My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #19, November, 1996

AFRAID OF THE NET

Our small Catholic university was the victim of a media hit and run attack recently. First our campus newspaper, then the local newspaper and the local TV stations, then the midwest newspapers and TV stations, discovered that (gasp!) our students had access to pornography on the internet.

As our students would say, "Well, DUH." Of course we have access to pornography on the internet. Just like we have access to it in bookstores and movie theaters and cable television. This isn't exactly news anymore. It's called free expression, and in theory, at least when it concerns press freedoms, journalists are in favor of it. Or maybe free expression is only for journalists?

This is not to say that I'm endorsing pornography, or pedophiles preying on innocents on the net or the other dangers that are, in fact, out there. I'm saying that, like our founding fathers, I accept the trade-off that free expression involves--in order to have our free expression, we have to allow other people theirs. Our founding fathers trusted the American public with ideas, believing that they would have the good sense, ultimately, to reject the harmful and meretricious.

What was missing from this reporting on our campus and the internet is the answer to the obvious question any intelligent reader would have, which is "What does a Catholic university get out of the internet that makes it worthwhile to tolerate the very unCatholic images in the story?"

Now that would have been news. Not to you, of course, because anyone who can find me on the internet already has a pretty good idea how the net is used to teach. But it would be news to the general public. It is the side of the internet that never gets covered at all. Why? Partly, I believe, because that's a story that would require the reporters to do some research. Porn and predators are easy to cover. Finding out where the good stuff is on the net, and finding out how a university uses it in its teaching and research, would take some time, thought, and guidance from experts.

I also suspect that reporters, editors, broadcasters and news conglomerates are scared of the net. I suspect that most of them don't understand the technology. Even less do they understand the whole ethos of the net--the idea that "information wants to be free" does not even make sense to people trained to make money from it.

The media people who do have any sense of what the internet is really all about, of course, fear it for the genuine danger it represents to them: it threatens the only power reporters have--the power to define what is news, and whose voices will be heard.

Whose voices are those? Increasingly, it's conservative voices and masculine voices. A true story, repeated in many newsrooms, according to many editors and reporters I've listened to: Someone asks whether they can add a column by (choose one) Molly Ivins or Barbara Ehrenreich or Cynthia Tucker or Mary McGrory. Editorial answer: We're already running (choose one) Ellen Goodman or Linda Chavez or Mona Charren. In short, one woman suffices nicely to speak for all women, we've done our bit, and now we can get back to the serious business of telling you what men think about issues.

And what constitutes news? Increasingly it's scandal, titillating stories of the great or at least well-known. There are days when it's hard to tell the New York Post from the National Inquirer. And once one media outlet reports something, every media outlet reports it.

Back when there were just the three big news networks, and all were showing news simultaneously, news was a respectable loss-leader. It may not have made a great deal of money, but since it wasn't competing with anything else that made a great deal of money, reporters could afford to deal with things that, while lacking in excitement, were nonetheless important.

But then cable came along, and so did Fox and UPN and other networks. Suddenly network news had to compete with MTV and re-runs of the Brady Bunch. To keep people from switching that dial (which remote control made oh, so easy to do), news had to become a lot more like entertainment. It had to have drama, accusations and counter-accusations. Above all, it had to have GREAT PICTURES. (That Ross Perot came along and grabbed the country with his quaint old-fashioned flip charts explaining the national debt was a lesson the networks did not pick up on.)

At the same time, cable TV gave us C-SPAN, with its gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House and Senate, and political conventions, and political campaigns. And if C-SPAN would show you every word a candidate said, that meant that any remaining obligation reporters felt they might have to report a candidate's words went by the board--hey, people who really wanted to know could just watch cable, couldn't they? (You say 50% of the public does not have or cannot afford cable? I'm not sure journalists are aware these people exist.)

Increasingly we viewers of news found that the stories our news media were reporting were not the stories we wanted to know about. Reporters and pundits (it's getting harder to tell the difference every day) did tell us about health reform-- the political maneuvering behind it, anyway. They told it as a story of a president's great challenge and great failure. What they didn't do, with any substantial clarity, is tell us what was in the legislation, who stood to gain by it, and who stood to lose. Nor did they tell us the important story about what was already happening to our healthcare system--that important decisions about our health were often being made not by doctors but by insurance companies.

To be sure, the news people told us all about O.J. Simpson. For over a year. Every night. Did any political candidate, or international crisis, or national problem, rate 10 minutes of news coverage on every major network every night? No. Did any network devote even ten minutes total to the Telecommunications Act? I don't think so, and I watched an awful lot of newscasts. And which matters more to our lives: O.J. Simpson, or the extraordinary federal power grab over the free expression on the net?

item--Did you know there's a new labor party in our country? I didn't think so. You see, when it held its first convention, none of the networks covered it. Not a single national media outlet covered it. Even C-SPAN didn't cover it. (I found out about it in an obscure liberal publication called The Oklahoma Observer.)

item--Companies had been downsizing and laying off millions of workers for well over two years before downsizing qualified as a news story in the national media.

item--the networks went to the national conventions in full force, then refused to let us see what was happening there. Most network coverage was, in fact, of news anchors talking to reporters and pollsters and political analysists and pollsters, while dimly in the background you could see the actual business of the convention going on.

item--we do get to hear the actual words of a president or presidential candidate--sometimes for as long as 8 whole seconds. That's the average soundbite this time around. But always, those words are inside a poisonous commentary by a reporter, explaining the political reasons for anything the candidate says. Is there even the slightest hint that a president or candidate might want to do something because he believes it is the right thing to do? No. (And then reporters blame the public for being cynical and uninvolved with politics.)

Reporters get upset when they hear people complain about their coverage. They take great comfort from the fact that liberals and conservatives both hate them. They think this means that they manage to be fair and objective. It doesn't occur to them that it may mean that the reporters don't ever get it right.

Reporters get more upset when people say they would rather get their news from Rush Limbaugh, or C-SPAN. Well, they're going to get even more upset, because those of us who have access to the net are going to go there for answers to the questions the reporters aren't even asking. You see, on the net, we can find people who are asking the same questions we are. And maybe have some answers.

On the network news, we get to see Republicans and Democrats. Take it or leave it. that's what's available. Maybe a little Ross Perot thrown in, but, smirk, smirk, we all know he's crazy.

On the net, we can find Libertarians and Communitarians and Green party candidates and New Party candidates. We can find feminist newspapers and African-American newspapers and liberal (yes, there still is such a thing as a liberal) newspapers. We can find union organizers, and Habitat for Humanity and People for the American Way, and , of course, we can find their conservative counterparts. We can find people who are organizing their communities to solve the problems that our national political system is too politicized to deal with.

We can find on the net the full text of the legislation the nightly news won't even summarize. We can click on organizations we trust and read their analyses of that legislation. We can find the party platforms, and the full text of the speeches the pundits talked right through. We can go directly to government agencies online and read the FAQ files, or e-mail them for answers to our questions. We can register to vote online. We can see what our own state and other states are doing about problems that concern us. We can click on our representative's name to e-mail our opinions.

Kind of makes you wonder what we need the network news for, doesn't it?

Scared of the internet, are they? You know something? They jolly well should be. And so should our politicians.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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