• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, March 14, 2005

Not a day goes by that we aren't treated to yet more hand-wringing speculation on the imminent demise of network news. The blame radiates in all directions like solar flares: the average age of the audience is now 60; nobody gets home by 6:30 or 7; the old war horses are hobbling off to pasture; CNN; TiVo; the Internet; bloggers; scandals; it costs too much to keep bureaus open in Taipei, Frankfurt, and La Paz.

Nowhere have I read the word "arrogance," which I think has more to do with the problems of the news business than all of the other solar flares combined.

Before the Internet enabled private citizens to do the kind of research that only academics and journalists had the time (or inclination) to do, big media news lived in an impenetrable castle with only sources and reporters allowed inside. Outside the walls were the great unwashed masses, otherwise known as their audiences.

Although those inside the castle said the formula for what they did was very simply outlined by who, what, where, when, and how, wrapped in a foil of objectivity, the people outside the castle often smelled a rat. When they said, "We thinks we smells a rat, we do," the people inside the castle said, "That is because you do not understand our business."

Now the rat is biting those in the castle on their arses.

Clichés and stereotypes exist because there is, hidden down inside, a hint of truth to them. When for years people said the press was controlled by white, Ivy-educated, liberal men living in the Washington-New York axis, it is because it was largely true. Before cable TV and the Internet, their power to control the agenda of what people thought about and how they thought about it was nearly absolute. What got on that agenda had more to do with what their press peers thought than what the people outside the castle walls thought.

Not that there weren't bureau chiefs living among the great unwashed imploring NY and DC to reconsider their "inside the beltway" perspectives, but they lost more than they won. Without any scientific methodology--only "my gut feeling"--editors inside the castle tried to guess at what would interest their audiences--and more importantly, then tell them why it should interest them.

In story conferences at a major newsweekly where I worked for a decade and a third, stories too often got into the book not because there was any consensus on whether they belonged there, but rather because somebody deemed to be an expert--argued louder and more angrily than the rest of the room. It didn't have to be a trend--if it happened to one of their kids or spouses or parents, it was reason enough to do a story.

This is not to suggest that there weren't big media news editors trying their earnest best to provide that elusive "objective" report. They were many and continue to be many (but fewer than they would have the unwashed believe.)

The problem wasn't and isn't the screw ups, the biased stories, the stories that end with a clear "perspective" that says to the reader, "if you don't agree, you are a moron." The problem was and is admitting and correcting errors, both factual and interpretive. Too many senior-level big media editors have no sympathy for the collateral damage their stories can do. Because of their "education and training," they feel uniquely enabled to help the unwashed mass "understand" the meaning of events. And if you happen to disagree, it is because you "don't understand journalism."

A good deal of the ill will swirling in the wind around big media is simply a reaction to its 50 years of sheer arrogance. Had it viewed its audiences as partners rather than subjects to be lorded over, there might be a little more sympathy for their current troubles.