Journalist: Media must pay attention
By ERICA THESING
Associate News Editor
Troubled by decreasing credibility, a demand for high profits and the pressures of a 24-hour news cycle, the media must listen to their critics and their audience, Geneva Overholser said during a lecture Tuesday night.
Overholser, a syndicated columnist and former editor of The Des Moines Register, explained that newspapers and other news outlets are important to their communities. The media must shed their arrogance and serve the people they work for, she said.
Citing several studies of citizen reaction to media, Overholser noted that 38 percent of Americans polled recently said media is hurting democracy.
Overholser explained that many sources of media criticism exist, including magazines and organizations that study journalistic behavior. She then cited four problems that keep criticism from being effective, including an uneven distribution of it. Of the 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States, only 40 have ombudsman or reader representatives, Overholser said.
"Each community needs a way to speak to the power that is held within [the media]," she said. "People care about this. They know we're powerful and influential."
A good starting place, Overholser said, would be a national organization that makes recommendations on press accountability. She explained that the media need to be open to adoption of an industry-wide standard of behavior.
The second problem stems from the current economic situation of the media. As newsrooms become incorporated and businessmen dominate top management of news organizations, the emphasis on journalistic strengths shifts to a hunger for profits, Overholser said. She said readers would happily ally with journalists in fighting these profit pressures if they understood the problem.
"We report on other businesses far more avidly than we do on our own," she said. "[Readers] are ignorant of our difficulties because we aren't telling them."
Overholser also criticized the lack of media criticism coming out of journalism schools. She pointed to the medical and legal professions, which have close ties with their academic community, as examples of how the two should work together.
"For some strange reason, journalism educators and journalism practitioners are quite estranged from each other. Certainly we on the practitioner side need useful research in an accessible form," she said. "We are too troubled to waste such a promising resource."
Overholser, who served for three years as ombudsman at The Washington Post, also said that journalists aren't listening to their audience.
"The fact is, there's a great deal of unhappiness," she said. "We need more thoughtful ways to let the citizen's voice be heard."
Overholser said journalists have relied too long on old tenets of their industry, including the notion that bad news sells.
"We overemphasize the negative so much," she said. "Well, we have ridden that horse until it's dead on the ground."
Overholser added that listening to the readers should never turn into pandering.
"They want us to be the professionals. We can learn enormously from asking questions, but that's not the same as holding a finger to the wind," she said. "You can't edit a newspaper the way you would design a product to please someone. You can't edit a broadcast the way you would design a shoe to fit someone."
Overholser also asked audience members to contact editors when they feel the media has done something wrong.
"Do not just grumble about it," she said. "Really let your newspaper know about it. I think it's really a part of citizens' responsibility to make this a two-way discussion with newspapers."
Overholser is the 1999 Journalist-in-Residence at Notre Dame. Her visits to campus are supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in conjunction with the University's new John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics and Democracy.
All News Stories for Wednesday, November 10, 1999
