COLUMN: Will we still trust CNN?

From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00 From Edward Sherwin's, "The Lower Frequencies," Fall '00About a year ago, scores of high school students decked out in suits and skirts descended on Penn's campus for a debate tournament. Their topic was whether journalists ought to be able to protect the identities of confidential sources, and their misperceptions about the practice -- and business -- of journalism boggled the mind. That prepubescent kids would accuse professionals of every crime short of murder should not have been surprising. It was only months before, during the previous summer, when Stephen Glass, an associate editor of The New Republic and a Penn alumnus, was found to have fabricated dozens of stories for TNR, George and Rolling Stone; The Boston Globe fired two columnists, one for fabricating quotes and the other for plagiarism; CNN and Time retracted their inaugural Newsstand report on the use of nerve gas against American soldiers in Vietnam; and a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter was accused of stealing voicemail messages from a company he was investigating. Media credibility has plummeted -- only 11 percent of newspaper editors in a recent Editor & Publisher poll said that public confidence in newspapers is "high" or "very high." And a new threat -- the corporatization of the news media -- is looming on the horizon. This month's America Online-Time Warner deal is the best example to date, and may only be the tip of the iceberg. Headline-grabbing instances of reporter malfeasance were few and far between in '99, replaced by a whirlwind of alliances between print, television and online news providers -- and between the media and other corporate bodies. The most omnipresent threat is no longer that journalists are making up stories -- it's that they are covering them up. Historically, newspapers, particularly in smaller markets, have been "forced" to deep-six stories that would reflect negatively on large advertisers or town bosses. But the defining scandal of the new era of media conglomerates took place in 1998, when ABC pulled a 20/20 report on convicted sex offenders employed at the Walt Disney World theme park. The Walt Disney Co., incidentally enough, took over Capital Cities/ABC Inc. in a $19 billion deal in February 1996. According to some observers, the 20/20 case won't stand alone in the annals of bad journalism for very long. "It's an old, old problem -- and it's gotten much, much worse as the news machines have been absorbed into huge media corporations," said Mark Crispin Miller, director of New York University's Project on Media Ownership. With AOL's recent purchase of Time Warner, Steve Case's Internet giant now has control of the Luce magazine empire -- Time and Fortune included -- and Ted Turner's CNN. The true test of media objectivity in the future will be whether journalists can report fairly and accurately on their corporate bosses -- and their bosses' competitors. "It simply didn't make sense to run unflattering news about the very sources of your income," Miller said of the media's relationship with advertisers. And he's not any more confident that the CEOs in the skyscrapers won't be exerting behind-the-scenes control over the reporters on the street. But while every consumer of news and information should be concerned, forecasts of doom and gloom haven't yet come to pass. For every scandal involving 20/20 and Disney theme parks, there are media outlets like MSNBC and Slate that have reported aggressively on the Microsoft antitrust case -- despite falling all or part under Bill Gates' suzerainty. Journalists of all stripes will inevitably have to come to grips with some strange bedfellows. Microsoft and NBC News set the bar when they launched the MSNBC cable channel and Web site several years back. More recently, partnerships have been formed between ABC News and The New York Times, CNBC and The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC and The Washington Post. Consider for a moment the unusual case of Howard Kurtz, one of the nation's most well-respected media critics. By working for CNN and the Post, the list of his potential conflicts includes two bitter enemies -- Microsoft and AOL. But all the while, Kurtz's objectivity, tested regularly when he reports on the Post newsroom, has not wavered. Ultimately, the news media will have to become a self-policing entity. When one story is yanked by the home office, the burden will fall on another journalist to uncover and expose misconduct. That won't do a lot to restore public confidence in the media -- but at least the networks and papers won't be reduced to propoganda machines either.