Dr. Deni Elliott

When I was invited to speak at this meeting, I realized that this was just an incredible opportunity to hear from people who deal with the media as sources, as subjects in a way that matters deeply for your companies and for your communities. And what I found last night, to my surprise, is that there is a particular culture that you have in this professional society that I haven't seen in many professional societies with which I've spoken. Hearing the principles of the Arthur Page Society and how it is that you expect to treat your constituencies, what I see is that's how you treat each other. It's a very nice kind of modeling of the sort of behavior that the Society preaches.

But it is wonderful to be here, and to be from Montana, I might add. I've been at the University of Montana now for five years. Doing practical ethics in Montana is a little like studying fish at a coral reef. It's a true immersion. It's not that the people in Montana are more unethical than most; it's just that all that space gives people the opportunity to take things to extremes.

For example, there are a lot of people in this country who think that the Federal Government interferes with individual rights, but it takes Montana to be home to the ultra-conservative, anti-federalist, constitutionalists who shoot at Black Hawk helicopters that are flying overhead on training missions.

A lot of people think that technology is ruining our lives and support the principles of groups like Earth First, but it takes Montana to be home to a leftist recluse who is the suspected Unibomber. I will make one aside about the coverage of Ted Kazinski. When he was found in Lincoln, Montana, the national press made a big point of the fact that Kazinski didn't have electricity or plumbing in his little cabin. And we were all a little baffled by that out in Montana. As far as locals are concerned, you city folks have electricity and plumbing because you're not lucky enough to have a good supply of firewood and a creek brimming with glacial run-off out back.

The point is that Montana is unique in many ways, including being an equal opportunity extremist state. Doing practical ethics in the equal opportunity extremist state is tricky business if you don't want to find yourself facing the wrong end of a shotgun. So I've learned to look for ways of helping people focus on the big picture rather than their own passionately held positions. And that's what leads into my project for this morning.

The title of my talk was given as "Corporate America and the Media: Different Expectations of Truth." Although I probably had something to do with the title of that talk, it seems to me that upon reflection there are three problems. First of all, the title is too easy to have fun with. You know, what is their expectation of truth? The second is that it's far more theoretical than I'm planning to be. There's also an important conceptual error in the title of the talk. Journalism, the news media, is corporate America. And that's part of the problem, I think, of news media trying to do its job. I'll return to that notion in a while.

But first, what I'd like to present is an ideal big picture for the practice of journalism and the practice of public relations. Now, I'm not going to suggest that either journalists or communication officers always, or even often, meet this ideal. But the purpose in providing an ideal is that it gives a goal. It's something to aim toward. So I hope you'll put aside your well-deserved cynicism about the press and consider with me for a few minutes what it would look like if journalists, as well as communications officers, were fulfilling their unique social functions.

The social function of any profession is what legitimizes it. It's what sets the practice or the profession aside from other societal roles. When I have students take on this exercise of trying to figure out the social function of various professions, I tell them to imagine themselves as anthropologists in an alien but extremely functional society. In this society everything works. Everyone does his or her job. Every social institution does what it should. So I ask them to describe what teachers are doing and how that differs from what parents are doing and how that differs from what pediatricians are doing. I ask them to think about what the government is up to in that foreign land, to think about the role of journalists, advertisers, and public relations people as well.

Now, the thing that's interesting about this exercise is that if you express the social function of each practice or profession in a way that is truly narrow and unique, you find that you've got pieces of a societal jigsaw puzzle. In the hypothetical world, in which every profession is fulfilling its social function, the professions complement one another. The community works, individuals' needs are met, because the socially legitimized functions fit together.

So what is the job of the journalist, or to speak more institutionally, of the news organization? It's to discover, provide context for, and report on issues that are relevant to the needs of self-governing citizens. A wonderful old Washington journalist, George Reedy, described it to me in a conversation some years ago by saying, "The job of the journalist is to tell people what society expects from them and what they can expect from society."

For journalists to do that job well, they need to be relatively free of self - or private - interests. Their special expertise, upon which I think society depends, is their ability to take a kind of meta-view of the community. That doesn't mean to step outside and not care about the community, but it means that their job is to observe it as well as be in it. They need to say, "Right, this is something that citizens need to understand if they're going to govern themselves." Governing ourselves is some of what the society expects of us as citizens, and it's the job of the journalist to provide that. And the other part of that special expertise of these ideal journalists is the ability to put that needed information into context so that citizens understand why they need to know what they're being told.

Where News Coverage Falls Short

This is an area where I think news coverage is particularly bad. The context gets lost when these important stories that people need to know are part of a mosaic, sandwiched between the house fire that the film crew happened to catch because it was at the right time of the morning and people were on staff and the startling news that one of you has a disgruntled employee.

Now, certainly some of what citizens need to know has to do with business and corporations, industry as well as government. The questions that come to mind easily are things like, "What role is this company playing in our community? How is the business being a good citizen of the community? How is it not? How can individuals take advantage of the benefits that the industry brings? How can individuals support industry? How can the community hold the corporation accountable for problems?"

These are things that people, citizens, need to know about the corporations and businesses in their community. So it's easy to see how the ideal role of the public relations officer or department fits in with the ideal role of the journalist. The social function of the communications officer is to serve as an agent for the company to hear those questions the community should be asking, to respond to those questions, to ask questions back to the community and target audiences and listen to the responses. As we've heard mentioned here, the role of the public relations person is to act as an adviser, a counselor to the company. Now, I've avoided using the metaphor of conduit or channel of communication, because the ideal communications officer is more of a catalyst than a conduit. The communications officer creates opportunities for communication within the company, between the company and target audiences, and for the communication about the company that happens completely externally.

News media and corporate communications fit together in that they share a common agenda of letting information that citizens need to know about the company be heard and be said. The difference is that, ideally, journalists have an obligation to serve the citizen's need for information and corporate communications officers, ideally and legitimately, have an obligation to help their companies thrive, not just survive but be well.

The fact that journalists have obligations to citizens and that communication officers have obligations to their companies does not necessarily create a conflict. Both can have their needs met most of the time. Occasionally, the needs of the company and the citizens may conflict.

Citizens need information that relates to their ability to self-govern. Everything else is frosting. It's not a bad thing for news organizations to provide human interest stories and other interesting tidbits. But these other things can't substitute for citizens getting what they need. And the fact that certain information is needed by citizens is what justifies the harm that news media sometimes cause in telling those stories. The harm caused otherwise by news media is not justified.

Do citizens need to know that the plant is dumping toxic products into the river? Yep.

Is it likely to hurt the company? Yep.

Is that justified? You bet.

Do citizens need to know that the corporation is in the middle of delicate negotiations with another company that may decrease the size of the local plant, or may increase it for that matter? No. Why not? Well, there's not a damn thing that the citizens can do about it anyway at the moment except be in the way.

Corporate partners need the privacy to work out details of closures, expansions and mergers just as individuals need privacy to work out details of divorces and marriages. If the story of the negotiation is leaked and printed or broadcast, is the harm caused the company justified? No. Harm caused by journalists is legitimized by the social function of that profession. Period.

We can look at what makes these two cases different, I think, by focusing on what the company really needs - needs not wants - to thrive and be well. I've already said that it needs privacy to make decisions out of the public spotlight. It needs the liberty to be a corporate citizen. But the reason that the other story is justified is that it also needs to meet its responsibilities as a corporate citizen. And that means caring for the local environment. What the corporation needs, or the industry needs in the case that I gave, to thrive and be well, is to work with the community and other interested parties in how to deal with its waste. Quietly harming the environment in which it operates is not ultimately going to help the company thrive and be well. If communications officers are doing their job, they are helping to remind the rest of top management ways that the company can thrive and be well.

Strategies for Dealing with the Media

Even if you are willing to buy that I'm right in describing how journalists and communications officers should work together, or could work together, in an ideal world, the point is that it's not an ideal world. I'm sure you're very familiar with the kinds of things that get in the way of public relations people operating in this ideal manner so I'm not going to spend much time there. What I'm going to do is to talk about three major problems that I think contribute to journalists acting in a less than ideal way and suggest some strategies for dealing with news media.

First. - and I think this is maybe the most serious problem - is that there's a continuing trend toward news organization ownership and control by a few non-news concerns. The effect that this trend has on the ability of the news organization to meet its social mandate is pretty clear. If the purse strings are in the hands of those who are only economically invested in the news organization's mission, a tension is created between those trying to meet obligations to the public, and those trying to meet obligations to stockholders. It creates a classic conflict of interest.

That's why I said there's a conceptual error in the title of my talk. Journalism is corporate America. Ben Bagdikian said in the 1987 preface to the second edition of his insightful book, The Media Monopoly, that he was surprised by four developments in the four years that had passed since the first edition of his book. Even 10 years after his observation, his surprise is worth sharing because the developments make it easy to see why journalists have a hard time doing their job.

In 1987 Bagdikian wrote that he was surprised by "the rapidity of enlarged corporate control, the naivete of so many working journalists about its impact, the degree to which students of communications have ignored the peculiarities of local monopoly in American news, and the unconcern of the country's top editors with the extent to which (mass advertising) is changing the form and content of news itself."

From Bagdikian's 1990 third edition of The Media Monopoly, I'd like to give you some illustrations of the news media control which raise concern.

To begin with a little alphabet soup; we all know that GE began bringing good news to light when it acquired NBC through its 1986 purchase of RCA. GE is the world's 10th largest corporation. As well as producing news, it's a major defense contractor, producer of electric lamps, nuclear missiles and locomotives.

Time Warner is the largest media corporation in the world, largest magazine publisher in the United States, second largest cable company in the world, one of the largest book publishers, and the world's largest video company. And it produces news, of course, as well as entertainment.

There's Robert Murdoch's News Corporation Ltd., which controls more newspaper circulation around the world than any other publisher, including two-thirds of all newspapers in Australia, one-half in New Zealand, one-third in Britain. Murdoch also controls book-publishing firms in Britain and the U.S. He has the largest satellite television system in Europe and is the second-largest magazine publisher in the U.S. He controls Fox Broadcasting Network, 20th Century Fox movie studios, and is the world's largest distributor of videocassettes.

Maxwell Communications of Britain owns newspapers, book-publishing houses, magazines, databases, communication satellite channels, market services, and printing plants.

Since 1990, as Bagdikian rightly points out, these media giants and conglomerates have consumed a larger "market share" of existing media including, almost incidentally, news organizations.

Now, is it troublesome that corporations own news organizations? No. It's no more troublesome that for-profit corporations own news organizations than for-profit corporations to manage health care. On the face of it, it's not a problem.

What's troublesome is the possibility of corporations sacrificing good quality health care for the bottom line, or sacrificing good quality news for the bottom line. What's troublesome with the news, in particular, is that it takes very delicate negotiating for journalists and news managers to get beyond the feeling that there's a sacred cow grazing in and on the newsroom. Part of the job of news organizations is to tell people what they need to know for self-governance. That means understanding corporations. That means understanding the owners of the news organizations. It may be that citizens need to know that the ownership of news will affect what journalists call news.

A second problem that we have currently with news media is that any change in technology leads to a paradigm shift in what counts as news. We can see the effect of changes in technology as we examine the development of the printing press, the telegraph, the wire service, the ability to send still and moving pictures. Every time we've had a technological advance, news media institutions have had to rethink, "What do we mean is news?" Now the technological paradigm shift that is taking place around the world is the ability to provide citizens with instant access to the world's events.

To extend a metaphor, in our increasingly global community, there are more open windows in an ever more thickly settled town square.

Increasingly, as citizens "we are there." Satellites, small cameras that carry their own power supply and easily moveable equipment to broadcast what these cameras pick up create the sensation of instant news. But the sensation of instant news is not the same thing as real news. Real news is a creation of the journalist and the news organization. What comes out at the end of the editorial process with any luck, is a massaged, synthesized, encapsulated interpretation of an event or an issue of importance to people in a self-governing society.

News Is Created by Journalists

The open window metaphor that I gave, the fact that media outlets can pick up and broadcast what's happening in our global community town square, doesn't mean that it's news. What comes in through those open windows is analogous to the honking horns and wisps of conversation and crying babies that one hears in a less-virtual town square. None of this is news. News is what the journalism profession, responsibly or not, creates for us.

The third and last problem that I'll discuss before providing some suggestions of what you can do in dealing with news media in an imperfect world is the problem of mediocrity.

It used to be that I'd hear about some particularly awful practitioner in whatever profession and sort of shrug it off by saying, "Well, somebody has to graduate at the bottom of the class." It took me a while to realize that our problem in most professions, most practices, is not the bad doctors, the bad lawyers, the bad journalists; it was the mediocre ones. The really scary truth is that most people graduate in the middle of the class.

In my experience, few journalists are evil or working with the real intent of causing harm, but many are pretty dumb. They're lazy, they're not very creative, and they're certainly not brave. I blame part of this on the increasing corporate mentality of the newsroom. A Boston Globe journalist, while interviewing me for a story the other day, kind of mused wistfully, "You know, this place feels like an insurance agency now." Now, there's nothing wrong with insurance agencies. But they're not places conducive to the special social function of journalists. It's hard for journalists to feel encouraged to take their social function seriously when what's rewarded is cheap and efficient filling of a shrinking news hole.

But the mediocrity of journalism goes beyond that. I worry about the type of student now being attracted to the profession. And I worry about the modeling that the current practice of journalism is giving to future journalists.

I have an upper level/graduate class that I teach once a year on ethics and public affairs, and it's a wonderful group because it brings together students who are candidates for the master of public administration degree and master of business administration degrees, as well as forestry students, philosophy students, political science students, and journalism students. And I can predict that the least analytic students, and often the worst writers, will be among the journalists.

It's a problem for society, I think, that we have fewer Woodwards and Bernsteins in the profession. And it's a problem for you. That type of journalist was committed to digging out a story, but they could also see a reflection of the profession's social function in every story they wrote. They were tough and demanding when dealing with sophisticated sources, but they also recognized their partnership with sources and refrained from burning them.

So, how can you deal with journalists in a less-than-perfect world? First of all, take advantage of their laziness, feed journalists things. If it's easy and they don't have to do a lot of work, you'll often be able to get them to do what you want. The second thing to keep in mind is that what journalists have a right to is information that is important to the needs of citizens, not some fictitious "right to know."

The third thing is to make a friend in the newsroom. The business editor is somebody to cultivate. Ask that editor's advice. Let the editor get to know you and get to know that you understand the complementary roles of your professions. Business news has to fight to get front-page play, and if you can help that business editor get front-page stories, he or she will be very grateful. And then when somebody from the city desk is getting on your nerves or seems to be on the verge of making a really stupid or harmful mistake, you can call your friend and say, "Look, so-and-so just doesn't get it."

As you may know, every news organization, print and broadcast alike, has what is called a "budget meeting" at least once a day. This is when editors come together and talk about what stories are being covered and what goes where. In budget meetings I attended at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Louisville Courier Journal and other places where I worked long-term as an ethics coach or did seminars, I found that there's little that editors enjoy more than going into the budget meeting and saying to one another, "Gee, your boy seems really to be screwing up that story.' So that's why I'm saying that making a friend in the newsroom can work.

Last of all, I'll share with you one of my favorite motivators for getting people to do the right thing. As an aside, I would like people to do the right thing for the right reason, but I'll settle for them doing the right thing. OK. The motivator: Shame.

On some pre-conscious level, reporters, editors, and even producers of the local news know what they are supposed to be about. They know that the social function of journalism is to tell citizens what they need to know for self-governance, even if they haven't heard anything like that since journalism school. So, when they ask you questions, ask them questions back.

Ask them, "What does that have to do with your obligation to tell people what they need to know for self-governance?" Ask them, "Why is it that citizens need to know that? How is that information going to help them?" The reporter will either be stunned into silence or will actually engage with you in a dialogue about the story. Either way, you win.

I'd like to end with a plea. When I scold journalists about the sins of the profession, I try to remind them that they each have the power to make changes in the industry. So, even though I've been focusing on problems with journalism rather than corporate communications, I'd like to remind you that journalists and public relations officers play complementary roles in providing information. You have the power to create a better, more open communication climate in your company and in your community. And doing so does not imply that you should be disloyal to the company. Quite the opposite. Focusing on what the corporation needs to thrive and be well can suggest a myriad of opportunities for communication.

If journalists want to fix what's wrong in their industry, they need to take on the reality that the social function of journalism is being forgotten by those who control the industry. Communications officers have a far easier job in bringing about more open communication about what citizens need to know so that your company can thrive and be well. You need only to change some attitudes. As I understand it, the ability to develop strategies to change attitudes is a big part of what doing your job is all about.

I think what is not acceptable for public relations officers and other senior executives of major corporations is to ignore the press. Yes, I know that you can go around news media and reach your target audiences; yes, I know that you can plan heavily funded campaigns that by-pass news media and go directly to citizens.

But journalism is the most essential social institution in any society. And journalists are in a bad way right now. They need your power and influence in the corporate world to help them get back on the track of reporting and presenting the news. Please use the tremendous power of business to strengthen news media rather than dismantle them.

 

Vitae: Deni Elliott is professor of ethics and director of the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana. A professor in the Department of Philosophy and adjunct professor at the School of Journalism, she went to Montana after serving as founding director of the Dartmouth College Ethics Institute.