A call for crusading.

TIME WAS WHEN newspapers had con victions and actively sought their implementation through news and editorial columns. They campaigned and crusaded to address needs and to redress wrongs.

Publishers had a philosophy, a sense of the good society. The young Gene Pulliam took on the Ku Klux Klan and fought for municipal ownership of utilities. C.L. Knight made clear the publisher's obligation: "It is our duty to hold high our ideals of public service or get out of the newspaper business." Jonathan Daniels spoke for his colleagues when he wrote that their "chief contempt is reserved for the quiescent. "

When E.W. Scripps said, "Show light and the people will find their way," he was thinking of a serious agenda for his newspapers.

Editors like O.K. Bovard, Pulitzer's newsroom genius, were not embarrassed to speak of public service campaigns that would arouse a "tide of public opinion" that would bring about the desired change.

These journalists were nurtured by concepts of journalism that conceived of the press in the way Jefferson put it in describing a free press as "the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral and social being."

Their priorities were set by journalists such as Oswald Garrison Villard, who wrote that the owners of the press "must ask last of all what were the returns of the counting room but must first inquire what ideals a given journal upheld, what moral aims it pursued, what was the spirit of fair play and justice which activated it, and above all on whose side and under whose banner it fought."

Dickens a Radical, But Widely Read

Many of these editors and publishers were well read, and they were moved by the dynamism of Charles Dickens whose novels spoke for the oppressed and the helpless, and whose journalism represented, as Dickens's biographer Edgar Johnson put it, "uncompromising humanitarian radicalism." In the 1850's, Dickens edited Household Words, and into it he poured week after week his indignation at the indecencies visited on the young, the poor and the powerless.

He utilized, says Johnson, "every conceivable weapon: reasoned argument, cajolery, facts and figures, humor, insinuation, irony, parable and allegory, sarcasm, repetition, angry diatribe." And he had "a huge and steadily growing audience ranging in both directions from the middle and upper middle classes."

Our muckrakers held a similar moral perspective as they exposed the employment of children working in mines and mills, racism in the judicial system and corruption.

Something happened along the way to the present state of newspapering. Newspapers turned from advocacy to a value-free objectivity that did not antagonize advertisers and seemed to go down well with their middle-class clientele, which was obsessed with the accomplishments of a supposedly objective science and technology. Ownership passed to sprawling non-journalistic families and to corporations concerned with dividend-conscious stockholders. Publishers increasingly identified with the corporate conscience. Mammon was set loose in the marketplace of ideas.

The concept of the newspaper as an activist, agenda-setting force was replaced with the concept of "responsible" and "balanced" journalism. We now have are active, stenographic press.

It is this sanitized, homogenized and objectified press that we see being propped up. The rescuers talk of a decline in readership, a growing aliteracy among the young, the challenge for reader time from television, VCR, movies, Walkman, stereo, and the like.

They suggest "news readers can use, " by which they mean pieces on parenting, job hunting, gardening, menu-planning and the like. As Reid Ashe of Knight-Ridder puts it: When newspapers find circulation declining they "back off the dry government stuff and address real concerns like careers, child-rearing, religion, entertainment, personal investing, participation sports, neighborhood issues. In other words, give them stuff they can put to use in their dealings with the people around them."

Then there are the design and layout solutions: Use color, graphics, prominent nutgraphs, boxes, summaries, no-jump rules, briefs, digests, indexes, news-at-a-glance--a "reader-friendly" design, a newspaper, as one advocate put it, "that is easily scanned in 15 minutes."

And we had better not ignore the good-writing crowd. In seminars, institutes and in article after article we are advised: Use narrative techniques, kickers, quotes; talk over the piece with your editor or writing coach, don,t be reluctant to write an outline, rewrite and rewrite.

And there are the reinventers of the wheel who advise newspapers, as a lengthy piece in the Nieman Reports by a former journalism dean recently suggested: Do more interpretive reporting, give readers the overview.

Maybe these devices will bring back the non-readers. Eventually, though, readers will find that they can get most of the stuff elsewhere--on television, by telephone, through tapes. Why spend half a buck on a 15-minute read when you can get the same chitchat from eyewitness news or on the morning television shows?

The dispensers of reader-friendly advice for newspaper survival are prescribing palliatives for a terminal condition. Their prescriptions are fillers that lack the life-giving ingredient. They do not recognize that journalism works best when it stands on a firm moral base and that when journalism's mission is ignored all else is fluff, interesting though the entertainment may be.

That mission is to provide useful information to enable people to live decently in a consensual society. This concept animated the journalists we admire most, those who built the newspapers we respect. It may well be that the major communication device of the future will be a Mac-generated multimedia-audio-visual something. But if we want to preserve print because we believe that democracy functions best when people have information in a form they can examine and ponder, then we should consider returning to our roots.

Unless we do, I fear that we will be held responsible for helping to solidify the ice age of indifference that seems to be holding so many in its grip. Let newspaper empires branch out into telephone-delivered information and the rest of the electronic-age services. But retain the newspaper for those who need to be informed. And staff it with editors and reporters who have a concern for justice and decency, who believe in:

* Equal access to the community's

services and resources.

* Justice and fair play for all members

of the community.

* Equal opportunity to develop

one's abilities.

* Political freedom--being able to

do what one wishes within the

limitations of just laws and

reasonable societal limits. The

right to say, with Bartleby the

Scrivener, I refuse.

* Political freedom--meaningful

participation in the management

of the community, having a say

in the adoption of policies, rules,

regulations.

|My God, Martha, Did You Read This?'

These journalists understand what Elizabeth Hardwick meant when she said, "Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference--with words." And they have a respect for their trade or profession reflected in the words Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha addressed to Meir the Scribe: "Be careful in your work, which is a devine art; for by omitting or adding a letter you may cause the world's ruin."

Most newspapers do not mean much to their readers. They do not engage their readers. Designed to be read on the run, their impact is a powder-puff dab, hardly the stuff of Edna Buchanan's ideal piece that would cause the breakfasting reader "to spit out his coffee, clutch his chest, and say to his wife, |My god, Martha, did you read this?'"

Unless we care, we cannot produce pieces that involve readers with their newspapers. Unless we see the world from the perspective of the great journalists of our golden age, we will be little more than advertising conveyers.

The signs are already upon us: the belief that three-color weather maps and boxes and briefs belong on page one; the time we spend conveying writing tips. This direction of effort brings to mind Tolstoy's warning: "As soon as man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly responsive to the aesthetic."

As Pauline Kael, the movie critic, wrote: "Technique is hardly worth talking about unless it's used for something worth doing."

There's a lot out there worth doing, especially in this political season. Harvey Cox said at a Nieman seminar, "I think the press is letting us down. I think the press is not helping us to be an informed and active citizenry, which the forefathers said we had to be. We,re becoming an inactive and ignorant citizenry. And part of it has to do with the way campaigns are planned and projected and presented to us, and the inability of the press to help us see through it." Cox spoke in 1989, but little has changed for the better.

As I drove across the country from New York to San Francisco, I sampled newspapers along the way. The major issue seemed to be whether Jerry Brown was present at pot parties. And the endless polls: President Bush's popularity rating, Governor Clinton's confidence rating. The only life I could discern was in the letters columns. There people spoke their minds--on how their U.S. senator stood on gun control, on abortion, on taxes. Surprisingly, several letter writers favored higher taxes to pay off the debt. There was anger, excitement, passion in these letters, a sense of involvement unmatched by the news or editorial columns.

People do want to be involved with matters more substantial than coping with piles and periods; they want something more than news nuggets that give the kind of quick gratification their microwaved breakfasts provide. If we offered more substantial fare, we might find our readers as eager as Dickens's were. His reader "though thirsty for tea, and hungry for toast, darts upon that morning's journal and unfolds it with satisfaction, which shows that all his wants are gratified at once."

I wonder how much confidence readers will have in the newspaper the planners intend for them. A recent Gallup Poll of the believability of 16 news organizations found that people gave highest marks to The Wall Street Journal, the lowest to Geraldo Rivera.

The Journal? The Journal with its unrelentingly long pieces, its day-today similar makeup, no pictures, no color, no boxed nutgraphs? The poll reminded me of a conference of Journal editors I attended some years ago. On the agenda was a poll the newspaper had taken of its readers. Also up for discussion were devices to shorten stories, including a no-jump rule. The poll showed that Journal readers had confidence in what they read in the newspaper. They believed what they read, the depth interviews found, because of the array of factual material. As the readers, comments were read to us, an equation became inescapable: Length equals believability.

So much for the no-jump rule.

Here a personal note is relevant.

When I traded my press pass for a teaching appointment, my dean informed me that I would have to serve as the adviser to the student daily, which, I was told, was not read. It was not difficult to see why. It practiced bulletin board journalism: Pinnings, press releases, scores. I told the staff to go out and find news, and I required each of my students to produce a series of articles during the semester. One student discovered that movies shown in Kansas had to be approved by a state board of review, and his series and a strong editorial campaign led to a bill in the state legislature seeking repeal of the law setting up the board. It failed passage by one vote, but the board was dissolved soon after by a Supreme Court ruling against prior censorship.

Students discovered institutional racism. Applicants for admission were required to submit photographs with their high school transcripts so that black students would be assigned rooms with other blacks. The university housing office distributed two lists of city housing, one to white students, the other to blacks. The chancellor objected to the story, but the practices were halted. Another student discovered that school retirees were living in near poverty on meager pensions. A campaign led to the legislature's passing legislation improving the pension program.

Making the News? Of Course

One of my colleagues on the journalism faculty complained that we were "making news," not covering it, and I had to confess he was correct. I was trained, I replied, to make news and that was how I was training my students. Some regents objected and a new chancellor found this journalism vexing. It was clear I had to move on.

The point of this recollection is that the newspaper was read. One regent, a publisher most vociferous in his criticism, read us, avidly. A former student on his news staff told us his boss would rummage through the mail every morning to pull out the student newspaper to see what we were up to. The paper was a force for good in the community. It had a point of view. It was in the tradition of the newspapers we admire and respect.

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, says that values over the last two decades have changed. Values that have risen in student esteem most are being well off financially, personal recognition and running others. Altruistic goals have declined, as has developing a "meaningful philosophy of life." It may be that prescriptions for changing newspapers reflect a shift in values much as a response to newspaper economics.

Bok's observation brings to mind the final line of Gene Patterson's review Al Neuharth's book, "Confessions of S.O.B.": "Neuharth collected small newspapers into one big chain which looking to him for a voice, found he did not really have anything to say." The is nothing in the prescriptions of the "reader-friendly" salvagers that counteract the nihilism at the heart so much of our journalism.

"The junk is dressed up to look meaningful as the real news," wrote Philip M. Wagner of The Baltimore S30 years ago. He pointed to the objectivity creed, which, he wrote, "becomes in all too many cases an excuse for not making the news judgments that matter, since judgments might be taken imply a point of view and hence |bias' |prejudice' in reporting--something |objective' news editor is not supposed to have...

"Looking at the rank and file of a papers, it is hard to say which traits a the more distressing: the abysmal conditions of our editorial pages, the routine-mindedness and frivolity and refusal to face real decisions which pass for |objectivity' in the news columns, the failure to realize that the two--the news and a point of view toward it--a elements of equal importance in making the daily record of our times.

"A newspaper that is not inform throughout by a conscious point view, a set of basic ideas, a public philosophy if you want to call it that, is a cripple. In that sense, most American newspapers are cripples."

Reporters and copy editors know the difference between good and inadequate journalism, and it is time them to speak up. Do they believe the stream of reader-friendly copy they a asked to turn out will make a difference in their community? In 20 years, will they be able to look back with pride and say they contributed something to their communities? After all, a moral sensibility, the desire to help people cope with each other and with the power of government and commerce, is what impelled them into journalism.

Melvin Mencher is professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. He worked for United Press (before it was United Press International) and newspapers in New Mexico and California and was a Nieman Fellow in 1953. He is the author of two textbooks, "News Reporting and Writing" and "Basic Media Writing" and contributes to a number of publications.

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Title Annotation:	newspapers should fight for a better society
Author:	Mencher, Melvin
Publication:	Nieman Reports
Date:	Sep 22, 1992
Words:	2618
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