Clueless in the Capital.

Reporters get the right story wrong--and academics tune out.

In May 1996, ValuJet Flight 592, Its cabin full of smoke and its crew struggling to maintain control, spiraled out of the sky and into the Everglades. The crash claimed 110 lives and sparked intense soul-searching: How could such a thing have happened?

"Dateline NBC," after a three-month investigation, devoted much of its May 9, 1997 show to providing an answer. Reporter Chris Hansen concluded "our government did not do enough to protect us. It failed to implement the recommendations of its safety experts. It failed to warn us about dangers it knew of well before the crash. And one year after Flight 592 crashed here in the Florida everglades, it has failed to make sure that a similar accident cannot happen again?" The segment then presented an interview with a former FAA official who bluntly argued, "I would probably favor listing the FAA as directly causing the accident."

That, however, was far from the whole story. ValuJet had long been a troubled airline. It had flown with broken or missing equipment, and it had suffered a string of mishaps, including an engine that burst into flames before takeoff and planes that overran runways on three separate occasions. In the case of Flight 592, the fire was caused by highly volatile oxygen generators--canisters that supply oxygen to passengers "in the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure," as the boarding announcements say. The airline's maintenance contractor had mislabeled them as empty, had failed to install required safety caps, and then failed to pack them properly for shipment. A spark started a fire, and the oxygen generators quickly turned it into a smoky inferno that brought down the plane. The immediate cause of the crash, in other words, was the failure of both a private-sector airline and its private-sector contractor to follow government rules already on the books.

The same thing happened when "CBS This Morning" investigated the 1993 outbreak of food poisoning in Oregon "Jack-in-the-Box" hamburger restaurants. Co-host Paula Zahn asked, "So who is to blame for this food poisoning?" Her guest, Tom Devine from the Government Accountability Project, replied simply, "For the last decade, the Department of Agriculture has been gutting its food-inspection program and the bureaucrats have been asking for it." In fact, however, the outbreak occurred because the restaurants failed to cook the burgers thoroughly.

In both cases, the government surely could have done a much better job. Post-crash investigations pointed to the FAA's problems in regulating the safety of start-up airlines. The USDA has struggled for years to improve its "sniff-and-poke" meat inspection system. Turning up the heat improves the odds that government will focus more on such important issues. In both cases, though, it made a better television story to pin the entire blame on the government. The "gotcha" got the air time, and in the process an important part of the story was lost: the difficulty of equipping government to deal with fast-changing conditions in the private sector, and the private sector's reluctance to abide by the rules.

Switch to the academic side of the street. The Clinton administration has been trying to reinvent the federal government since early in 1993. New ideas, from customer service to employee empowerment, have flooded out of Vice President Gore's office. When asked about which academics they relied on for insights, though, Elaine Kamarck, Gore's senior domestic policy adviser, paused, thought carefully, and replied, "Well, really--none?"

These vignettes sketch a recurring problem. When it comes to what government really does, the news media often latch onto exactly the right story in precisely the wrong way. The real stories are often far more complex, much more textured, and infinitely more interesting than what television, in particular, can easily capture. Academics, especially those whose job it is to think about how to make government work better, often miss what government is really doing. In their search for academic respectability and career-enhancing breakthroughs, they tend to write for each other and to avoid the hot-button stories altogether. As a result, when a story like the ValuJet crash breaks, the full explanation sometimes never emerges--and the underlying causes of the problem are that much more likely to linger.

The Scandal Chase

"It's all consistent with covering politics as a game, a forum for celebrity life, and a place for scandal," explains Thomas Mann, director of the Brookings Institution's Governmental Studies Program. Journalists seldom produce stories about government working well, he notes, unless it's a lonely bureaucrat battling the system. The media, both broadcast and print, are far more likely to produce stories about screwups and scandal than in-depth reports about how things work and how they could work better.

For example, when The Washington Post poked around the FDA's drug-approval process in a March 23 article, it led with the tale of Jo Ann Ottmers. She eagerly took a new diabetes medicine, but the drug made her nauseated and weak before damaging her liver. Ms. Ottmers underwent a liver transplant and sued Warner-Lambert, the drug's manufacturer. Such tales, the Post suggested, underlined a "debate that is raging over the safety of medicines that millions of Americans take every day" Yet the story later revealed that the FDA was approving more drugs than ever before, in half the time as before, at the same historic rate of 2 to 3 percent of drugs later withdrawn for problems. Thus, the scandal served to obscure another, larger story: The FDA had managed to speed up its drug approval process dramatically without increasing the rate of problem drugs.

Stephen Hess, longtime observer of the Washington media, is fond of quoting Dame Rebecca West: "Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space" The space has expanded, the challenge has grown, and the lure of "gotcha" stories has exploded. With TV newsmagazine shows airing virtually every night of the week, the rise of 24-hour-a-day cable news, and the print media struggling to find their way in the electronic information age, there is far more space to fill. In the heat of tough competition, viewers and readers are hamer to attract and keep. That's fueled personality-based "gotcha" stories, grounded in scandal--the "up-close-and-personal" approach designed to grab headlines.

It's not that the private sector doesn't also suffer from bureaucracy problems--after all, "bureaucracy" is a generic term for how large organizations, public and private, behave. But private companies can hide their mistakes far more easily than the government can, because they aren't subject to the same legal requirements for openness. Where the government's "waste, fraud and abuse" is fodder for investigations by reporters, watchdog groups, and congressional committees, similar mistakes and sins by private companies are far more likely to escape the public eye. Retailers bury shoplifting costs in higher prices and credit-card fraud in higher interest rates. Government tends to deal with society's hardest problems, operates in areas with greater risk, and works in the spotlight. There's a greater chance for bad things to happen and little chance that bad news will escape media attention.

The result, as Elaine Kamarck explains, is a "negativity bias" toward government: a mismatched sense of the private sector's virtue and the government's vice. And because the presumption of poor government performance is so widespread, Kamarck explains, it's hard for most reporters to believe that government could have done something right. When good things happen, therefore, they look for something else that could account for it. The result is a distorted public view of government agencies: Government isn't as bad as news stories usually suggest; private companies often aren't as well-managed as their carefully cultivated images suggest.

Moreover, the "news hole" for government stories has shrunk as the negativity bias has increased. Government news stories on "ABC World News Tonight" dropped from 40.2 percent of all stories in 1977 to 15.9 percent in 1997, according to a survey by the Committee of Concerned Journalists. On the "CBS Evening News," the drop was from 38.9 to 18.7 percent. "NBC Nightly News" cut its government coverage from 32.7 to 18.5 percent. In two major newspapers--The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times--government coverage remained about the same. But in Time and Newsweek, government stories plummeted. In 1997, in fact, Time's government coverage was just one-fourth that in 1977.

As coverage has shrunk, personal-interest stories have driven much of what remains, especially on TV newsmagazines. These shows are popular with network executives, because they cost about half as much to produce as hour-long dramatic shows and have consistently won high ratings. When news happens, the magazines can quickly incorporate fresh segments and bring the personal touch to stories like plane crashes and political squabbles. As mainline TV shows have fallen in the ratings or consistent winners like "Seinfeld" have gone off the air, replacing them with newsmagazines has been the model. In fact, as "60 Minutes" executive producer Don Hewitt has been quoted as saying, "Behind every new newsmagazine is a failed sitcom"

The proliferation of newsmagazines has produced an insatiable demand for new segments, especially because they rarely broadcast reruns. Large numbers of producers chase a small number of stories on the same topic. The result, some producers complain, is pressure to oversimplify and hype stories to grab viewers. "Dateline NBC," for example, entitled its story on long work hours for truck drivers (and whether government ought to impose tougher regulations) "trucker's killing fields," The newsmagazines focus on scandals, preferably with a real-person angle, because they have only seconds to grab the viewers' attention before they reach for the remote control.

Add to that a much shorter news cycle. A 1999 American Journalism Review study by reporters John Herbers and James McCartney found that, with the rise of CNN, stories have become far more condensed. Reporters once would have taken one day to report the story, the next to gather reactions, and the third to produce background analysis. CNN produces all three within minutes, and that pressures everyone else in the business to keep up or get squeezed out.

Nothing shows the shifting sense of what's news more than National Journal. The magazine was founded in 1969 by alumni of Congressional Quarterly in an effort to provide the public with better coverage of the executive branch. In 1979, it featured articles on acquired tastes like federal loan programs and nuclear power plant safety. Twenty years later, the magazine had shifted to politics. Articles in early 1999 explored topics like a "March muddle" for the GOP and "invasion of the lobby snatchers" Washingtons premier inside-government magazine had become a journal of political analysis. As its political coverage rose, analysis of government administration shrank--virtually to the vanishing point.

The same thing has happened to daily newspapers' coverage of government. Herbers and McCartney found that the Department of Veteran's Affairs, once covered full-time by a number of news agencies and papers, is now covered by only two. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is down to one. And the Interior Department, which controls 500 million acres of public land, oversees four major agencies, and is involved daily in all kinds of hotly contested environmental and land-use issues, does not have a single reporter covering it full-time.

To some extent, these changes reflect constructive reforms in the way papers cover political issues. In the past, it was far too common for reporters assigned to a particular department to stand around waiting for handouts, producing redundant and often shallow stories. Nowadays cross-coverage is far more common, with single reporters covering several agencies on say, a health or national security beat. Yet the tendency to miss out on less sexy government stories is undeniable. Last fall The Washington Post's Bill McAllister noticed an important change in the way the Department of Veterans' Affairs was making decisions. For the first time in decades, the department was showing a willingness to close some of its obsolete or redundant hospitals. Initially the story was slated for the front page. But it lost out to the Lewinsky scandal and a variety of other local, business and international stories. Finally it ran on page Al5.

This national trend mirrors shifts in how the media cover state and local governments. Since the '70s, the ratings chase has driven local TV stations to increase "news you can use" and "fighting the bureaucracy" stories--and it's worked. The day-to-day business of government gets little coverage except from scandals and the police and fire blotters. In state capitals, wire services and leading newspapers have reduced their reporting staffs even as devolution has sent more power to the state houses. In Michigan, for example, the Detroit News cut its statehouse bureau from six reporters to four, and United Press International closed its three-person Lansing bureau. Connecticut's capitol press corps is just half of what it was a decade ago. Across the country, only 513 reporters cover state government full-time, along with 113 wire-service reporters. That compares with 3,000 media credentials issued for last year's Superbowl. As Paul Klite, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Media Watch, said of a national survey of local television news, "most local TV newscasts have abandoned the public interest in the race for ratings." Some bars in Los Angeles even offer happy-hour prices on drinks if helicopter cameras are tracking a police chase.

Producers and editors have discovered mayhem as a profit center. It works because that's what viewers watch and readers read. In 1997, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press analyzed which stories Americans had paid the most attention to in the previous decade. Disasters and personal-interest stories, from the Challenger explosion to a little gift in Texas caught in a well, topped the list. Complicated political news, like the debates over campaign finance and global warming, fell to the bottom.

These patterns seem to apply in other countries too. "Daily Focus," a 15-minute TV news magazine, attracts 300 million daily fans, with in-depth stories on white-collar crime and corruption--in China.

The Effects on Government

What difference does this all make? In part, a negative image of government and its employees undermines citizen trust in public institutions, undermines the morale of government workers, and discourages the best and brightest from seeking government careers. An extensive Council for Excellence in Government study of how government workers and their institutions appear on prime-time TV--a survey of 9,588 characters seen from 1955 through 1998-showed that government has gotten a black eye and that the trend is getting worse. Teachers and law enforcers generally get positive treatment, but otherwise, "television takes public officials and civil servants and turns them into politicians and bureaucrats who serve their own interest or special interests rather than the public interest?' On "Seinfeld," Newman did everything possible to avoid delivering the mail--except when there was a chance he might win a transfer to Hawaii or earn ten-cent refunds on recycled soft-drink cans. University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Anne Hamilton found that although people like government services and the people who provide them, they deeply distrust faceless and anonymous "bureaucrats" and "bureaucracies?'

The scandal chase has also meant that reporters, in their zealous pursuit of what has gone wrong, aren't seeking the story of what might go wrong. Such reporting could nip scandals in the bud before they become juicy fodder for Pulitzer prizes. Think of how the S&L scandal that cost the nation over $100 billion could have been prevented or minimized if reporters had been probing for warning signs.

And think of the Challenger disaster. The shuttle exploded in midair in January 1986 while millions of Americans watched in horror on television. Soon afterward, the story of how it could have been prevented began to emerge--thanks more to whistle-blowers at NASA and Morton Thiokol (its private sector contractor) than to the press. Front-line engineers at Thiokol had been worried for months that cold weather might prevent the solid rocket motors' gaskets from sealing properly, putting the shuttle in grave danger. They pressed their case with middle-level managers, to the point of a shouting match with both NASA and contractor managers the night before the fatal launch. But the top officials in charge never heard the full story. Why? Because after a number of embarassing delays, they didn't want to hear any more excuses, no matter how real. The agency had already sped up its launch schedule, thanks to competition with the European Ariane rocket and the Reagan administration's desire to see NASA run like a private company. Thiokol was worried about losing its shuttle contract. And NASA was eager to have the launch occur in time for President Reagan to point proudly to Christa McAuliffe, the public school teacher in space, during his State of the Union address. When Thiokol engineers recommended postponement to NASA's George Hardy, he said he was appalled and asked them to make another recommendation. In effect, he was telling them "I don't want to hear about it."

Worries about the shuttle program were well-known in the space community. If reporters had been looking carefully at the risks, the dangers would have become more well-known to the public--and NASA would not have dared to ignore them.

The obsession with scandal makes it even harder for government officials to get their stories out. Not only are there fewer reporters covering government, they're less likely to have experience on the beat and less likely to jump into a story unless it's already hot. Sometimes reporters in D.C. only move on a story after regional papers have covered it. In their survey for American Journalism Review, Herbers and McCartney found that Washington officials often bypass Washington reporters to talk with newsmen at regional papers, knowing that their story may get more play this way. "We'd rather appear in the Washington Post through AP, coming from the outside," one senior Interior Department official told Herbers and McCartney.

It's true, as Michael McCurry argues elsewhere in this issue, that for anyone willing to look and especially for anyone with a computer, there's never been more information available on government and its operations. Yet this blizzard of information often magnifies the problems caused by the decline of reporters who understand the core issues. Fresh to a story and swamped with information, the instinct of most reporters is to reach for the cult of scandal and celebrity.

For a sense of what the government is and what it does, therefore, it's both the best of times and the worst of times. The major media have dumbed down their coverage and produced less of it. Despite the flood of new information out there, it's hamer to separate news from spin and scandal from news.

Just the Science, Ma'am

Academics' analysis of government administration--and government's reliance on academics for advice about how to make it work better--has changed just as fundamentally. A generation ago, government officials never would have thought about making major administrative changes without convening a brain trust of top academics. Indeed, a tightly connected group of leading scholars came to Washington during World War II to help structure the war effort, shaped the two Hoover Commission reports that defined post-war government administration, and provided the "whiz kids" that drove the Kennedy administration.

A strange thing happened soon after, though--most academics' phones stopped ringing. The Reagan and Bush administrations relied heavily on the Heritage and Cato think tanks for ideas ranging from privatization plans to downsizing initiatives. But these weren't typical academics. The analysts had a clear ideological point of view and a strategy for working Washingtons corridors for power. They produced policy briefs and how-to guides for conservatives trying to transform the government. At the state level, conservative think tanks like the Hudson Institute shaped welfare reform. Intellectuals played a powerful role, but rarely were they university-based academics.

The Clinton administration's "reinventing government" campaign only confirmed the trend. Its guidebook was David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's best-seller Reinventing Government--a book written by a journalist and a former city manager that transformed the way top officials thought about government. The book relied on ideas about customer service from the private sector, the path-breaking reforms in New Zealand's government, and extensive reporting on what state and local governments were doing. They paid almost no attention, though, to the last century's scholarly work in public administration.

How could academics have slipped, in just one generation, from the go-to authorities on government administration to sideline players? There are two answers. First, public administrationists had helped found political science at the turn of the century, but by the '50s their commonsense approach was eclipsed by political science's search for a stronger scientific base. Second, as public policy schools grew in leading universities around the country, students and practitioners created a different approach--public management--that shared little with public administration. That pushed public administration into an intellectual backwater from which it has been struggling for a generation to escape.

Blind Spot

It isn't as though academia had ignored government altogether. In the past few decades public policy programs have sprung up all around the country, from Harvard's Kennedy School and Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School to the LBJ School at the University of Texas and the Harris School at the University of Chicago. These schools are multi-disciplinary, with economists and political scientists joining sociologists, lawyers, and engineers, among others. Their mission is to find out how to make better policy choices, how to know whether programs are working, and how managers can produce results.

But the old-fashioned practice of observing government administration in action gave way, in these new schools, to the sexier job of dreaming up new programs and designing statistical and theoretical models to see how such programs might work. The hot approach was microeconomics, which uses mathematically complex formulas to determine the most efficient way for a business or government agency to spend its money. This kind of theory can be useful. But it only takes you so far in a world where political realities interfere with the best-run markets. It's one thing, for example, to create an elaborate market-trading scheme that rewards companies for reducing the amount of pollution they emit. It's quite another to create and administer the market to make it work--and to determine whether the scheme really makes the environment any cleaner and improves anyone's health.

At worst, these highly formal approaches can drift away from reality altogether. In the early '80s some scholars developed elaborate theoretical models to explain and predict the decisions of Federal Reserve officers. Although they showed an impressive knowledge of the Fed's decisions and an undeniable analytical elegance, as a predictive tool the models were useless and, to the Fed officials who saw them, laughable.

Another approach that gained ground in academia was known as "public management?' Unlike public administration, which focused on processes (like budgeting and personnel) and structure (like organization and hierarchy), public management concentrated on people. The book titles of some of the movement's leading thinkers sketch the approach: "leadership counts" (by Robert D. Behn) as a tool for "breaking through bureaucracy" (Michael Barzelay). Leadership does indeed count. The trick lies in figuring out how to wire leadership into the enduring processes and structures that make bureaucracy work.

The older, observation-based approach didn't die out completely. In the '70s, a group of scholars began writing analyses of why government programs went wrong, dubbing their approach "implementation" Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky wrote the most famous book, Implementation. In its subtitle, the authors pledged to explain "how great expectations in Washington are dashed in Oakland; or, why it's amazing that federal programs work at all? From urban renewal to job training, the case studies proliferated. They were richly detailed and fun to read, but in the end they suffered the same problems as the TV newsmagazines: It was hard to tell if they got the story right, if they were telling the right story, and if their lessons could be generalized to other problems. In the end, implementation lost out to the more fashionable specialties, ensuring that the academy would stay behind the curve on the government's day-to-day business.

Combine these threads and the implications are clear. Policy-makers and many academics have dismissed public administration for being quaint and out of touch. But the abstract approach favored in much cutting-edge scholarship offers little help to people out in the trenches trying to make government programs work better. As a result, government managers have tended to draw inspiration from journalists' accounts (like Osborne and Gaebler), private-sector lessons (like re-engineering and customer service), foreign experiences (like New Zealand and the United Kingdom), and from their own front-line battles. They relied on few academics for ideas--and in turn, few academics paid much attention to them.

Asking the Right Questions

Academia's difficulties in grappling with government have only deepened in the past decade. While the realities of government shifted radically with devolution, privatization, reinvention, and welfare reform, scholars continued to build on earlier academic models, learning more and more about less and less. Scholars have too often defined their research problems by the questions that others have already asked. They have answered them with data others have already collected. Messy problems that require extensive data collection have tended to slip off the agenda. As Kennedy School scholar Steven Kelman points out, on many critical questions, from procurement reform to devolution, "there are no existing data sets--and because people don't gather their own data, they don't study this:" It's an academic reenactment of the old joke: "Why are you looking for your lost keys under the streetlight?" -- "Because the light is better there?'

That surely can't be said of Richard F. Fenno, Jr., a much-beloved political scientist who spent the last half of his career following members of Congress and producing analyses of remarkable insight. In his 1985 American Political Science Association presidential address, he passionately argued that "Observation is the heart of political analysis?" In fact, he concluded, "Contexts and sequences of legislative life have not been observed in the rich detail they deserve, because not enough political scientists are presently engaged in observation." Fenno doesn't just talk the talk. He spent months following Dan Quayle around every day, and wrote a fascinating and useful report on what Quayle--and, for that matter, other legislators--actually do with their time.

Another exception to the rule is political scientist James Q. Wilson, who has always seen administration as the very core of politics. He devoted his career to producing studies rich in observation and detail, from his work on crime to a much-celebrated book on bureaucracy. He also produced a whole generation of students who have done the same. John Dilulio, for example, moved from exhaustively reported studies of prison administration to equally well-grounded work on the role of religious institutions in urban neighborhoods. Steven Kelman applied his research on government to his job in the Clinton administration as director of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, where he spearheaded major reform legislation. Robert Katzmann has produced pathbreaking work on issues from trade regulation and disability policy to broader issues like the relationship of Congress with the courts. He's now been nominated to the federal bench.

Other scholars have produced equally rich analyses of what government is and how it really works. Todd LaPorte has written extensively on complex organizations like aircraft carriers and the Department of Energy. Erwin Hargrove has probed "impossible jobs" like running prisons and police forces. Paul C. Light has put the state of the public service back on the public agenda. Allen Schick's analysis of government reforms in New Zealand became the benchmark by which the government there measured its monumental reform.

But the heads of public policy programs quietly talk about how hard it is to hire scholars who carry on these traditions--who really understand government and produce solid research on government administration. It's risky for young scholars on the tenure chase to follow Fenno, both because it's hard to turn out a large volume of publications and because more formal work is more fashionable. Established scholars tend to get set in their research ways and to get just as caught in the field's fashions. That, in turn, makes it even harder to train students for public-service careers and to grow the intellectual capital to make government work better.

To make things worse, as veteran New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum points out, outsiders often find academic writing opaque. Equations and formal models scare off the uninitiated, and even articles based on more traditional methods often frighten off curious outsiders. Among busy government officials, there's often a sense that the academic literature contains a great deal of impenetrable analysis on problems they don't find important--that academics write more for each other than to shape and inform public debate. It's not hard to see how policy-makers and journalists, on the one hand, and academics, on the other, drift apart.

Breaking the Cycle

Putting the two pieces of the story together produces an unhappy tale. It's hard to escape the sense that the mass media, in the search for more viewers and readers, are too often capturing exactly the right stories in precisely the wrong ways. In the academic world, the search for scientific respectability has driven many scholars to research questions and methods that insulate them from the realities of politics. Policy-makers rely little on cutting-edge research and worry constantly about how to manage reporters' spin.

Sadly, most of the incentives in the game are loaded against busting out of this ugly triangle. Reporters know that breaking a scandal is the way to earn a reputation. Academics want tenure, so they stick to the kind of research that will help them get it. Like the social forces that drive it, government is growing and changing faster than anyone can keep up with it. Still, the rest of us need to recognize our role as well: As viewers and readers and voters, we get the media and government we ask for (and, hence that we deserve).

There are glimmers of hope out there. The reinvention movement has sparked real interest in attacking government's problems, though (in this country, at least) the toughest problems have yet to be faced. In the academy, public administration is enjoying a mild resurgence, as scholars recognize that their theories need real-world tests if anyone outside the Ivory Tower is going to pay attention to them. And some of our best journalists continue to report on what the government is doing and why.

But the triangle won't be broken until all three parties recognize that their failures are mutually reinforcing. Good government doesn't just happen by itself. It requires both a vigilant press and attentive, thoughtful scholarship--not to mention an engaged citizenry. If we don't want space shuttles to explode in midair, new species to go extinct, or deadly bacteria in our hamburgers, we need to stop the cycle that makes reporters cover the right story wrong--and scholars to miss the story altogether.

Donald F. Kettl is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.