Harry’s scoop on newspapers, commentators

Here’s “Chapter 2” from a folder of drafts Harry filed on his computer in the 1980s and ’90s. At the time, he’d thought about writing a book on the media. We can only imagine things he would have had to say about the media today.


Chapter 2

Here’s a question I’m often asked, sometimes at cocktail parties, sometimes in serious conversations or discussions. “Harry, after reading so widely for so many years, how do you feel about the media? Are they doing a good job?”

I wish the answers could be as simple as the questions, but they’re not. My feelings about the media are somewhat ambivalent – part admiration and respect, part revulsion and contempt. I’m reminded of what Winston Churchill once said about democracy. “Democracy,” he said, “is the worst form of government imaginable – except for all the others.” Or words to that effect. He had a way of spouting nuggets like that.

Meteorologists like to say that there is no such thing as bad weather – only different kinds of weather. In a way, the same thing can be said about newspapers. None of them are all good; none of them are all bad. They are all a mixture of good and bad which, in effect, makes each one different. The National Inquirer, for example, is as different from The New York Times as the sun is from the moon. Yet, they are both newspapers, just as the sun and the moon are both heavenly bodies in our solar system. One can be described as an abomination in the media world, the other as a great purveyor of information and influence. (I leave it to you to decide which is which.) But both have their moments of greatness, and both have their moments of failure. The point is that they are very different breeds of the same cat, and the people who read them do so for different reasons. The one, perhaps, to keep up with their prejudices; the other, perhaps, to be entertained or informed. (Again, I leave it to you to decide which is which.)          

The commentator represents the top of the heap in a system that puts the ordinary reporter at the bottom. This is the “Peter Principle” at work. When a reporter displays the qualities of persistence, astuteness, acumen, etc., that make him first-rate at what he does, he is rewarded by being taken out of that field and placed in the category of pundit, or commentator. This move immediately escalates his pay schedule to astronomical proportions, and this applies both to newspapers and broadcast journalism.

But what do such pundits do to earn their high salaries? They become, in effect, parasites, feeding off the work of other journalists. They either rewrite the news that others have gathered, adding their own comments (read biases) or they have teams of writers do it for them. On a newspaper, it would be tantamount to having the rewrite man elevated to a position equal to that of the editor, with commensurate salary and prestige, and putting his own byline on all the stories.

I strongly believe that this is what has happened to many of the syndicated columnists. They have, in accordance with the Peter Principle, been elevated to the level of incompetence. Strictly as an aside, I might add, I suspect that the same sort of thing has happened in our educational system. Those who have demonstrated the highest ability as educators have been elevated to administration, the level of incompetence for them, and our educational system has suffered accordingly.

In any case, reporters must be frustrated by the so-called star system, especially in television. More often than not, a reporter – a foreign correspondent – will gather the facts of an important story from some very high-level sources overseas; but does he get to tell his story to the viewers? Usually not. Dan Rather, or Tom Brokaw, or the current reigning star (read anchorman) will tell it, on whatever network or channel you’re watching.

TV News

Television is an enormously influential medium in our country and, probably, around the world. Or so they say. Indeed, it has become somewhat of a cliché to say that the majority of the people get their news from television and, thus, television shapes the public’s perceptions of the world around them. Well, it does and it doesn’t. The problem is that there is no accurate way to measure precisely how influential it really is. In my view, its influence is a myth perpetuated by the broadcasters and the agencies that sell advertising.

To be sure, millions of people watch the news, and millions more watch major events – football games, the World Series, the Olympics, Presidential news conferences, national tragedies, etc. – and there is no better medium for conveying a sense of what is happening now, right now, live and in living color. But the day-to-day news, the nightly news programs, are watched by fewer people than watch the major event shows or the major entertainment shows. And while they get some feel for what’s going on in the world or in their local communities, anyway, the question is, do they get a real understanding of what is transpiring?

(Stay tuned for more of Harry’s media-related drafts on this blog.)

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman

Harry’s unweathered essays on the media

In 1987, Harry drafted the following essay about the media, one of many he eventually filed in a computer folder titled “BOOK 1”. Yes, he had considered the idea of writing a book on media after he retired from government. The essays could serve as a history lesson for youngsters and others who could use the background. For sure, they show us more of the knowledge that occupied Harry’s mind.


Chapter 1  Introduction

I have a great deal to say about the media, but before I start, let me define the term. The media is something like the weather – everyone talks about it but nobody ever does anything about it. And when people talk about the media, they all mean different things; that is, they are talking about different elements of the media. Media itself is an all-embracing term. It includes newspapers, magazines, books, radio broadcasts, television broadcasts, newsletters, house organs, press releases, etc.

To complicate the problem, within each element of the media there are different manifestations. In the newspaper field, for example, there are seven-day a week newspapers, five-day a week newspapers, three-day a week newspapers, weekly newspapers, biweekly newspapers, and even a few monthly newspapers. There are newspapers for sale and newspapers given away free. Even Sunday newspapers can be cast in a separate category, since they are quite different from their daily counterparts and some are even managed by separate staffs.

Within both radio and television broadcasting, there are the major networks, the independents (so-called), cable, and local stations. All are part of the same general species, but all differ from each other in many important ways. The same is true of magazines – general magazines, popular magazines, trade magazines, special interest magazines, and so on. There is, in fact, such a wild proliferation of published and broadcast material available to the public that it is very nearly impossible to catalogue and assess it all under the heading of “media”.  

Books, for example, are a very important element of the media, since they exercise considerable influence over the way their readers view the world around them. Movies, too. If anyone thinks, for example, that people in other countries derive their impressions of life in the United States from newspapers alone, he is badly mistaken. Books, movies and television entertainment programs have far more influence on foreign perceptions of American society than do newspapers or news broadcasts. I can’t prove that, but I strongly believe it.

In any case, the entire spectrum of material embraced by the “media” is too huge to be manageable in any one volume like this. On a practical level, therefore, when I talk about the media, I am talking only about a few of its more important (in my view) elements; that is, a few newspapers, a few magazines, a few broadcasts – a small fraction of the whole, and yet enough, I hope, to convey the reasons why I feel as I do about media performance and its effect on our national perceptions.  

Now a few words about where I’m coming from. For some 36 years I was intimately associated with a Pentagon publication called the Current News, a series of daily compilations of newspaper and magazine stories dealing with national security affairs. This sort of experience does not qualify me as a journalist, per se, but rather as a serious reader, or student, of journalistic efforts. I would submit that anyone of moderate intelligence who studies the products of journalism in any field of interest attentively for more than three decades will inevitably learn something – not only about the field of interest, but also about the practice of journalism itself. If he has a modicum of self-respect, he will also think about what he has learned. And if he has an ego, as I do, he will try to impart what he has learned to others, as I am in this book.  


(In the following weeks, I’ll post more essays from Harry’s “BOOK 1” files.)

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman