Overdosed on Excitement

By Thomas Griffith

Overdosed on Excitement

If relations between the Carter Administration and the press have recently been at an unhappy low, there are some who reason that by a President's second year, things are usually that way. Others blame the situation either on the shortcomings of the press or on Carter's people. But Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, thinks "a more basic reason is boredom."

"The fact is that Jimmy Carter and his entourage bore the Washington press corps," Hess writes in the Washington Post. "Reporters in the capital have had a steady diet of excitement in recent years--with the exception of the brief Ford interregnum--and have come to require bigger and bigger doses of news intoxicants." Certainly neither Vance nor Brzezinski is as fascinating as Kissinger (their side comments are never as memorable as his), and Carter isn't as outlandish as Lyndon Johnson or as malignant as Nixon. What to do then?

The journalist's job is to make the important interesting. But it isn't easy: just look at those dull graphics behind any network anchorman as he nightly tries to animate a subject like inflation. Boredom isn't something journalists like to acknowledge; it is merely endured. That ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," wouldn't seem a curse to a journalist. Editors deal in novelty and discovery; the negative and less talked-about side of this is knowing when to spare the reader the overfamiliar. Newsweek editors were once oddly attached to a cynical acronym, MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over), applied to subjects they didn't want to hear more about. But anticipatory boredom can lead to being sated by a subject without having fully explored it. When the news trails off but the space or the air time to be filled is as large as ever, an editor's eyes cannot glaze; they have to open wider.

The easiest refuge in dull times is to hype a story--to make every major or minor shenanigan a Watergate (as in Koreagate, Lancegate and Hollywoodgate). Maybe you can excuse the Washington columnist or the fellow on the beat for tired coinages like that, but you shouldn't excuse the editor who prints them. An editor is always free to change a subject rather than try to inflate it. With Washington less exciting, the cover stories in the newsweeklies again range more widely, to science, medicine, entertainment and sports. Too many magazines and newspapers have also turned--to the displeasure of those who think life is real and news is earnest--to boutique journalism, to trendy preoccupation with you: your health, your dinners, your frustrations. Remember when news meant only what happened to others?

Watergate begat a rush of investigative reporting, but there have been few triumphs, since documented scandals are harder to come by than gossipy innuendoes about people in public life. Newspapers do better at reporting significant social trends and developing reporters who can piece together complex situations. Proud an editor may be of these, but it's still the dramatic news story that makes his adrenaline jump. Not just out of a preoccupation with the sensational. Aldo Moro's kidnaping had all the terror and suspense of an Eric Ambler thriller, but it illuminated for millions the divisive strains in Italian society. A melancholy event was also an absorbing civics lesson.

Unfortunately, the premature boredom of American newspaper editors is most acute in the area of foreign news. They assume that Americans are weary of unsolvable problems in unpronounceable places. The foreign correspondent is now an endangered species. The only newspapers with more than a handful of staffers abroad are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Their best stories often reflect the correspondents' enterprise when news in an area isn't hot. Yet other papers have cut out or cut down foreign staffs, and rely on A.P. news or rent somebody else's coverage. The result is to confine the reporting of world news to too small a group--to the perceptions, the industry, the imagination and the availability of a shrinking band of reporters.

The most scandalous neglect occurs in prospering newspaper chains. Being linked together presumably should give them not only economies of management but also a chance to share editorial opportunities. Yet the wealthy Newhouse chain, with 29 metropolitan papers (circ. about 3.5 million), has no foreign staff. Neither has the Knight-Ridder chain, with important papers in Detroit, Philadelphia and Miami. The Gannett papers (circ. 3 million), which proudly report increased earnings for 42 quarters in a row, now have 77 papers --and not one foreign correspondent. How are you going to discover interesting news if you're not out there looking?

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