TV news should be more about reporting

Is it time to turn down the volume on TV news?

A handful of developments this fall suggest a brewing backlash against opinionated news – particularly those cable segments that set people up to argue political points, or outshout each other.

One event drew a lot of attention: Jon Stewart’s public scolding of CNN’s “Crossfire” hosts. Others received little notice, like ABC News President David Westin’s impassioned defense of objective reporting in a speech delivered at Harvard University.

Take a stopwatch to a day’s coverage on a cable news network and measure how much time is spent on people talking about the news than on actual reporting, Westin said. Compare that to five years ago, and he bets you’ll find there’s a lot less time spent on reporting today.

“There are very understandable reasons why,” he said in an interview. “It is easier and cheaper and, frankly, more vivid and attractive to an audience to put on very strongly expressed opinions.”

TV executives are rewarded for it, too. Fox News Channel dominates its industry due largely to an opinionated prime-time lineup that took its cue from the growth of talk radio in the 1990s. “Hardball” is MSNBC’s most popular show.

But Westin said there’s a danger to repeatedly set up two people to argue a point without any real investigation into which view has more credence. Sometimes one side gets more attention than it deserves, he said.

“It looks like it’s fair and balanced, and therefore is accurate,” he said.

It was a disgust over that kind of format that fueled Stewart’s cranky appearance on “Crossfire” on Oct. 15, where he got into a bitter and personal tussle with Tucker Carlson.

Cable news has become a street fight, Stewart later said on “60 Minutes.”

“What has become rewarded in political discourse is the extremity of viewpoint,” he said. “People like the conflict. Conflict, baby! It sells. ‘Crossfire’! ‘Hardball’! Shut up! You shut up!”

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Kinsley, a former “Crossfire” host, wrote this month that he’s been pitching another approach. Instead of having opposing camps simply argue, the hosts’ job should be to push them toward a common ground.

“The idea, in a word: ‘Cease-Fire,’ ” he wrote.

So far, no takers.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism noted an interesting parallel trend in its studies of campaign coverage and public opinion about the news. It characterized only 14 percent of newspaper and TV campaign stories this year as being straight news reporting. The bulk fit reporting into some narrative theme – President Bush tries to recover from his poor first debate performance, for instance.

During the 2000 campaign, the journalism think tank characterized 29 percent more of the stories as straight news, said Tom Rosenstiel, the project’s director.

“The press becoming more interpretive doesn’t mean it’s become more ideological,” he said. “But it may reinforce the suspicion of the public that the press is writing what it thinks. It could encourage the suspicion of bias even though it’s not evidence of it.”

Westin saw the public’s raw nerves in action last spring, when ABC News was accused of launching a political attack on President Bush with the “Nightline” special where names of Americans killed in Iraq were read. There was no political motivation, he said.

Research this year showed how the nation’s ideological divide had spread to news choices: By wide margins, Bush supporters favored Fox News Channel and Kerry backers turned to CNN. Some critics suggested the U.S. news marketplace could soon more resemble Britain’s, with more news organizations that don’t disguise a partisan bent.

While that may be a stretch, there are few reasons to think things will change anytime soon.

Fox’s template is still dominant; there’s no evidence that spending more time reporting and less time arguing will be rewarded. CNN Headline News – a bastion of all-news, all-the-time – will experiment early next year with prime-time talk shows.

Westin remains a believer.

“There is a role for a news organization that does its best to tell the truth,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that everyone has to. It doesn’t mean that everyone will flock to that news organization, but enough people will value it and come to it and it will make sense from a business point of view as well as a journalistic point of view.”