Column: Watching Media

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Watching Media
By Edward C. Pease
©1994

A recent headline in the Logan Herald-Journal announced, “Man tries to bite police dog.”

It was an eye-catcher for anyone idly page-surfing through the second section. But the average Utah newspaper reader may not recognize that headline as a recurring inside joke for journalists, part of press history, lore and tradition.

Back in 1918, John Bogart, a city editor for the New York Sun, helped American journalism define what’s news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often,” Bogart wrote. “But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” With this concept of the kind of news that Americans most want—the “Gee whiz!” stories, the bizarre, the horrifying, the heart-wrenching—sensationalism as a way to sell news was born.

As any newspaper reader or TV viewer knows, the man-bites-dog standard has helped define what journalism has become.

Just watch “reality-based” TV programming. “Hard Copy,” “Inside Edition,” “Cops,” “911” and many other TV tabloids report breathlessly about questionable (sometimes re-staged) events, misguided personalities and real-time crimes, catastrophes and arrests.

To say nothing of the daytime soap operas and primetime sitcoms—“General Hospital,” “Fresh Prince,” “As the World Turns,” “Melrose Place” and the rest—which help Americans form an understanding of how relationships and families work according to entertainment media’s cockeyed view of the world.

On radio and television, talk shows—from “Oprah” to “Rush Limbaugh” and “Larry King Live”—are the hottest thing around, and often the hottest thing over lunch or at the dining room table, too. Talk shows have replaced conversations we used to have in person—on porches, in diners and barber shops, over backyard fences with friends and neighbors. Nowadays, talk shows are the new “electronic backyard fence” over which we Americans get together to talk about what’s new, where we form our views of the world.

From the interminable O.J. Simpson trial to the latest plane crash, from election campaigns to White House missteps, from the continuing agony in the Middle East to race relations in this country—the news media help set the agenda of what we think about.

Entertainment media also reflect society and help form how we, our children, families, friends and neighbors see the world and each other. When 17-year-old Nathan Martinez of Salt Lake was arrested for the murders of his stepmother and sister, authorities (and the media) said his crime was inspired by his 20-plus viewings of the movie “Natural Born Killers.”

It’s an old story—“The media made me do it.” Back in 1938, at Halloween, Orson Welles pulled the greatest media prank of all time when his actors performed “War of the Worlds” on radio, convincing millions of listeners that Martians had invaded New Jersey. We laugh today, but how about this from the Associated Press: “The CBS movie ‘Without Warning,’ about an asteroid striking Earth, triggered hundreds of phone calls nationwide Sunday night from confused viewers concerned that the depicted disaster might be true.” That story appeared Oct. 31, 1994.

It’s a strange place, the “real world”-according-to-the media.

With this column, the Standard Examiner inaugurates a regular feature that will critically examine how the news and entertainment media work, and how they perform in our lives in Utah and beyond. “The media” means not just newspapers (including this one), but also TV, radio, advertising, magazines—even books, records and CDs, and the much-ballyhooed “information superhighway.”

The idea is to take an up-close and skeptical look at the media that flood our lives and homes, from the morning paper and “Good Morning America” to radio shows we hear on the way to work to the evening situation comedies and latest Hollywood releases. These help set the agendas of our lives, our culture and our society, so they’re worth examining as they come into our homes.

We’ll discuss—with the help of you readers, our community partners and neighbors—not just what Americans like and dislike about media content, but how it all works, dispelling some myths about the press and examining what researchers have learned about how Americans use the media, and vice versa.

Responsible citizens in what truly is becoming an Information Age should know how it all works. We all must be skeptical and knowledgeable consumers of news and entertainment in the brave new electronic world, where the media are the “backyard fence” over which we discuss with friends and neighbors the day’s events.

(Postscript: This column appeared in 1994 in the Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner. It was my first and last “regular” column in the Standard, as the editorial page editor convinced the publisher the next day that it was a bad idea for a newspaper to run columns criticizing the press. So it goes.)