The Dismal Science Hits a Nerve

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Network economics coverage is expanding, but is it better?

When Washington journalists were polled in 1979, the economics beat ranked a lowly eleventh in prestige among 13 categories of reporting. Today it is a prime assignment, especially in television, where the world of budgets and finance was long written off as hopelessly dull and nonvisual. Since the beginning of 1980, the number of network reporters and commentators covering economics news has increased from five to nine. The surge in status should not be surprising: economics has become hot politics and important news. The most dramatic battles on Capitol Hill during the Reagan Administration have involved taxes and budgets. In the view of many journalists, the President has asked to be judged primarily on his stewardship of the economy. Says CBS News Vice President Edward Joyce: "The President called the nation's attention to these issues, as is proved by the very prevalence of the word Reaganomics."

For all their enthusiasm, the network news staffs still have a hard time telling an economics story except in terms of its impact on individuals. Further, they often fail to recognize that their propensity for human interest, and seemingly for bad news more than good, can have unintended political consequences. Which story more truly reveals the state of the economy and the performance of Reaganomics: the drop in inflation from 12.4% in 1980, the year before President Reagan took office, to about 5% in 1982, a change that is often conveyed flatly and numerically? Or the simultaneous rise in unemployment from 7.4% to 10.8%, a development that lends itself to anecdotes and dramatic interviews with the jobless?

In March, the President testily questioned whether it was "news that some fellow in South Succotash has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?" The networks have continued to say that it was. Among the most persistently critical analysts of Reaganomics is Commentator Bill Moyers of CBS. In April, Moyers reported and narrated a documentary called People Like Us. It portrayed four families as innocent victims of social welfare cuts, despite Reagan's contention that the truly needy were still protected by a "social safety net." White House Communications Director David Gergen angrily charged that the documentary hit "below the belt," and that some of Moyers' examples were misleading. CBS stood by the program, and Moyers has continued to jab at Reaganomics in his Evening News commentaries. In December, for example, he began an analysis with these assertions: "This country is in trouble. People are hurting. The people who govern us acknowledge the dangers, but they continue to act at odds with reality."

Moyers is not the only TV figure to prompt complaints from the Administration. On Election Night, Gergen telephoned CBS White House Correspondent Lesley Stahl to condemn remarks made by her and her colleagues that the results were a referendum on Reaganomics and that it was likely to be "a Democratic night." Ten days later, Reagan complained to conservative Columnist James Kilpatrick that TV coverage of the economy was persistently unfair. Said Kilpatrick, paraphrasing Reagan: "CBS in particular, he remarked, seemed determined to distort the economic picture by excessive concentration on the bad news."

To conservatives especially, much of network reporting, and not just at CBS, can seem highly editorialized. The Administration contends that defense expenditures help stimulate the economy. ABC's Economics Editor Dan Cordtz countered, in a report, that a major military buildup would provide "the wrong jobs in the wrong places." ABC closed its evening news program a few days before Christmas with a montage of children on Santa's knee in Beaver County, Pa., asking not for toys but for jobs for their unemployed fathers.

On occasion NBC has also been harshly judgmental. Its portrait of the President at mid-term included an appraisal of Reaganomics by Correspondent Mike Jensen, who came close to calling Reagan's stewardship a failure. Jensen summed up: "It soon became apparent that something was wrong. Business got steadily worse. Factories closed. Layoffs. Bankruptcies. All we can really count on is that President Reagan will be guided by an optimism that not everyone shares."

The networks are not necessarily hostile to Reagan. Rather, they are motivated by competition for the largest possible audience and thus face a self-imposed pressure to give their stories emotional impact. The Institute for Applied Economics, a business advocacy group based in New York City, reviewed 491 hours of network news aired between July 1981 and June 1982. It found that "stories selected to inform the public on the nature of Reaganomics were typically human interest interviews with victims of recession," and cited 37 examples.

Yet all three networks are expanding their serious economics coverage. Each now employs three reporters or commentators on the subject to serve both evening and morning news programs. Each airs more prime-time documentaries than ever before on business and finance, even though the programs are unlikely to rival the movies of the week for ratings points. A few weeks ago, ABC profiled a subject that would have been unthinkably arcane before the onset of the recession: the arbiter of the nation's money supply, the Federal Reserve System. Correspondents Cordtz and Mike Connor blamed the recession not mainly on Reagan but on the Fed's tight-money policy that had been introduced to stem inflation. Indeed, ABC asked whether the independent Fed should be more closely controlled by elected Government.

On Christmas night, CBS aired a symposium among reporters and business executives exploring why each side mistrusts the other, and asking whether the network overemphasizes negative news. NBC, since 1980, has aired three shows on the abstruse topic of competition between the U.S. and Japan for productivity and export trade.

With increasing frequency, network reporting aims toward a necessarily simplified but often illuminating explanation of events. ABC's Cordtz, a former writer for FORTUNE and the Wall Street Journal who is recognized even by rival network executives as the best on the beat, specializes in giving viewers a primer on how things work. In one stock market story, for example, he included a step-by-step description of how a share of stock is bought and sold; in a report on the downturn in retail sales, he ticked off the roles of Government, business, foreign buyers and consumers in reviving the economy. His colleagues at ABC include Connor, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Stephen Aug, a former Washington Star business editor who delivers morning news briefs at express-train speed. Admits Aug: "There is a lot you do not have time to say, and sometimes the best you can hope for is to leave the viewer with an impression of what you have said."

CBS has Jane Bryant Quinn, who also writes for Newsweek, Ken Prewitt, a reporter for MONEY, and Evening News Correspondent Ray Brady, an alumnus of the business-oriented Forbes and Dun's Business Month who nonetheless tends to stress the impact of economic trends on the ordinary viewer. "He is much more consumer oriented than anyone else on the beat," says a senior CBS News executive. Contends Brady: "You can boil most economic phenomena down to whether you do or don't make money."

In addition to Commentator Alan Abelson, who is editor of the business publication Barron's Weekly, NBC has Reporters Jensen, a New York Times alumnus, and Irving R. Levine, a longtime correspondent in Moscow and Rome who pioneered the beat starting in 1971. Levine is sometimes regarded by critics as behind the times, perhaps because he rarely uses flashy graphics. He urges an administrative change, already undertaken at rival ABC, that would, he says, greatly improve coverage: designation of a pool of specialized producers (ABC has five) to work on economics. Says Levine: "Not having to initiate a new person into basic understanding each time would increase my productivity enormously."

Print reporters who cover economics, and Government officials with fiscal duties, continue to see the networks' coverage as underprepared and thin. Says one reporter: "Their biggest problem is that network correspondents cannot say, 'I do not know what this development means.' They should learn that they do not have to take the conventional interpretation as fact." A related complaint is that TV reporters tend to overemphasize the significance of a single statistic, like one month's index of leading economic indicators, or an unrepresentative situation, like the unemployment rate in Youngstown, Ohio. Perhaps in part out of professional rivalry, print reporters also claim that their TV colleagues rarely break new ground. Says a Wall Street Journal writer: "I do not feel that watching the nightly news is a necessary part of my day."

Even the critics, however, concede that there has been undeniable improvement over the past couple of years. The new availability of computer-generated graphics has allowed reporters to illustrate, and therefore air, stories unsuited to ornamentation with stock footage. In addition, there has been a salutary rediscovery of the chart.

Stories purely about businesses, other than news items on layoffs or bankruptcies, are still infrequent. But one worthy exception was a series last week by CBS on "deindustrialization," or the disappearance of jobs in heavy manufacturing. Reporters Ed Rabel, Bernard Goldberg and Linda Douglass tellingly depicted the rise in productivity and entrepreneurial spirit among Third World competitors of Western manufacturers. The series disputed, moreover, the optimistic observation of a similar report by ABC's Richard Threlkeld a few weeks ago. Describing the retraining of jobless former auto workers in California, Threlkeld said: "These labor pains we are feeling are the economy giving birth to the 21st century."

Threlkeld, Rabel, Goldberg and Douglass, interestingly, are not regularly assigned to economics stories. But increasingly the networks are scheduling more coverage of commerce and finance than even the expanded specialty staffs can handle. Sums up NBC's Frank: "Economics is creeping into everything. All of our reporters need to acquire economic literacy."

--By William A. Henry III.

Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.