gans, Deciding What's News, 201.
18. Herbert Gans, “ Are American Journalists Dangerously Liberal?”
Columbia Journalism Review (November/December 1985), 32-33.
19. Gans, Deciding What's News, 41.
20. Associated Press Managing Editors Association, Journalists and
Readers: Bridging the Credibility Gap (San Francisco: a p m e , 1985),
28.
21. Gans, Deciding What's News, 48.
22. Theodore H. White, “ America’s Two Cultures,” Columbia Jour­
nalism Review (Winter 1969), 9-10.
23. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 149--50.

Chapter 4
1. Washington Post, November 5, 1984, section C.
2. Deakin, Straight Stuff, 329.
3. Henry Murray, Explorations in Personality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1938), xii.
4. Ibid., 545.
5. David McClelland, Assessing Human Motivation (New York: Gen­
eral Learning Press, 1971), 12.
6. Ibid.
7. David Winter, The Power Motive (New York: Free Press, 1973),
117-18.
8. Ibid., 117-18.
9. McClelland argues that power motivation can be either personal­
ized or sublimated to larger social purposes. The behavioral pat­
terns of sublimated and unsublimated high power scorers are also
somewhat different, in ways that seem to conform to theory. At
first, McClelland tried to measure sublimated power by differentiat­
ing between t a t stories in which power or influence were sought
for personal ends (“ He wants to be elected President because he
wants to be top dog.” ) and for social purposes (“ He wants to be
elected president so he can help the poor.” ). He found few

315
 Notes
behavioral differences between respondents who emphasized social
as against personal gain. He discovered that use of the word not
in t a t stories seems to reflect the sublimation of power needs.
Individuals who score high both on n Power and nots do tend to
sublimate power to social organizational goals. On the other hand,
high power, low not scorers tend to exploit others for personal gain.
His research procedures and findings are described in David
McClelland, Power: The Inner Experience (New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 1975).
Following these procedures, we also compared unsublimated or
personalized power scores of journalists and businessmen. Once
again, the journalists produced significantly higher scores (p <
.001).
10. David Winter and Abigail Stewart, “ The Power Motive,” in Har­
vey London and John Exner, eds., Dimensions of Personality (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), 421-22.
11. W.W. Meissner, The Paranoid Process (New York: Jason Aronson,
1978). See Winter, The Power Motive, 144-48, for empirical evidence
on the association of paranoia with fear of power.
12. See, for example, David McClelland and David Winter, Motivating
Economic Achievement (New York: Free Press, 1969); D. Winter,
D. McClelland, and A. Stewart, Competence in College (San Fran­
cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981); and John Atkinson, ed., Motives in Fan­
tasy, Action and Society (New York: Van Nostrand, 1958).
13. David McClelland, The Achieving Society (New York: Van Nos­
trand, 1961). McClelland’s effort to develop broad generalizations
about whole societies by using these methods has aroused consider­
able controversy. The scoring systems which he, Winter, and others
have developed, however, have generally been well received by the
profession. Most commentators agree that the methods used to
develop and validate the scoring systems have been rigorous and
empirically sound.
14. Daniel McAdams, “ Themes of Intimacy in Behavior and
Thought,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40, no. 3
(1981), 573-87; “ Studies in Intimacy Motivation” in Abigail Stew­
art, ed., Motivation and Society (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1981).
15. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
(New York: Jason Aronson, 1975).
16. Jennifer Cole, “ Narcissistic Character Traits in Left Activists”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1979). Unlike the other t a t
scoring systems we have discussed, this was derived clinically
rather than experimentally. Although it has met the scientific test
of reliability, evidence of its validity is still lacking. It is therefore

316
 Notes
a speculative test whose findings are only suggestive. In a previous
use of this system, however, we found in two separate studies that
male political radicals outscored nonradicals in narcissistic pa­
thologies. The radicals also recalled having more negative relation­
ships with their parents than did nonradicals. These findings sup­
ported our hypothesis that one source of their radicalism was
injured or “ bruised“ narcissism early in life. See Stanley Rothman
and Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism (New York: Oxford
Press, 1982), 252-57, 345-46.
17. Two other measures of narcissistic traits, which Cole terms “ low
boundaries“ and “ heterogeneity,“ cropped up only rarely and did
not significantly differentiate the two groups. These measures are
intended to tap emotional fluidity found more often in adolescents
than successful adults. Even if these responses are included, how­
ever, the resulting overall measure of narcissism produces group
differences significant at the .001 level.
18. It might be argued that journalists, as professional writers, would
naturally tend toward more flamboyant imagery. It is not
creativity, however, but self-reference that is critical to this scoring
system. Moreover, this “ occupational“ argument cuts both ways.
One could also argue that journalistic training subdues personal
expressions of creativity in favor of a more prosaic orientation
toward factual accounts of reality.
19. Longitudinal studies in both the United States and England show
that the t a t scores of college students predict their subsequent
career choices. This eliminates the possibility that the motives
develop as responses to different occupational roles. These findings
are reported in Winter, Power Motive, 107-9.
20. Rosaline Hirschowitz and Victor Nell, “ The Relationship Between
Need for Power and the Life Style of South African Journalists,“
Journal of Social Psychology 121:2 (December 1983), 297-304. In
this study the journalists worked at newspapers in major cities, and
the controls were matched for age, sex, language, and socio-eco­
nomic status.
21. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York:
Basic Books, 1976), Ch. 1; Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society, 477-80.
22. Rothman and Lichter, “ Personality, Ideology, and Worldview.“
23. Max Weber, “ ‘Objectivity* in Social Science,“ in Edward Shils and
Henry Finch (trans.), Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social
Sciences (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949), 90-103.
24. Hess, The Washington Reporters, 124.
25. Time, April 11, 1983, 79.

317
 Notes
26. Robinson and Sheehan, Over the Wire and On T V, 147-48.
27. Washington Post, November, 11, 1984, section A.
28. Deakin, Straight Stuff, 328.
29. Maura Clancey and Michael Robinson, “ General Election Cover­
age: Part I,” in Michael Robinson and Austin Ranney, eds., The
Mass Media in Campaign ’84 (Washington D.C.: American Enter­
prise Institute, 1985), 32.
30. David Paletz and Robert Entman, Media Power Politics (New
York: Free Press, 1981), 16-17.
31. Washington Post, July 15, 1984.
32. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 3.
33. Epstein, News from Nowhere.
34. Leo Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 243-44.
35. Quoted in Philip Hilts, “ And That’s the Way It Was,’’ Washington
Post Magazine, March 15, 1981, 36.
36. Quoted in Crouse, The Boys on the Bus, 71.
37. Ibid., 72.
38. Quoted in Charles Peters, How Washington Really Works (Read­
ing, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1983), 22-23.
39. Tom Shales, Washington Post, June 5, 1984, section C, 1-2.
40. Clancey and Robinson, “ General Election Coverage: Part I.’*
41. Ibid., 33.
42. Steven Wiseman, “ The President and the Press,’’ New York Times
Magazine, October 14, 1984, 34.
43. Ibid., 36.
44. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 247-48.
45. Fred Friendly, TV Guide, August 1, 1981, 25.
46. Tony Schwartz, “ Bill Moyers— the Trick is to Make TV Work for
You,” New York Times, January 3, 1982, 21,27.
47. Harold Lasswell, “ Psychopathology and Politics,” in the Political
Writings of H.B. Lasswell (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1951).
48. Louis Banks, “ Memo to the Press, They Hate you Out There,”
Atlantic, April 1978, 35.
49. Friendly, TV Guide, 25.
50. Quoted in Washington Post, April 18, 1981.
51. Washington Post, October 30, 1983.
52. Deakin, Straight Stuff, 352-53.
53. Time, December 12, 1983, 76-77.
54. Washington Post, January 2, 1985.
55. Kraft, “The Imperial Media,” 39-40.
56. Clifton Daniel, “ Presidents I Have Known,” New York Times
Magazine, June 3, 1984, 50.
57. Crouse, The Boys on the Bus, 5.

318
 Notes
58. Kraft, “The Imperial Media,” 37-38.
59. Washington Post, June 5, 1984.
60. Ibid.
61. “ Journalism Under Fire,” Time, December 12, 1983, 78.
62. Washington Post, October 22, 1984.
63. Ibid.
64. Washington Post, September 29, 1984, June 30, 1984, February 12,
1984.
65. Robinson and Sheehan, Over the Wire and On T. V., 212.
66. Ibid., 302.
67. Ibid., 91.
68. Hess, The Washington Reporter; 126.
69. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 242.
70. Ibid., 243.
71. Crouse, The Boys on the Bus, 371-74.
72. Ibid., 393.
73. Rosten, The Washington Correspondents, 241.
74. Ibid.
75. “ Can the Press Tell the Truth?” Harper's, January 1985, 51.
76. Playboy, January 1985, 268.
77. Hess, The Washington Reporter, 89.
78. “ Can the Press Tell the Truth?” Harper's, January 1985, 39, 50.

Chapter 5
1. Quoted in Epstein, News From Nowhere, 14-15.
2. Ibid.
3. Quoted in Playboy, March 1985, 167.
4. New York Times, December 12, 1984.
5. Washington Post, December 12, 1984.
6. New York Times, September 30, 1984.
7. Washington Post, September 30, 1984.
8. Washington Post, November 13, 1984.
9. New York Times, November 12, 1984.
10. Donald Shaw, “ News Bias and the Telegraph,” Journalism Quar­
terly 44 (Spring 1967), 3-12, 31.
11. Lewis Lapham, “ Gilding the News,” Harper's, July 1981, 33.
12. Cited in Halberstam, The Powers That Be. 36.
13. “ Reporting ‘Background’ : You Can Interpret and Still Retain Ob­
jectivity,” Nieman Reports 4 (April 1950), 29.
14. Washington Post, December 10, 1983.
15. New York Times, February 7, 1984.
16. New York Times, October 2, 1984.
17. Washington Post, March 4, 1985.

319
 Notes
18. Washington Post, Septem ber 8, 1983.
19. Washington Post, March 27, 1982.
20. Washington Post, February 10, 1984.
21. Washington Post, July 14, 1985.
22. New York Times, May 22, 1984.
23. New York Times, March 7, 1984.
24. Wall Street Journal June 18, 1984.
25. Ibid.
26. New York Times, July 13, 1984.
27. New York Times, June 20, 1984.
28. Washington Post, June 25, 1984.
29. New York Times, June 20, 1984.
30. Washington Post, June 19, 1984.
31. Lapham, “ Gilding the News,“ 35.
32. The Roper Organization, Evolving Public Attitudes toward Televi­
sion.
33. William C. Adams, “ Visual Analysis of Newscasts,“ in W .C
Adams and Fay Schreibman, eds., Television Network News: Issues
in Content Research (Washington, D.C.: George Washington Uni­
versity, 1978), 155-76.
34. Epstein, News from Nowhere, 153.
35. Paul Weaver, “ Newspaper News and Television News,“ in Doug­
lass Cater, ed., Television as a Social Force (New York: Praeger,
1975). 92.
36. Robinson and Sheehan, Over the Wire and On T V., 216.
37. H.M. Kepplinger, “ Visual Biases in Television Campaign Cover­
age,“ Communication Research 9 (July 1982), 432-46.
38. Paul Good, “ Why You Can’t Always Trust ‘60 Minutes’ Report­
ing,” Panorama, September 1980, 39.
39. Quoted from Harry Stein, “ How ‘60 Minutes’ Makes News,” New
York Times Magazine, May 6, 1979, 76.
40. Ibid., 78.
41. Good, “ Why You Can’t Always Trust ‘60 Minutes’ Reporting,”
108.
42. Media Institute, Punch, Counterpunch, 33.
43. Fay Schreibman, “ Television News Archives,” in Adams and
Schreibman, Television Network News, 91, 109.
44. Public Agenda Foundation study quoted in Ron Nessen, “ Should
TV News Always Tell All?” TV Guide, June 27, 1981, 10.
45. Don Kowett and Sally Bedell, “ Anatomy of a Smear,” TV Guide,
May 29, 1982, 15.
46. Burton Benjamin, CBS Reports' “ The Uncounted Enemy: A Viet­
nam Deception: An ExaminationMimeo, July 8, 1982, 57.

320
 Notes
47. The best introduction to this technique is probably found in Ole
Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969). See also Adams and
Schreibman, Television Network News, especially W. C. Adams,
“ Network News Research in Perspective,” 11—46; and Lawrence
Lichty and George Bailey, “ Reading the Wind: Reflections on
Content Analysis of Broadcast News,” 111-138.
48. Edith Efron, The News Twisters (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing,
1971)-
49. R.L. Stevenson, R.A. Eisinger, B.M. Feinberg, and A.B. Kotok,
“ Untwisting The News Twisters, ” Journalism Quarterly (Summer
1973), 211-19.
50. C. Richard Hofstetter, Bias in the News (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1976).
51. Clancey and Robinson, “ General Election Coverage: Part I.”
52. For example, Robinson and Sheehan’s conclusion is strengthened
by the fact that at least three other scientific studies independently
found a pro-Mondale or anti-Reagan tilt in 1984 campaign cover­
age. See Dennis Lowry, “ Measures of Network TV News Bias in
Campaign ’84” (paper presented at the annual conference of the
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communica­
tion, Memphis, Tenn., August 3, 1985); John Merriam, “ Media
Coverage of the Election,” Issues Management Letter, November
13,1984; Doris Gräber, “ Candidate Images: An Audio-Visual Anal­
ysis” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association, Chicago, August 29-September 1,
1985). The Gräber study is particularly innovative in its examina­
tion of TV news “ visuals,” an element that further studies would
do well to incorporate.
53. O f course, there are many aspects to campaign coverage besides the
question of partisanship. Among the best additional examples of
the extensive content analysis literature on this topic are William
C. Adams, ed., Television Coverage of the iq 8 o Campaign (Nor­
wood, N.J.: Abley, 1983); Doris Gräber, Mass Media and American
Politics (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1984),
chapter six; and Thomas Patterson’s classic study, The Mass Media
Election (New York: Praeger, 1980).
54. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, “The Unique Perspective of
Television and Its Effect,” American Sociological Review 18 (Febru­
ary 1953), 3- 12.
$5. David Altheide, Creating Reality (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publi­
cations, 1976).
56. Ben Bagdikian, “ Professional Personnel,” 33

321
 Notes
Chapter 6
1. This and the following quotations are from “ The Fire Unleashed/*
a b c - t v , June 6, 1985.

2. Unpublished Cambridge Reports study, July 1985.

3. W.L. Rankin, B.D. Melber, T.D. Overcast, and S.M. Nealey, Nu­
clear Power and the Public (Seattle, Wash.: Battelle Human Affairs
Research Centers, 1981).
4. Roger Kasperson et al., “ Public Opinion and Nuclear Energy/*
Science, Technology, and Human Values, Spring 1980, 11-23.
5. W.L. Rankin, S.M. Nealey and D.E. Montano, Analysis of Print
Coverage of Nuclear Power Issues (Seattle, Wash.: Battelle, 1978);
W.L. Rankin and S.M. Nealey, A Comparative Analysis of Network
Television News Coverage of Nuclear Power, Coal and Solar Stories
(Seattle, Wash.: Battelle, 1979).
6. Media Institute, Television Evening News Covers Nuclear Energy
(Washington, D.C.: The Media Institute, 1979).
7. Joseph F. Coates, “ What Is a Public Policy Issue? An Advisory
Essay,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 4 (March 1979), 29.
8. Alvin M. Weinberg, “ Can Technology Replace Social Engineer­
ing?” in Albert H. Teich, ed., Technology and Man's Future (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972), 27-35.
9. Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, Nuclear Power Issues and
Choices (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977), 399-401.
10. William Proxmire, “ Congress Must Act on Proliferation,” Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 41 (March 1985), 32-34.
11. Jerrold H. Krenz, Energy: From Opulence to Sufficiency (New
York: Praeger, 1980), 164-65.
12. Eliot Marshall, “ Reactor Safety and the Research Budget,” Science
214 (November 13, 1981), 766.
13. John Kemeny, “ Saving American Democracy: The Lessons of
Three Mile Island,” Technology Review (June/July 1980), 81; Doro­
thy Nelkin, “ Some Social and Political Dimensions of Nuclear
Power: Examples from Three Mile Island,” American Political
Science Review 75 (March 1981), 134.
14. Colin Norman, “Assessing the Effects o f a Nuclear Accident,”
Science 228 (April 5, 1985), 31-33.
15. Having taken the light water reactor ( l w r ) path, the federal gov­
ernment and nuclear industry alike have tended to ignore the sec­
ond U.S. reactor type— the high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor
( h t g r ) , one of which operates at Fort St. Vrain, Colorado. Trou­
bles with the L W R , however, have given increased attention to the
h t g r , primarily because o f its safety advantages. These are two­

fold: less radioactivity is inserted into the cooling system, and it

322
 Notes
tolerates much higher temperatures in the core. But the debate has
expanded even beyond the domestic h t g r . A recent study by the
Institute for Energy Analysis suggested a more aggressive posture
toward a smaller, German-American modular high temperature
reactor and the Swedish Process Inherent Ultimately Safe ( p i u s )
technology. Both these options are said to possess “ inherently safe“
characteristics that “ rely not upon the intervention of humans or
of electromechanical devices but on immutable principles of phys­
ics and chemistry.” A.M. Weinberg and I. Spiewak, “ Inherently
Safe Reactors and a Second Nuclear Era,” Science 224, June 29,
1984, 1398-1402.
16. Gerald Garvey, Nuclear Power and Social Planning (Lexington,
Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1977), 76-77.
17. Ralph Nader and John Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 64-65.
18. Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group, Nuclear Power Issues, 283-
86.
19. Marc H. Ross and Robert Williams, Our Energy: Regaining Con-
trol (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), 67.
20. John P. Holdren, “ Energy Hazards: What to Measure, What to
Compare,” Technology Review 85 (April 1982), 37.
21. Julia Bickerstaffe and David Pearce, “ Can There Be a Consensus
on Nuclear Power?” Social Studies of Science 10 (August 1980), 317.
22. Nader and Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, 62-63.
23. Arthur C. Upton, “ The Biological Effects of Low-Level Ionizing
Radiation,” Scientific American 246 (February 1982), 41-49.
24. Sam H. Schurr, Joel Darmstadter, William Ramsay, Harry Perry,
and Milton Russell, Energy in America’s Future (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1979), 353.
25. J. M. Harrison, “ Disposal of Radioactive Wastes,” Science 226
(October 5, 1984), 11-14.
26. Ford Foundation, Energy: The Next Twenty Years (Cambridge,
Mass.: Ballinger, 1979), 441-42.
27. U.S. Department of Energy, The National Energy Policy Plan
(Washington: U.S. Department of Energy, 1983).
28. Mark Crawford, “ The Electricity Industry’s Dilemma,” Science
229 (July 19,1985); 248-50; Russ Manning, “ The Future of Nuclear
Power,” Environment 27 (May 1985); 12-17, 3^ 37-
29. Holdren, Energy Hazards; Robert W. Crandall and Lester B. Lave,
eds., The Scientific Basis of Health and Safety Regulation (Wash­
ington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1981).
30. Dorothy Nelkin and Michael Poliak, “ Problems and Procedures in
the Regulation of Technological Risks,” in Carol H. Weiss and

323
 Notes
Allan H. Barton, eds., Making Bureaucracies Work (Beverly Hills,
Cal.: Sage, 1980), 259-78.
31. Bruce A. Bishop, Mac M cKee and Roger D. Hansen, Public Con-
sultation in Public Policy Information: A State-of-the-Art Report
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Energy Research and Development A d­
ministration, 1978).
32. Dorothy Nelkin, Technological Decisions and Democracy (Beverly
Hills, Cal.: Sage, 1977).
33. Allan Mazur, The Dynamics of Technical Controversy (Washing­
ton, D.C.: Communications Press, 1981).
34. Our results are presented in detail in S. Rothman and S. R. Lichter,
“ The Nuclear Energy Debate: Scientists, the Media, and the Pub­
lic,” Public Opinion, August/September 1982, 47-52; S. R. Lichter
and S. Rothman, “ Scientists’ Attitudes Toward Nuclear Energy,”
Nature, September 8, 1983, 91-94; R. L. Cohen and S. R. Lichter,
“ Nuclear Energy: The Decision Makers Speak,” Regulation,
March/April 1983, 32-37.
35. Robert Cohen, “ The Perception and Evaluation of Public Opinion
by Decision-Makers: Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States”
(Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982).
36. Sharon Dunwoody, “ The Science Writing Inner Club: A Commu­
nication Link Between Science and the Lay Public,” Science, Tech­
nology and Human Values (Winter 1980), 14-22. Based on this
analysis, we added science journalists at such outlets as the A s­
sociated Press and United Press International, Christian Science
Monitor, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe.
37. Our sources, in this and our other two studies, were the Reader's
Guide for magazine articles, the New York Times Index for its
stories, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive for broadcast
material. We examined all 266 articles from the newsweeklies as
well as 606 Times articles and 657 television stories.
38. The standard was actually somewhat mere strenuous. We used a
statistic called Scott’s pi, which corrects for the likelihood that
coders will sometimes agree by chance. Coders were assigned to
pairs, and each pair was tested prior to coding each media format
(newspaper, magazine, television). They were allowed to begin cod­
ing only after they attained an agreement rating on pi exceeding .80.
This is considerably more difficult than attaining an 80 percent level
of agreement, the widely used minimum.
39. CBS, January 26, 1971 (all television references are to the evening
newscast).
40. “ How Safe the Atom,” Time, August 18, 1972, 78.
41. “ A ll About Radiation,” Newsweek, April 9, 1979, 40.

324
 Notes
42. “ No Truce in the New A-War,” Newsweek, June 21, 1976, 61.
43. NBC, June 13, 1981.
44. “ Trying to Contain the Genie,“ Time, June 22, 1981, 40.
45. “ Too Hot for the Usual Burial,” Time, January 10, 1983, 19.
46. NBC, April 28, 1982.
47. The coding system was initially applied to the New York Times,
whose stories could be reliably assigned to either the problem or
issue category. However, the highly interpretive character of televi­
sion and magazine stories (as well as the latter’s greater length)
often produced a combination of technological and political ele­
ments. Therefore, a combination category was added to accommo­
date the actual structures of the stories. This means that results for
the Times and the other media are not precisely comparable on this
dimension. Luckily, the results were so consistent that this minor
change had no effect on the overall pattern. When comparing
coverage of technical and political answers, we refer to the “ pure”
categories, ignoring the combination stories.
48. “ Radioactive Water Spills,” New York Times, February 25, 1977,
19-
49. “ The Irrational Fight Against Nuclear Power,” Time, September
25,1978,71-72.
$0. “The Nuclear Speed-Up,” Newsweek, December 10, 1973, 137.
51. CBS News, June 9, 1982.
52. “ In the Shadow of the Towers,” Newsweek, April 9, 1979, 39.
53. “ No Truce in the New A-War,” 61.
54. “ Meet the Nukeniks,” Newsweek, May 14, 1979, 39.
55. “ Question Around the World: When Can We Get A-Power?” U.S.
News and World Report, September 30, 1974, 51.
56. “ A New Hurdle in Way of Atom Power,” U.S. News, April 15,
1974, 69-71.
57. “ U.S. Dilemma,” New York Times, October 11, 1976, a i .
$8. “ Who’s Going Nuclear?” Newsweek, July 7, 1975, 26.
59. CBS News, February 7, 1979.
60. “ The Peaceful Atom: Friend or Foe?” Time, January 19, 1970, 43.
61. “ A City That Loves the Atom,” U.S. News, August 25, 1980, 55.
62. “ Atom Plant Safety— The Big Questions,” Newsweek, April 9,
1979» 33-
63. CBS News, October 8, 1974.
64. New York Times, June 2, 1976.
65. “ The Irrational Fight Against Nuclear Power,” 71.
66. “ Beyond ‘The China Syndrome’,’’ Newsweek, April 16, 1979, 31.
67. Sources included any reference to a group or individual used to
provide information. This meant both indirect and direct

325
 Notes
quotations, as well as any other reference that attributed informa­
tion to groups or individuals other than journalists. We chose this
broad definition both because the form of citation is largely a
matter of journalistic convention, and also because this enabled us
to gain the broadest grasp of where journalists turn for help in
constructing a story.
68. This figure assumes that the total number is double that produced
by our 50 percent sample of television broadcasts. It also excludes
those with a government, industry, or interest group affiliation.
69. “ Notes on People,” New York Times, September 16, 1976.
70. NBC, July 8, 1973.
71. “ New Nuclear Power Fears,” Newsweek, April 19, 1982, 101.
72. Rothman and Lichter, “ The Nuclear Energy Debate,” 47-52.
73. “ $380 Million and Counting,” Newsweek, October 10, 1983, 30.
74. NBC, June 13, 1981.
75. “ Growing Debate Over Dangers of Radiation,” U.S. News, May 14,
1979» 25.
76. “ All About Radiation,” 40.
77. See the citations and discussion in Mark Mills, “ Errors and Mis­
representations in A B C ’s ‘The Fire Unleashed’ ” (Washington,
D.C.: Science Concepts, 1985), 3-4, 14.
78. One last reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way is provided
by the New York Times. O f the seven media outlets we examined,
America’s newspaper of record provided coverage most in keeping
with (and perhaps informed by) the perspectives of the expert
communities. Yet the Times may also illustrate the interplay of
professional norms and personal attitudes in shaping the news. For
example, the relative lack o f “ spin” at the Times probably reflects
its adherence to the traditions of objective journalism, and its resist­
ance to the more interpretive styles we found elsewhere. But this
very even-handedness, in citing roughly equal numbers of pro- and
anti-nuclear experts, conveyed the false impression that the experts
were split evenly on both sides of the nuclear debate.

Chapter 7
1. William Raspberry, “ The Easy Answer: Busing,” Washington Post,
April 10, 1985, A 2 3 .
2. Millikin v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).
3. Columbus Board of Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449 (1979);
Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 443 U.S. 526 (1979).
4. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Statement on Metropolitan
School Desegregation (Washington, D.C.: 1977), 6-7.
5. J. S. Coleman, S. D. Kelly, and J. A. Moore, Trends in School

326
 Notes
Desegregation, 1968-73 (An Urban Institute Paper, UI 722-03-01,
August 1975).
6. Lee Christine Rossell, “ Assessing the Unintended Impact of Public
Policy: School Desegregation and Resegregation” (unpublished
manuscript, Boston University, Department of Political Science,
1978).
7. Diane Ravitch, “The ‘White Flight’ Controversy,” The Public In­
terest 15 (Spring 1978), 135-36.
8. David Armor, “ WTiite Flight and the Future of School Desegrega­
tion,” in W. Stephan and J. R. Feagin, eds., School Desegregation
(New York: Plenum Press, 1980). The literature on white flight is
voluminous. See also, for example, C. Clotfield, “ School Desegre­
gation, ‘Tipping,’ and Private School Enrollment,” Journal of
Human Resources (1976), 29-50; Luther Munford, “ Desegregation
and Private Schools,” Social Policy 6, no. 4, (January/February
1976), 42-45; C. Rossell, D. Ravitch, D. J. Armor, “ A Response
to the ‘White Flight’ Controversy,” The Public Interest 53 (Fall
1978), 109-15.
9. Armor, “ White Flight,” 36; see also J. C. Weidman, “ Resistance
of White Adults to the Busing of Small Children,” Journal of
Research and Development in Education (Fall 1975), 124-29.
10. D. Sears, C. P. Hensler, and L. K. Spears, “ Whites’ Opposition to
‘Busing’: Self-Interest or Symbolic Politics,” American Political
Science Review 73, no. 2 (June 1979), 369-83.
11. J. C. Weidman, “ Resistance of White Adults,” ; J. Kelley, “ The
Politics of School Busing,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 38, no.
i (Spring 1974), 23.
12. See Armor, “ White Flight,” for a detailed critique of the symbolic
racism argument.
13. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Violent Schools—
Safe Schools: The Safe Schools Study, Report to the Congress
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1977).
See also M.J. Hindelang and M.J. McDermott, Criminal Victimiza­
tion in Urban Schools (Albany, N.Y.: Criminal Justice Research
Center, 1977).
14. J. Toby, “ Crime in American Public Schools,” The Public Interest
58 (Winter 1980), 21; J. Toby, “ Violence in School,” in N. Moms,
ed., Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 4
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
15. M. J. McClendon, “ Racism, Rational Choice and White Opposi­
tion to Racial Change,” Public Opinion Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Sum­
mer 1985), 214-33.
16. Brown v. Board of Education, supra, at 494-5 n. 11. See also K. B.

327
 Notes
Clark and M. P. Clark, “ Racial Identification and Preference in
Negro Children,“ in T. M. Newcomb and E. L. Hartley, eds.,
Readings in Social Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1947); H. Proshansky and P. Newton, “ The Nature and
Meaning of Negro Self-Identity,” in M. Deutsch et. al., eds., Social
Class, Race and Psychological Development (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, 1968); J. Porter, Black Child, White Child
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
17. S. A. Stouffer et. al., The American Soldier, vol. 2 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949).
18. M. Deutsch and M. E. Collins, Interracial Housing: A Psychological
Evaluation of a Social Experiment (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1951).
19. U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Racial Isolation in the Public
Schools, vol. I (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office,
1967), 114.
20. Ibid., 202-4.
21. D. J. Armor, “ The Evidence Against Busing,” The Public Interest
20 (Summer 1972), 90-126.
22. Thomas F. Pettigrew, Elizabeth Useem, Clarence Normand, and
Marshall Smith, “ Busing: A Review of the ‘Evidence,’ ” The Public
Interest 30 (Winter 1973), 88. See also Armor’s reply, “ The Double
Double Standard: A Reply,” The Public Interest 30 (Winter 1973),
n9-
23. C. Jencks, Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and
Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 255, 258.
24. H. J. Walberg, “ Student Achievement and Perception of Class
Learning Environments,” (Boston: m e t c o , 1969); David J. Armor
and W. J. Genova, “ M ETCO Student Attitudes and Aspirations:
A Three-Year Evaluation,” (Boston: m e t c o , 1970); P. M. Carri-
gan, “ School Desegregation via Compulsory Pupil Transfer:
Effects on Elementary School Children,” final report for project
No. 6-1320, Contract No. OEC c-3-6-061320--659, U.S. Office of
Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Office of Education, 1969).
Robert Crain and Rita Mahard, “ Desegregation and Black
Achievement: A Review of the Evidence,” Law and Contemporary
Problems 42 (1980); Ronald A. Krol, “ A Meta Analysis of the
Effects of Desegregation on Academic Achievement,” The Urban
Review no. 4 (1980).
25. N. St. John, School Desegregation: Outcomes for Children (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975).
26. Ibid., 59.
27. Ibid., 85.

328
 Notes
28. W. Stephan, “ School Desegregation: An Evaluation of Predictions
Made in Brown v. Board of Education, ” Psychological Bulletin 85,
no. 2 (March 1978), 221.
29. J. B. McConahay, “ Reducing Racial Prejudice in Desegregated
Schools,“ in W. D. Hawley, Effective School Desegregation (Bev­
erly Hills: Sage, 1981), 18-36.
30. Ibid., 38-39. See also M. Patchen, Black-White Contact in Schools:
Its Social and Academic Effects (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue
University Press, 1982), 69.
31. Boston Globe, June 28, 1979; National Assessment of Educational
Progress, “ Science Achievement: Racial and Regional Trends,
1969-73/’ March 17, 1975.
32. J. S. Coleman, “ Remarks on the Topic ‘Court Ordered School
Busing* ” (speech before the General Court of Massachusetts,
March 30, 1976).
33. The slightly lower level of support at the Post may reflect our
inability to code the earliest years of Post coverage, when media
perspectives on busing tended to be most favorable.
34. Again, this may reflect the fact that stories early in the decade
focused most heavily on concerns for equal education, while the
white flight debate heated up during the mid-1970s.
35. Washington Post, March 2, 1972.
36. Time, September 17, 1979, 76.
37. C B S , October 29, 1975.
38. “ The Busing Dilemma,” Time, September 22, 1975, *4 -
39. C B S , February 16, 1972.
40. “ A Lesson in the South,” Time, November 4, 1974, 88.
41. New York Times, September 8, 1977.
42. New York Times, September 18, 1976.
43. “ If Not Busing, What?” Time, April 24, 1972, 61.
44. “ The Busing Dilemma,” 13.
45. New York Times, September 18, 1976.
46. “ Coleman: Some Second Thoughts,” Time, September 15,1975, 41.
47. “ Forced Busing and White Flight,” Time, September 25,1978, 78.
48. Washington Post, March 4, 1973.
49. C B S , May 16, 1974.
50. New York Times, July 8, 1974.
51. Washington Post, March 18, 1976.
52. “ Boston: Preparing for the Worst,” Time, September 15, 1975, 4 L
53. Time, September 12, 1977, 71-
54. Washington Post, May 31, 1976.
55. C B S , March 13, 1972.
56. “ A Tale of Four Cities,” Time, September 17, 1979, 78.

329
 Notes
57. Time, December 23, 1974, 65.
58. Washington Post, n.d. # 8 8 .
59. “ Desegregation Grades,” Time, September 6, 1976, 64.
60. “ Seeing your Enemy,” Time, April 3, 1972, 46.
61. CBS, February 16, 1972.
62. New York Times, July 8, 1974.
63. Official political activity referred to any busing action taken by an
elected or appointed individual or group at the local, state, or
federal level. This included speeches, policy announcements, legis­
lative debates, and voting. Grassroots activities were defined as
those undertaken by citizens seeking to influence political decision­
making, short of disruptive protest. This included voting, letter-
writing, local organizing, and signing petitions. Nonviolent protest
encompassed all disruptive activities by individuals or groups at­
tempting to influence political decision-making without violating
laws relating to persons or property. These included marches,
demonstrations, and school boycotts. Violent protest included de­
struction of property, as well as attacks on students or other in­
dividuals.
64. School routine referred to activities associated with the normal
school day for students, teachers, and school officials. These in­
cluded classroom attendance, riding a school bus, and extracur­
ricular activities, such as sports or cheerleading. Disruptive inci­
dents referred to violent or destructive acts within the school,
related to race or busing. These included physical assaults or de­
struction of property by students. Police security activities involved
the use of police, national guard, or any other security forces in
response to violent or disruptive activity in or around schools. This
included stationing guards on school property, having them ride
buses to protect students, et cetera.
65. Time, September 29, 1975, 48.
66. C B S , September 12, 1975.
67. Washington Post, May 31, 1976.
68. The later ranking of these activities should be interpreted cau­
tiously, because there was a sharp drop-off in all media coverage
after 1975, giving relatively few stories to rank for this period.
69. After surveying poll results throughout the 1970s, Sears and his
colleagues found that only about 15 percent of whites typically
supported busing for desegregation. The figures varied somewhat
over time and according to different question wordings. The au­
thors concluded, however, that “ the overwhelming majority of
whites oppose busing, no matter how they are asked about it.”
(Sears et al., “ Whites’ Opposition to Busing,” 371). By contrast,

330
 Notes
they found that blacks “ are about evenly divided about it.” (Ibid.,
372.) The most recent surveys suggest that these conclusions are
still valid. See, for example, Linda Lichter, “ Who Speaks for
Black America?,” Public Opinion, August-September 1985, 43;
National Opinion Research Corporation General Social Survey,
Spring 1983.

Chapter 8
1. Lipset and Schneider, The Confidence Gap.
2. Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies
and the World They Shaped (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 313.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 318.
5. A second distortion occurs in the calculation of depreciation allow­
ances. Firms are permitted a tax write-off on the historical purchase
price of capital equipment to provide for replacement. In periods
of high inflation, however, this depreciation allowance is inade­
quate to cover actual inflated replacement costs.
A third distortion is the underestimation of net worth or net
assets. The profit rate is typically calculated by dividing the firm’s
net income by its net assets. Income, however, reflects the current
inflated value of the dollar, while assets are carried on the books
at their historical or original value. This makes the denominator in
the income/asset ratio artificially low, resulting in an exaggeration
of the profit rate.
6. U.S. Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business, vari­
ous issues, cited by Walter Mead, “ Private Enterprise, Regulation
and Government Enterprise,” in Campbell Watkins and Michael
Walker, eds., Oil in the Seventies: Essays on Energy Policy (Vancou­
ver, B.C.: The Fraser Institute, 1977), 162. See also the discussion
of price trends in M.A. Adelman, The World Oil Market (Balti­
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 160-90. Adelman’s
analysis is quite complex although he too finds the price trend was
clearly downward from 1957-69.
7. First National City Bank, Economic Newsletter, April 1979, 5.
8. George Terborgh, cited by Harold Williams, “ When Profits Are
Illusions,” Across The Board 15 (June 1978); 71-72.
9. A second consideration is the effect on net worth. Due to the
magnitude of company income and the effects of o p e c price in­
creases, the distortion in the net income/net worth ratio may be
quite significant.
10. First National City Bank, Economic Newsletter, 5.
11. Other industries included, for example, drugs, clothing, chemicals,

331
 Notes
building heating and plumbing equipment, lumber, glass products,
and automotive parts.
12. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Finance, Oil Company Profit­
ability (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974),
5-n.
13. For example, they are able to utilize depletion and drilling cost
allowances to their advantage, as well as increase crude prices while
maintaining unchanged prices downstream at the refined products
level. John Blair, The Control of Oil (New York: Pantheon Books,
1976), 237.
14. Shyam Sunder, Oil Industry Profits (Washington, D.C.: American
Enterprise Institute, 1977).
15. Edward J. Mitchell, U.S. Energy Policy: A Primer (Washington,
D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1974), 91. See also Sunder, Oil
Industry Profits, 41-49. For example, a firm with a high proportion
of debt to equity financing will show a higher return on equity than
a firm with a lower debt to equity ratio. The particular accounting
method used to calculate depreciation allowances and the time
pattern of a firm’s cash flow will also affect the rate of return. Since
each company has several accounting options, there will inevitably
be differences in the interpretation of the data. Additionally, ac­
counting measures of profitability cannot account for risk differen­
tials between firms. A high-risk industry will exhibit a higher than
normal rate of return to compensate investors for that risk. The oil
industry is typically viewed as a high-risk industry due to the
uncertainty and expense of the exploration phase of production.
Other segments of the industry have a lower degree of risk. In
addition, a high risk may be mitigated by tax write-offs for unsuc­
cessful exploration efforts. A second risk component for investors
is the industry’s future prospects.
16. Sunder, Oil Industry Profits, 70.
17. Mitchell, U.S. Energy Policy, 93-95.
18. Blair, The Control of Oil.
19. U.S. Congress, Committee on Banking and Currency, Ad Hoc
Committee on the Domestic and International Effect of Energy and
Other Natural Resource Pricing, Oil Imports and Energy Security:
An Analysis of the Current Situation and Future Prospects, cited by
Walter Mead in Watkins and Walker, Oil in the Seventies, 134.
20. Neil Jacoby, Multinational Oil: A Study in Industrial Dynamics
(Studies of the Modem Corporation, Graduate School of Business,
Columbia University, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974),
xxiii.
21. Blair, The Control of Oil 77.

332
 Notes
22. Blair bases his argument on “ . . . the inability of the Iranian
government to market oil seized from a concessionaire [in 1952], the
failure of the Iraqi government to induce independents to take
concessions . . . and the ending of a competitive threat from Italy
and the subsequent subordination of the Italian government to the
majors.” See Blair, The Control of Oil, 77-78. In the case of the
Iranian government’s failure to market its nationalized oil, it is
important to note that prospective buyers were threatened with
legal action by the companies subjected to the seizure. They con­
tended that the oil was their property until the Iranian government
compensated them for the seizure.
Similarly, the reluctance of independents to bid on Iraqi conces­
sions can be traced to the legal dispute concerning the nationaliza­
tions. The U.S. State Department advised U.S. companies to stay
out of Iraq until the legal questions were settled. Finally, the “ end­
ing of the competitive threat from Italy” was also due in part to
unsound business decisions. See Blair, The Control of Oil, 93.
23. Jacoby, Multinational Oil, 124.
24. Neil Jacoby, “ Vertical Dismemberment of Large Oil Companies—
A Disastrous Solution to a Non-Problem,” New York Times, cited
by Barbara Hobbie, Oil Company Divestiture and the Press (Praeger
Special Studies, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1977), 20.
25. Neil Jacoby, “ International Aspects of Dismemberment,” State­
ment before Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, in Patricia
Maloney Markun, ed., The Future of American Oil: The Experts
Testify (Washington, D.C.: American Petroleum Institute, 1976),
84. Hastings Wyman, Jr., compiler.
26. Jacoby, Multinational Oil, 172-211. It should be noted that critics
have observed concentration occurring from vertical integration,
the use of joint ventures, communities of interest, cooperative ac­
tion, or government decisions that strengthen control.
27. Edward Mitchell, ed., Vertical Integration in the Oil Industry,
(Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1976), 41, 26.
28. See Richard Mancke, “ Competition in the Oil Industry,” in Mar­
kun, The Future of American Oil, 97-132; Adelman, The World Oil
Market; Edward W. Erickson, “ The Energy Crisis and the Oil
Industry,” in Markun, The Future of American Oil, 27-38; Walter
Mead, in Watkins and Walker, Oil in the Seventies, 136; and
Charles Doran, Myth, Oil and Politics (New York: The Free Press,
Macmillan Publishing Co., 1977), 76.
29. Walter Adams and Joel Dirlam, Statement before the Energy Sub­
committee, Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, December
8, 1975, 2, cited by Hobbie, Oil Company Divestiture, 20. See also

333
 Notes
Walter F. Measday, “ The Case for Vertical Divestiture,” in George
Reigeluth and Douglas Thompson, eds., Capitalism and Competi­
tion: Oil Industry Divestiture and the Public Interest (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University, Center for Metropolitan Planning
and Research, 1976), 13.
30. Hobbie, Oil Company Divestiture, 121-44.
31. Ibid., 132.
32. This discussion was derived from Adelman, The World Oil Market.
33. Blair, The Control of Oil 60-62, and Senate Small Business Com­
mittee, The International Petroleum Cartel Staff Report of the
F T C , 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, 1952, 244-65.
34. In 1972, the Seven Sisters produced 77:1 percent of all opec oil. U.S.
Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multi­
national Corporations, 1974, part 4, 68, cited by Sampson, The
Seven Sisters, 241.
35. Ibid., 297-301.
36. New York Times, September 16, 1979.
37. Newsweek, February 25, 1980, 60.
38. New York Times, April 25, 1980.
39. Time, October 24, 1977, 27.
40. A B C , January 23, 1974.
41. New York Times, June 3, 1979.
42. A B C , April 23, 1974.
43. C B S , April 22, 1974.
44. New York Times, July 1, 1979.
45. A B C , October 23, 1974.
46. C B S , April 23, 1974.
47. Time, March 19, 1979, 72.
48. New York Times, July 30, 1979.
49. New York Times, July 1, 1979.
50. Time, May 7, 1979, 70.
51. New York Times, March 29, 1978.
52. Time, February 28, 1977, 47.
53. New York Times, May 16, 1974.
54. New York Times, May 22, 1978.
55. C B S , August 14, 1979.
56. New York Times, January 17, 1974.
57. New York Times, June 19, 1975.
58. New York Times, October 30, 1974.
59. New York Times, October 24, 1979.
60. New York Times, July 18, 1973.
61. New York Times, December 30, 1974.
62. C B S , January 11, 1974.

334
 Notes
63. New York Times, June 8, 1973.
64. Time, May 7, 1979, 70.
65. We will use opec as shorthand for this broader category, since this
organization or its members were nearly always the focus of rele­
vant stories.
66. C B S , January 11, 1973.
67. In her own content analysis, Hobbie found that Time, Newsweek,
and the New York Times Magazine all gave at least twice as much
coverage to anti-oil arguments and sources as to their pro-oil coun­
terparts. She concluded that major periodicals “ provided uneven
coverage, often lacking in impartial information and perspective.
The most visible sources and audible arguments were often seized
upon uncritically. Nearly completely ignored was the testimony of
experts who had made intensive studies of the oil industry.** Hob­
bie, Oil Company Divestiture, 118.

Chapter 9
1. Gans, Deciding What's News, 306.
2. Hess, The Washington Reporters, 89.
3. E. Barbara Phillips, “ Approaches to Objectivity,** in Paul Hirsch,
Peter McMay, and Gerald Kline, eds., Strategies for Communica­
tions Research (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage, 1977), 67-68, 71.
4. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1922), 364.
5. Meg Greenfield, “ Why We*re Still Muckraking,** Washington Post,
March 20, 1985, 15.
6. Ibid.
7. Epstein, News from Nowhere, 206.
8. Cited in Richard John Neuhaus, “ David Halberstam Tells Stories
About Important People,** Worldview, July/August 1979, 46-47.
9. Michael Robinson, “Jesse Helms Takes Stock,** Washington Jour­
nalism Review, April 1985, 14-17.
10. Michael Robinson, “ Future Television News Research,*’ in Adams
and Schreibman, Television Network News, 202.
11. Will Irwin, quoted in Roshco, Newsmaking, 45.
12. Gaye Tuchman, “ ‘Objectivity* as Strategic Ritual,’’ American
Journal of Sociology 77 (January 1972), 660-70.
13. Quoted in Harper's, January 1986, 19.

335
ABC, 20; “ Fire Unleashed” Better Business Bureau, 58
documentary by, 166-67; issue Blair, John, 262, 278
judgments by, 205-9, 216-17; Boston Globe, 15
nuclear energy coverage by, Braestrup, Peter, 15
184-214; oil industry coverage Broder, David, 25
by, 270-92; source and expert Brookings Institution, 40
use by, 209-14; story slants of, Brown, Jerry, 60
197-205 Buber, Martin, 103
Abeles, Ronald, 8 Buckley, William F., 56
Abzug, Bella, 56 Bush, George, 158
Accuracy in Media, 18 Business bribery, journalists'
Adams, Walter, 264 preconceptions on, 65-66
Affirmative action, journalists’ Business leaders, 21; antipathy
preconceptions on, 64-65 toward media, 38, 49;
Agnew, Spiro, 88, 122 personality traits of, 97, 104,
Altheide, David, 162 107-8; preconceptions of news
American Civil Liberties Union, issues by, 64-71; social and
58.59 political outlooks of, 73, 78, 81,
American Conservative Union, 83, 86; use of sources by, 58,
56 59, 60-61; values of, 36—37, 49
Americans for Democratic Business Roundtable, 60
Action, 58, 59 Business Week, 60
Armor, David, 224, 226, 228, Busing, content analysis:
251 conclusions of, 249-53; issues
Aspin, Les, 285 and topics in, 220-31; media
Associated Press Managing coverage of busing, 231-49
Editors Association, 91
Atomic Industrial Forum, 61 Cable News Network, 11
Caldicott, Helen, 61
Babcock and Wilson, 61 Cannon, Lou, 25
Bagdikian, Ben, 25, 27, 44, 165 Carter, Jimmy, 158, 160
Baltimore Sun, 127 Castro, Fidel, 50
Banks, Louis, 121 Catholic church, 3
Battelle Institute, 167 CBS, 20; busing coverage of,
Bell, Daniel, 108 23Í-53; campaign coverage of,
Benjamin, Burton, 152, 154 148-49; conflict with Johnson
Bernstein, Carl, 15, 17 administration, 15; on
Bethe, Hans, 61, 177, 211 copyright, 151; editorializing

337
 Index

by, I50-53, 154; issue Cronkite, Walter, 15, 17, 55

judgments of, 205-9; nuclear Crouse, Timothy, 52, 124, 127-28
energy coverage by, 184-214;
oil industry coverage by, Daniel, Clifton, 123
270-92; “ 60 Minutes” Deakin, James, 24, 52-53, 94, h i ,
programming, 149-51; source 121-22
and expert use by, 209-14; Denton, Jeremiah, 141
story slants of, 197-205, Deutsch, Morton, 227
233-34, 241 Dirlam, Joel, 264
Chamber of Commerce, 58 Donaldson, Sam, 109, 116
Chandler, Otis, 299
Clamshell Alliance, 61 Economic issues, journalists’
Clearwater anti-nuclear group, opinions on, 30-31, 41-42, 43.
59 See also Oil companies,
Coffin, William Sloane, 200 content analysis
Cohen, Robert, 178 Edison Electric Institute, 60
Coleman, James S., 224, 227, Efron, Edith, 157, 158
229, 251 Einstein, Albert, 200
Cole, Jennifer, 104, 107 Ellsberg, Daniel, 200
Collins, Mary Evans, 227 Energy Department, 60
Columbia University Bureau of Energy issues, journalists’
Applied Social Research, 11 preconceptions on, 68-70. See
Columbia University Graduate also Nuclear energy, content
School of Journalism, 45-51, analysis
294 Entman, Robert, 112
Commentary, 50 Environmental Action, 61
Common Cause, 58 Environmental Defense Fund, 59
Commoner, Barry, 60, 61, 177 Environmental Protection
Con Edison, 61 Agency, 61
Congressional Quarterly, 56 Epstein, Edward J., 89, 113, 299
Congress Watch, 58 Erlich, Paul, 134
Constitution (Atlanta), 45 European media, compared with
Consumer Federation of American, 2-5
America, 58
Consumers Union, 58 Facts on File, 56
Content analysis, 155—65: See Fairlie, Henry, 25-26, 27
also Busing, content analysis; Fallows, James, 115
Nuclear energy, content Ferraro, Geraldine, 156
analysis; Oil companies, Fonda, Jane, 60, 61
content analysis Forbes, 60
Cooke, Janet, 121, 145, 146 Fortune, 60
Corporate executives. See Frank, Reuven, 124
Business leaders Friendly, Fred, 118
Council on Environmental Friends of the Earth, 59
Quality (CEQ), 60, 61
Cranston, Alan, 27 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 49
Crile, George, 152, 155 Gallup survey, 17
Critical Mass Journal 61, 200 Gans, Herbert, 90-91

338
 Index
Gergen, David, 17 and variety, 127-29; nuclear
Germond, Jack, 26 energy attitudes of, 179781,
Goffman, John, 61 183-84; observer/participant
Goldman, Eric, 13 conflicts of, 138-44; personality
Good, Paul, 151 traits of, 95-108, 120-21,
Gray and Company, 27 123-26, 128-29, 295-96,
Greenfield, Meg, 298-99 297-98; personal relationship
needs of, 102-6, 126-27;
Halberstam, David, 17, 52, 122 political affiliations and
Hart, Gary, 60, 124, 156 opinions of, 28-33, 35-40, 43»
Harvard University, 38, 39 45; power needs of, 98-101,
Harwood, Richard, 51 109-17; preconceptions and
Hayden, Tom, 60, 61 perceptions of news by, 63-71;
Helms, Jesse, 18 professionalization and
Herburgh, Theodore, 23$ prominence of, 12-19, 23-28;
Hersh, Seymour, 121 public interest motivation of,
Hess, Stephen, 40, 43~44, 53» 117-20; responses to criticism
109, 127, 129, 297 by, 120-23; self-image of,
Hewitt, Don, 150 51-53; social and political
Hobbie, Barbara, 264, 291 outlooks of, 72-87, 294; on
Hofstetter, Richard, 157 social power, 37—38; sources
Hoover Institution, 56 and experts used by, 55-63,
Humphrey, Hubert, 157 139, 209-14, 290-91, 296;
students’ attitudes compared
Illinois Power Company (“ 60 to, 45-51; voting records of,
Minutes” program), 150-51 28-30, 39, 40, 4h 42, 48
Indiana University, 40
Inglehart, Ronald, 35—36 Kaiser, Robert, 112
International issues, journalists’ Kaltenborn, H.V., 139
opinions on, 32, 41, 49 Kendall, Henry, 61
Kennedy, Edward, 49, 60, 124
Jackson, Henry, 273 Kennedy, John, 159-60
Jackson, Jesse, 56, 156 Kennedy, Robert, 299
Jacoby, Neil, 262, 263 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 50
Jencks, Christopher, 228 Kohut, Andrew, 17
Jennings, Peter, 166 Koppel, Ted, 301
Johnson, Haynes, no, 121 Kraft, Joseph, 28, 33-34, 62, 123,
Johnson, Lyndon, 15, 17, 160 124
Jordan, Barbara, 56
Journalists: achievement needs Ladd, Everett, 32
of, 98-101, 109-17, 127-28; Lang, Gladys, 16-17, 161-62
adversarial orientation of, Lang, Kurt, 16-17, 161-62
114-17; demographics of, 21-27, Lapham, Lewis, 138, 147
46, 294; ideological Lasswell, Harold, 119
self-perceptions of, 28-33, 42, Life, 1
45, 48; income levels o£ 23-24; Lippmann, Walter, 6-7, 129,
on media bias, 33-35, 40, 298
54-55; needs for stimulation Los Angeles Times, 41, 42, 91

339
 Index
Lovins, Amory, 177 205-9; nuclear energy coverage
Luce, Henry, 44 by, 184-214; oil industry
coverage by, 270-92; source
Manning, Robert, 146 and expert use by, 209-14;
Market research, and news story slants of, 197-205
decisions, 112 Nelson, Jack, 27
McAdams, Daniel, 102-3 New journalism, 145
McCarthy, Joseph, 140 N ew R e p u b lic , 24, 50, 56
McClelland, David, 95-96, 102 News organizations' effect on
McColgan, Eileen, 72 new content, 88-91, 112-14
McGovern, George, 157 N ew sweek, 20; issue judgments
McReynolds, Dave, 200 by, 205-9; as journalists'
Mead, George Herbert, 138 source, 50; as national media,
Measday, Walter, 264 li—12; nuclear energy coverage
Media Institute, 167 by, 184-214; source and expert
Meese, Edwin, 144 use by, 209-14; story slants of,
Meissner, W.W., 99 197-205
Merelman, Richard, 9, 10 N ew Yorker, 145-46
Minority group journalists, 21, N ew Y ork R eview o f B ooks, 50
46 N ew York Tim es, 20, 42; and
Mitchell, Edward J., 260 adversarial media image, 15;
Mondale, Walter, 116, 158, 278 busing coverage in, 231-53;
Moral Majority, 32, 50 coverage compared to
M o th er Jones , 56 W ashington Post's, 134-37;
Moyers, Bill, 119 interpretive style of, 140,
Moynihan, Daniel P., 51, 56, 57 143-44; issue judgments by,
Mudd, Roger, 26, 124 205-9; on journalistic
Murrow, Edward R., 121, 150 professionalism, 51; as
journalists’ source, 50; on
Nader, Ralph, 49, 58-59, 60, 61, media bias, 133; as national
177 media, 11-12; nuclear energy
N a tion , 50 coverage in, 184-214; oil
National Academy of Sciences, industry coverage in, 270-92;
60 on “ poetic license,” 146; source
National Institute for and expert use by, 209-14;
Occupational Safety and story slants of, 197-205,233-34,
Health, 60 241
N a tion a l J o u r n a l 23, 56 Nixon, Richard, 15, 17, 122, 157
N a tio n a l Review , 50 Nuclear energy, content analysis:
National Welfare Rights Chernobyl accident and, 219;
Association, 56 conclusions of, 214-19; energy
National Wildlife Federation, 60 community's issue positions vs.
N a tion 's B usin ess , 60 journalists', 177-84, 208-9,
Natural Resources Defense 214-19; framework for, 168-70;
Council, 59 media coverage, 184-214
N atu re , 60
Naughton, James, 115 Occupational Safety and Health
NBC, 20; issue judgments of, Administration, 58, 60

340
 Index
Oil companies, content analysis: Rosten, Leo, 43, 92, 114-15, 118,
conclusions of, 288-92; issues 127, 128
and topics, 255-69; media Rycroft, Robert, 163-64, 170
coverage, 270-88
Safer, Morley, 14-15, 133
Paletz, David, 112 St. John, Nancy, 228-29
Patterson, Thomas, 8 Samuelson, Robert, 123
Pentagon Papers, 15 Schlafly, Phyllis, 143
Pettigrew, Thomas, 228 Schudson, Michael, 4
Phillips, Barbara, 297 Schwartz, Tony, 119
Political campaign coverage, 125, Science, 60
127; adversarial techniques of, Scientific American, 60
116—17; content analysis of, Sears, David, 225-26
Í55—59; “ front-runner” trend Shales, Tom, 116
in, 158—59; “ horse-race” Sharon, Ariel, 16
aspects of, 109-11; journalists’ Shawn, William, 146
voting records and, 28-30, 39, Sheehan, Margaret, no, 125-26,
40, 41, 42, 48; problems of 148-49, 158
analysis of, 159-61; by Sierra Club, 59
networks, 148-49 Sigal, Leon, 88, 113
Politicians, on-camera behavior Silverman, Fred, 150
of, IO “ 60 Minutes,” 149-51
Pollock, Richard, 200 Smeal, Eleanor, 143
Powell, Jody, 24 Social issues, journalists’ opinions
Progressive, 61 on, 31-32, 35-39, 41-43, 48. See
Public Broadcasting Service also Busing, content analysis
(PBS), 11, 20, 50 Speakes, Larry, 140
Public Citizen, 58 Stanton, Frank, 133
PUSH, 56 State University of California at
Los Angeles, 40, 41
Race and income issues, Stein, Herbert, 1
journalists’ preconceptions on, Steinern, Gloria, 49
66-68. See also Busing, Stephen, Walter, 229
content analysis Stone, I.F., 129
Raspberry, William, 220 Stouffer, Samuel, 227
Rather, Dan, 15, 27, 52, 115, 129, Sullivan, Harry Stack, 103
293 Sunder, Shyam, 259-60
Ravitch, Diane, 224
Reagan, Ronald, 49, 50, 116-17, Television journalism: adversarial
140, 141, 156, 158 aspects of, 115, 116-17; and
Redford, Robert, 60 development of national
Reeves, Richard, 115, 126 media, 7-12; negativism of,
Reid, Alastair, 145-47 125-26; story slants of, 203,
Rivers, William, 43 300; subjectivity in, 147-55
Robinson, Michael, no, 117, Television networks. See ABC,
125-26, 148-49, 158, 184, 300 CBS, NBC, Public
Roshco, Bernard, 90 Broadcasting Service (PBS)
Rossell, Christine, 224 Teller, Edward, 61, 177

341
 Index
Thatcher, Margaret, 50 Wallace, Mike, 150
Thematic Apperception Test W a ll Street J o u r n a l 11-12, 18, 19,
(TAT), 72-87, 95-108, 120, 20, 26
126, 127, 295, 297 W ashington Post ,
20, 26, 38, 39,
T im e , 7, 20; busing coverage in, 42; and adversarial media
23i-53; issue judgments by, image, 15; busing coverage in,
205-9; as journalists* source, 23i—53; coverage compared to
50; on the media, 122, 124-25; N ew Y ork Tim es* s, 134-37; as
as national media, 11-12; nuclear journalists* source, 50; as
energy coverage in, 184-214; on national media, 11-12;
objectivity, 18; oil industry negativism of, 125, 140, 141,
coverage in, 270-92; source 142-43; story slants in, 233-34,
and expert use by, 209-14; 238; 241
story slants in, 197-205, Washington press corps, 39-40,
231-34, 240, 241, 246-47 43-44, 114-15, 127, 128, 129,
T im es M irror , 17 297
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5 Watergate, 15, 16
Truman, Margaret, 123 Weaver, Paul, 148
T V G u id e , 152 Weber, Max, 102, 109
“ 20/20,’* 149 Westmoreland, William, 16,
152- 53» 154, 155
Union of Concerned Scientists, 61 White, Theodore H., 91
UPI, 148-49 Wicker, Tom, 129
Urban League, 56 Wilderness Society, 60
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 56 Winter, David, 97
U.S. Commission on Civil Wiseman, Steven, 117-18
Rights, 227 Witcover, Jules, 26
U.S. New s a n d W orld R eport, Woodruff, Judy, 24
20; issue judgments by, 205-9; Woodward, Bob, 15, 17
as journalists* source, 50; as Women journalists, 21, 46
national media, 11; nuclear
energy coverage in, 184-214; Yankelovich, Skelley and White,
source and expert use by, 178
209-14 Yardley, Jonathan, 146
Young, Andrew, 49
Vanderbilt University, 151, 159
Vanocur, Sander, 124 Zion, Sidney, 131
Vietnam War, 15, 17 Zirinski, Susan, 94

342
(Continued fm». frontßap)

The Media Elite is part of a larger

study of social and political leader­
ship in the United States of which
Stanley Rolhman is the director and
S. Roben Lichter is the associate di­
rector. it sponsored by the Center
for the Study of Social and Political
Change at Smith College, the Center
for Media and Public Affairs, the Re­
search Institute on International
Change at Columbia University, .and
George Washington University.

S. Robert Lichter is a research pro­

fessor in political science at George
W ashington U niversity. Stanley
Rothman is Mary Huggins Gamble
Professor of Government at Smith
College. Linda S. Lichter is co-di-
rector (with Robert Lichter) of the
Center for Media and Public Affairs
in Washington, D.C.
Jacket desig; U kc Strombctg

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academics join the fray with a seemingly continuous series
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profession and its public image. To paraphrase Marx, the
critics have attempted to change the media. The point,
however, is to understand it.
"Our goal has been to understand the relationship between
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