Mighty Media and Powerful Publics
By Claudia Ritzi

The coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre has made it clear once again: high-quality journalism needs public support.

He aims a gun directly at the camera; he brandishes a hammer; he sits in a car and insults his classmates; his face shows hardly any emotion, only his words express the hatred that exists inside of him. Almost every disturbing detail that the twenty-three year old Seung Hui Cho presented in the media package he sent to NBC News was broadcast or printed after he had killed thirty-two innocent people at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, on April 16, 2007.

When the murderer started the fatal shooting spree on campus, he could be sure of being famous within a few hours. He could rely on getting the posthumous attention he was longing for because there is nothing new about criminals trying to manipulate the news media - remember Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School in 1999, and Robert Steinhäuser, who three years later shot sixteen people at his school in Erfurt, Germany. Fortunately, in the liberal media systems of the United States and Germany, censorship that broadly prevents such coverage is unthinkable - even though the prospect of posthumous fame might have attracted Cho and the three other young killers.

Nevertheless, in the past few years journalists in both countries have been criticized frequently for crossing the boundaries of morality and decency when covering tragic events. Was it right that NBC and other cable and broadcast networks showed large parts of Cho's so-called "multimedia manifesto?" Can we accept that close-ups of grieving schoolmates will be shown publicly and relatives of the victims will be interviewed before they have a chance to realize what has happened? In most cases it is the journalistic community itself that utters the strongest criticism of such coverage. And nowadays they do so regularly by writing critical editorials or appearing as guests on talk shows.

Their criticism does not come as a surprise: it is well known that more and more journalists in Germany and the United States are unhappy with the way things are going in their profession. As a Pew Research Center study from 2004 shows, 41 percent of the 547 American journalists questioned were concerned about their coverage's quality. In Germany the situation is similar. In 2001, eleven of the most influential German journalist associations started a joint initiative to promote high-quality journalism ("Initiative Qualität"), which offers educational programs, develops quality standards and supports research on the quality of German media.

While in the past the United States and Germany had been widely admired abroad for their large numbers of high-quality regional papers, today in both countries exactly those papers seem to be in danger. But surprisingly, despite all of their mourning, the journalists themselves seem to not be able to improve their products. Even famous newspapers as The Washington Post or the Süddeutsche Zeitung nowadays print articles that you would rather expect in the yellow press than in a quality newspaper. One recent example: when the German Minister for Family Affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, changed her haircut a few weeks ago, almost every German newspaper covered this remarkable incident. The nationally-distributed newspaper Die Welt opened an article with the words "Haircuts of politicians are important," and after having read the text you could not be sure whether this first sentence was meant as a joke or not.

While they arguably wield more and more influence over politicians and parties, journalists seem to have lost the ability to influence the quality of their own work. This is a paradoxical situation.

The famous sociologist Max Weber defined power at the beginning of the twentieth century as the "chance of a man or a number of men to realize their own will in a social action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action." So the question is: if a significant number of journalists in the U.S. and in Germany insists on more quality, who is preventing them from doing so? Which impetuses are steering them, apart from their own professional attitude?

Usually, quality changes in news coverage are explained by the increased economic pressure the journalists are facing. Of course, economic numbers have become more important for media companies. Publishers seem to focus more strongly on bottom-lines today than they did in the past, and they seem to be less ambitious in raising the quality of their papers or programs. Also their business has become harder: while the number of advertising vehicles has exploded, the companies' advertising budgets have not. As a result, the managers can hardly increase profits without decreasing the expenditures. Such an analysis suggests fatal developments: journalism has to become cheap. But high-quality journalism will never be cheap.

Surely, there is a lot of truth in this observation. But still this is not a sufficient explanation as long as it does not take the customer into account. The profit of a media product always depends on the audience. The higher the numbers of viewers or readers who watch a show or read a paper, the more money the advertisers are willing to pay. As a consequence, recent trends in media coverage such as personalization, sensationalism, 'tabloidization,' and shrinking column space have to be seen as attempts to please the customers. Arguably, it is the recipients' alleged lack of interest in sincere and responsible journalism that has been changing media contents.

Time will tell whether the German and American publics indeed are more interested in their politicians' haircuts, family lives, or in the total of campaign contributions they are able to raise than in the policies they support. But one thing is already clear: the economic pressure on the media market has made the public more powerful than ever.

In modern democracies, there has always been a close relationship between the public and the media. But for many years at a time, recipients in the United States as well as in Germany forgot about the power they possessed. There was no necessity to think about it, because the journalist's and the audiences' interests converged. Additionally, with the help of an increasing variety of newspapers, magazines, radio channels, TV-broadcasters, and web pages, almost every demand of the audience could be met. But when severe competition endangers the supply of high-quality media content, the citizens have to realize again the important role a reliable news industry plays in our modern "media democracy."

Fortunately, we can be optimistic that the public will face this challenge. People in the U.S. and in Germany have become aware of the fact that journalism might be moving in a wrong direction. The viewers' reactions to the broadcast of Cho's videos and photos proved this: massive protests by the audience - not by journalists - convinced the persons in charge to stop showing the material. One day after their first publication, NBC and other cable and broadcast networks backed sharply away from showing the images. Those reactions are far more remarkable than the fact that the "multi-media manifesto" was broadcast at all.

The public seems to view the actions of the journalists and the publishing companies more and more critically, not only in the United States but also in Germany. When the publisher of the Münstersche Zeitung, a small regional newspaper with a long tradition in Westphalia, fired all of its journalists in the local section in January and replaced them by a new, cheaper team, many readers started to protest strongly against this decision. They collected signatures and organized protest events, many associations refused to cooperate with the new reporters, and a significant number of readers cancelled their subscriptions. The future of the nineteen fired journalists is still uncertain today, but surely the protest has made them stronger.

These are only two recent examples of public protest. But such incidents seem to occur more and more frequently and they should encourage all concerned journalists (and readers); as long as the media are sending their messages to an aware and active public, high-quality journalism will survive every competition - even and especially in modern media-societies.

Claudia Ritzi was an intern at AICGS in the Spring of 2007.

This essay appeared in the June 8, 2007, AICGS Advisor.