Rethink of News Values

Most Americans, according to polls, believe that the news media has gone too far in disclosing details of President Clinton's private life. They are also weary of the coverage and wish the whole thing would go away.

Apart from the fact that the scandal sells newspapers I suspect most journalists could do without it too.

There seems to be a momentum that drives unsubstantial rumours on the web, through undiscriminating tabloids, all the way to supposedly responsible newspapers. We have not yet learned, any more than those in Congress have, how to build in a pause to consider the likely consequences of actions before they are taken.

It would be a very bold editor - and one whose tenure might be limited - who did not feel that he or she should inflict the Starr report on their readers. Though why it was necessary to have the text in so many papers and magazines and on the internet as well as in books is a fair question. I wonder how many forests had to be cut down for the sake of the public's 'right to know'.

Many editors, faced with the Starr testimony, put the X-rated details, as Nigel Wade, Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, calls them, in a separate section clearly marked with warnings about the explicit content.

It was Wade who took a decision earlier this year to buck the way the school shootings in Oregon were covered round the country. Instead of going for big headlines on the front page for what everyone in the media business regarded as the biggest story of the day, he ran the story on pages two and three with the note that the paper was doing so because it was concerned that front-page treatment could harm or frighten vulnerable children.

'We wanted to avoid any risk of copycat actions,' he tells me. Wade seldom flinches at reporting bad news but 'we do not wish to encourage any unstable teenager to think of shooting as a way out of adolescent torments. And we do not wish to alarm smaller children.'

Not all his staff agreed with Wade's decision and he worried the next morning what the public's response would be. He need not have done so. Before breakfast a Chicago radio host offered congratulations and read his note on the air. Another radio station called before he had finished his coffee, and when he arrived at the paper he found almost every phone ringing with readers, particularly parents and teachers, thanking the paper for keeping the story off the front page. On that day 27 newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations asked for interviews.

'What other editors might do is up to them,' says Wade, 'but the message reaching us in Chicago is that readers are often frightened by the news and respond with gratitude when the media aligns its "news values" more closely with their own.'

The Chicago initiative is good news to Bill Porter, an English publisher living in France who has co-founded the International Communications Forum. In a profile last month in the Christian Science Sentinel, he is quoted: 'There is greater and greater demand for something to happen in the media that will produce positive waves. This is an interesting rethinking time for the media. We are not happy with our role in public life. There's something wrong when one of the pillars of democracy is so badly viewed by the public.'

As we go to press Porter is heading out to Los Angeles to speak to the annual conference of the Society of Professional Journalists. The announcement of his seminar states, 'Worldwide the press is at a low point in public esteem, and this discussion will centre on how to restore confidence in what we do.'

Very timely.