The public and quite a few politicians don`t know what they`re talking about when they criticize news organizations. The trouble with most news organizations, whether newspapers, television or radio, is that they don`t spend as much money as they should on reporting.
Good reporting is expensive and hard. The reason it`s so hard is that half the world is trying to hide the truth from the other half. Too many government officials, business executives, union leaders and ordinary citizens who deal with the public are doing things they don`t want anyone to know about and they`re good at concealing them.
It seems as if all the bad guys are caught sooner or later, but it`s a safe bet that we`ve never read about the biggest crooks in business and government because no one ever found out about them. There are not enough reporters.
Most politicians and business people are honest, but they`re also paranoid about reporters. Maybe it`s Mike Wallace`s fault. Even when they have nothing to hide, they try to hide it.
The public has a lot of mistaken ideas about reporters. I don`t know whether reporters and editors are generally more liberal than conservative, as critics claim. Even if they are, it`s possible for a reporter who votes Democratic to treat Republicans fairly.
There are other charges people make against reporters that are seldom true, or if they`re true, they`re meaningless. One is that reporters don`t give the whole story. Well, of course they don`t. Boiling a story down to its essentials is part of a journalist`s job.
I`m always surprised that people who distrust newspaper reporters because they say reporters are biased accept the reports on the life of Jesus Christ that are found in the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Those writers` stories differ and they could hardly be called impartial reporters. They wanted everyone to believe what they believed.
It`s difficult for a news organization not to spend more on its sales department than on its editorial department. Sales brings in money; editorial spends it.
Each of the three television networks has about 100 reporters.
(Television calls them ”correspondents” because all titles are inflated in television.) It seems like a lot, but not when you consider that the network news departments are trying to cover the world. They could use twice that many.
The network anchormen each make at least $1 million a year. The correspondents make substantially less, but Dan Rather is a better buy for the networks because he`s on every weekday and he attracts a crowd just sitting there being Dan Rather. Good reporters like Brian Ross at NBC or Richard Threlkeld at ABC don`t get on the air but once a week because they`re spending their time the hard way, being reporters.
The networks would be better news organizations if they each took the $1 million their anchormen make and hired another 20 reporters for $50,000 apiece. You wouldn`t find the anchormen arguing about that, either. They`re reporters and, though they like the money, they`re embarrassed to be caught up in the star system.
If Jesse Helms gets to be Dan Rather`s boss, he`ll probably make Dan a $50,000-a-year reporter.
