ABSTRACT

In the mid-1980s, what New York University professor Jay Rosen later catalogued as “alarm bells” (Rosen, 1996, pp. 18-33) were going off in the largely self-satisfied and somnambulant world of newspaper journalism, which constituted most of America’s serious journalism. Daily readership was plummeting toward 50 percent of Americans, and alternative advertising possibilities were multiplying even as civic life was showing severe cracks. A few journalists and academics worried about the alarm bells they could hear, though not all heard the same ones in the same way. Outside of a limited

number of associations and institutions with varying agendas, resources and reach, no broad platform existed for the profession to seek consensus about either the nature and extent of the problems or possible solutions. From my perspective as the editor of The Wichita Eagle, the presidential campaign of 1988 set off a distressing jangle. Barely more than one-half of eligible American voters had bothered to go to the polls after a campaign centered on images of a skulking Willie Horton, of George H.W. Bush in a flag factory, and Michael Dukakis grinning goofily under an out-sized military helmet. Substantive discussion of issues was sparse, particularly of those issues that most concerned citizens rather than the incestuously intertwined political-news-media establishments. In an op-ed column the week after the election, I wrote:

The campaign just concluded showed at its worst the mutual bond of expediency that has formed over the years between campaigns and the media. . . . Together they have learned that feeding the lowest common appetite among the voters is safer, cheaper, and less demanding than running the risk . . . of providing in-depth information.