3. Comprehension
Baseball
Decide whether the following statements are
true or false and correct the false statements.
The ball used in the game of baseball is covered with leather.
There are eleven players in a baseball team.
Fielders used to wear gloves, but now they catch the ball in their bare hands.
The team which fields is called the battery.
A player does not score a run unless he runs round all the bases before the next ball is pitched.
There is more than one umpire.
The batter is out if he hits the ball into the crowd.
After three players are out, the teams change positions and the batters become the fielders.
A player is out if he hits the ball into foul territory and a fielder catches it before it touches the ground.
If both teams have scored the same number of runs at the end of nine innings, the game continues until one player scores a home run.
The batter can go to first base if he is hit by the pitched ball.
The catcher wears a face mask because the bouncing ball kicks up a lot of dust.
4. Comprehension
Running for Your Life
Which of the following statements are true, which are false? Correct the false ones.
Quite a number of recent books and articles refute the notion that physical exercise prolongs life.
A long-term Harvard study does not confirm that view.
The study covered 35-year-old and 74-year- old Harvard graduates.
Men who did not burn more than 2,000 calories per week had a lower mortality rate.
The study shows that people who jog four hours per week have a good chance of prolonging their lives.
According to the study, the more exercises people do, the greater their life expectancy becomes.
Another result of the study is that regular exercise not only protects against heart disease but against other diseases as well.
30 per cent of the smokers who did regular exercises died during the survey.
University athletes are likely to live longer than their less athletic classmates.
10. Sports activities in later years affect
longevity much more than activities during the college years.
5. Letter Writing
Write a letter to the editor in which you express your personal opinion about physical exercise, and point out concrete examples which either support or refute the findings of the Harvard study.
260 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP
6.Preparing an Interview
Lousy at Sports
Imagine that this revelation of a prominent TV producer in The New York Times magazine has aroused the interest of a popular talk show host, who now uses the magazine article as the basis for his interview.
Put yourself into the position of the interviewer and prepare an introduction, in which you
point out the importance of being a sportsman/sportswoman or at least a sports fan, if you want to be accepted in American society
remind the audience of the large number of well-known athletes who have been invited to the show
introduce your guest and explain why he has been invited.
Then prepare questions concerning
Mark Goodson's reasons for publicly confessing his absolute dislike of sports
the attitude of many Americans toward men who are uninterested in sports
Mark Goodson's anxieties as the father of a boy
his job as a moderator of a sports quiz
the offer to become a baseball reporter
his experience of being eventually found out at a dinner party.
15 The Media
part A Background Information
U.S.A.-A
MEDIA STATE?
COMMERCIAL CONTROL OF THE MEDIA
NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES
NEW PRESS DEVELOPMENTS
Mass communication has revolutionized the modern world. In the United States, it has given rise to what social observers sometimes call a media state, a society in which access to power is through the media. The term media, understood broadly, includes any channel of information through which information can pass. Since a democracy largely depends on public opinion, all those involved in communicating information inevitably have an important role to play. The print and broadcasting media not only convey information to the public, but also influence public opinion. Television, with access to virtually every American household, which typically tunes in about six hours a day, is a powerful influence. The broadcast media, capable of mass-producing messages and images instantaneously, have been largely responsible for homogenizing cultural and regional diversities across the country. Beyond this cultural significance, the power of the media is important to politicians, who use the media to influence voters; and to businessmen and women, who use the media to encourage consumption of their products.
The relationship works in the other direction as well. The audience's opinions influence the media industry. Most newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks in the United States are private commercial enterprises and must be responsive to their audience's demands, especially for entertainment, if they are to stay in business.
Newspapers and magazines have long been major lines of communication and have always reached large audiences. Today, more than 11,000 different periodicals are published as either weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, or semiannual editions. In 1986, a total of 9,144 newspapers were published in the United States. More than 62 million copies of daily newspapers are printed every day and over 58 million copies of Sunday papers are published every week.
Readership levels, however, are not as high as they once were. Newspapers have had to cope with competition from radio and television. They have suffered a decline in circulation from the peak years around the turn of the century largely because of the trend of urban populations moving to the suburbs. Studies show that most suburban readers prefer to get "serious" news from television and tend to read newspapers primarily for comics, sports, fashions, crime reports, and local news. Nowadays, Americans consider television their most important source of news, and a majority ranks television as the most believable news source. Accordingly, newspapers have made changes to increase their readership levels. Some established metropolitan newspapers are now published in "zoned" editions for different regional
262 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP
a
udiences.
In some cases, they have lost their readership to new weeklysuburban
newspapers that resemble magazines in format. To meet the public
demand for more feature material, some publishers have started adding
"lifestyle" and "home living" sections to
their papers to make them more like magazines.
Circulation of Leading U.S. Magazines
General magazines, exclusive of groups and comics. Based on total average paid circulation during the 6 months prior to Dec. 31. 1986.
CONGLOMERATION
LARGE NATIONAL PAPERS AND NEWS SERVICES
Circulation
. 1,442,478
. 1,431,047
. 1,412,723
. 1,405,087
. 1,379,781
. 1,362,225
. 1,348,098
. 1,328,534
. 1,306,172
. 1,297,938
. 1,281,597
. 1,239,045
. 1,234,726
. 1,212,151
. 1,201,584
. 1,201,581
. 1,181,862
. 1,156,119
. 1,118,132
. 1,109,812
. 1,090,027
Magazine
Circulation Magazine
Circulation Magazine
Penthouse
Smithsonian
U.S. News & World Report
Southern Living
Field & Stream
VFW
Money
Seventeen
Popular Science
The Workbasket
Home & Away
Parents
Life
Ebony
Motorland
Popular Mechanics
Country Living
Globe
Elks
Adventure Road
1,001 Home Ideas
Outdoor Life
Discovery
. 2,379,333 . 2,310,970 . 2,287,016 . 2,263,922 . 2,007,479 . 1,951,004 . 1,862,106 . 1,853,314 . 1,843,067 . 1,779,463 . 1,749,083 . 1,721,816 . 1,718,726 . 1,703,019 . 1,692,501 . 1,634,930 . 1,619,121 . 1,600,963 . 1,577,302 . 1,569,951 . 1,540,428 . 1,520,915 . 1,446,446
Sunset
Bon Appetit
The American Hunter...
True Story
Changing Times
The American Rifleman .
Woman's World
Discover
Boys' Life
Mademoiselle
Vogue
Golf Digest
New Woman
Rodale's Organic
Gardening
Home Mechanics
The Family Handyman ..
Teen
Sesame Street
Travel & Leisure
Rolling Stone
Self
TV Guide 16,800,441
Reader's Digest 16,609,847
Modern Maturity 14,973,019
National Geographic 10,764,998
Better Homes & Gardens.... 8,091,751
Family Circle 6,261,519
Woman's Day 5,744,842
Good Housekeeping 5,221,575
McCall's 5,186,393
Ladies' Home Journal 5,020,551
Time 4,720,159
National Enquirer 4,381,242
Guideposts 4,260,697
Redbook 4,009,450
Star 3,706,131
Playboy 3,447,324
Newsweek 3,101,152
People 3,038,363
Sports Illustrated 2,895,131
Cosmopolitan 2,873,071
Prevention 2,820,748
American Legion 2,648,627
Glamour 2,386,150
Another trend which has accompanied the decline in readership and number of publications is the dramatic decline in competition. Variety at local and national levels has been reduced as media operations have become concentrated in the hands of just a few publishers and corporations. New York City is a good example. In the 1920s people in Manhattan could choose from fourteen different morning and evening dailies. Thirty years later, the choice was reduced by half, and today New York has only two morning papers, the Times and the News, plus one afternoon daily. In other areas around the country, the percentages of cities with competing newspapers have decreased dramatically as publishers are driven out of business by larger competitors. In 1926 there were more than 500 cities with competing newspapers. Today there are under 40 and the number is falling. At this point, 97 percent of the cities carrying daily papers have but a single publisher. They are called "one-owner-towns." Moreover, more and more of the remaining newspapers are under chain or group control. Chain publishers own newspapers all over the country. With a total circulation of over 22 million, chains comprise more than one third of the total daily newspaper circulation in the United States.
The U.S. has never had a national press or newspaper with a mass national circulation like The Times and The Daily Telegraph in Britain or the leading papers in other countries. However, the influence of a few large metropolitan newspapers, most notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, has increased so that these papers come close to constituting a national press. Both papers syndicate their staff-written stories to regional newspapers all over the country.
Most newspapers rely heavily on wire copy from the two major news services, the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), which gather
wire
copy: send
in a news report (by telegram in former times).
THE MEDIA 263
A wide variety of publications is available
OBJECTIVITY
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
national and international news stories and sell them to subscribing newspapers. The stories reported in major papers often influence other news media. Newspapers around the country and, significantly, television news programs take a lead from the Times in deciding what is and is not a big story. When the Times ceased publication for several weeks in 1978, there was clear evidence of television news programs' lack of direction.
The trend toward concentration of ownership is defended on the ground that large-scale organizations can provide the funds, know-how, and management to keep a newspaper profitable and competitive. But conglomeration raises questions among some social commentators about objectivity. Would marketplace diversity not ensure that error and bias would be counterbalanced, and does monopoly not increase the chance that the public may be misinformed?
The American press, especially in recent decades, has insisted on objectivity and detachment in news reports, usually imposing a more rigorous separation of fact from opinion than do newspapers in other countries. Opinion is excluded from news columns and is presented on separate editorial pages, which feature unsigned editorials and include opinions signed by readers, contributors, and syndicated columnists. Careful effort to preserve objectivity is made even among monopoly newspapers. The Washington Post, for example, which in 1976 had a monopoly in the morning market in the Washington, D.C., area, covered that year's presidential election by giving equal space to candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Even the photographs of the candidates were scrupulously equal in size and placement.
The mass media in the United States claim explicit recognition of their right to be free from government control and censorship. The First Amendment to the Constitution states: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom. . .of the press." Government and media often engage in confrontations when reporters disclose classified information or pursue investigative reporting to uncover injustices and corruption within American institutions. This adversary stance toward government which many news executives and reporters advocate has led government officials and other critics to accuse the
264 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP
RADIO
AND TELEVISION
NETWORKS
PROGRAMMING
news media of transgressing the bounds of journalism and influencing events they once merely described. The controversy over the role of the media has led to many stormy court battles. When, in 1971, the Washington Post and New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers," a classified U.S. Defense document about the origins of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict, the Supreme Court ruled that the newspapers were within their rights to publish the material. The Washington Post's role in uncovering the Watergate scandal is another example of the media's involvement in national events. The story started a sequence of events that led to the resignation of President Nixon.
Theoretically, anyone in the United States can start a newspaper or magazine, but to become a radio or television broadcaster one must be granted a portion of the limited radio-television spectrum by the government's licensing board, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). For the most part, the American broadcasting system has always been a commercial system. It is supported by money from businesses that pay to advertise goods or services to the audience. Advertising messages are usually presented as 15, 30, or 60-second commercial announcements before, during, and after programs. Ссдц-mercial broadcasting is a huge industry bringing in profits of about 1.8 billion dollars annually. As of 1984, there were over 8,000 commercial AM and FM radio stations and over 850 commercial television stations. Attracting a smaller audience, there is also noncommercial public broadcasting for radio and television. The funding for public broadcasting comes primarily from congressional appropriations, grants from foundations, and contributions from viewers. The programs, often educational or cultural, appeal to a highly selective audience.
The number of radio and television broadcasting stations provides for wide diversification in programming. Most radio stations offer listeners a variety of music programs, including country-western, pop music, classical music, and jazz. Other stations feature news, talk interviews and discussions, and religious programs exclusively.
Most commercial television stations are affiliated with one of the three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. Networks are essentially program distribution companies. A network buys programs from independent television production companies, most of which are located in Hollywood, and distributes these programs across the country to television stations that are affiliated with the network. The network is paid by advertisers to insert commercial announcements on the programs the network buys. Because networks are commercial systems dependent on advertising, they compete with each other for viewers and are intent on choosing programs that will win high audience ratings. Programs that aim at mass entertainment are preferred over educational and news programs. Evening news programs and other news shows are often criticized for concerning themselves with entertainment. Critics charge that networks often emphasize the personalities of newscasters at the expense of issues of public importance.
Supreme Court: see page 97.
Watergate: see page 29.
Vietnam: see page 15.
ABC: American Broadcasting Company.
CBS: Columbia Broadcasting Service.
NBC: National Broadcasting Company.
THE MEDIA 265
CABLE
TELEVISION
SATELLITE TELEVISION
ISSUES
Viewers whose tastes are not satisfied by the many offerings of network and local programs are now increasing their options by subscribing to cable television. About 35 million Americans pay a monthly fee of approximately $17.00 for greater selection. Cable television companies receive signals from television stations through a larger master antenna or dish and relay the signal into the homes of subscribers by wires attached to home receivers. Cable companies can program 40 different channels, providing viewers with many specialized programs such as Hollywood musicals, local theater productions, and recent film releases.
Satellite TV was originally designed to offer a greater selection of programs to people in rural areas that could not easily be connected to the cable system. It now provides anybody who is ready to have a satellite dish installed in his or her backyard with the same programming as cable TV. There has been a controversy recently as to the viewer's right to freely receive signals that are beamed down onto his or her property. The so-called superstateons, which are in fact small independent stations, utilize the power of both cable and satellite to program nationwide. Conventional television has had to struggle to retain its audience as people switch over to cable viewing, satellite TV or renting video cassettes.
As responsive as television is to audience ratings, many critics complain that producers and network executives should be more sensitive to the effects of television violence on children and adults. The debate over the possible link between the amount of violence on television and the amount of violence in society has not yet been resolved. However, protest did lead to the introduction of "family viewing time" from seven to nine o'clock in the evening. During these hours, adult programs containing violence and sexual suggestiveness are kept to a minimum. There is a considerable amount of citizen involvement on other issues as well. For example, there are groups that lobby for a better standard of children's television, and other groups associated with the religious right which object to explicit language and immorality on the television screen.
266
part в Texts
THE CASE FOR
TELEVISION
JOURNALISM
by ERIC SEVAREID
Courtesy of Saturday Review
When Eric Sevareid retired from CBS News in November 1977, his fellow journalists bestowed on him tributes befitting a statesman. Newsweek dubbed Sevareid "without doubt the most imposing of all broadcast commentators," and the Christian Science Monitor called him TV's answer to antiquity's oracle at Delphi. In his two-minute commentaries on CBS's nightly news broadcast, he perfected his own literary form, blending fact and opinion, always leaving a twinge of optimism in the air. Though he was originally an essayist and became a broadcaster at 26 with reluctance, he left television after 38 years a staunch defender of the medium.
kind
Qf adversary relationship
between print journalism and electronic journalism
exists and has existed for many years in the
United States. Innumerable newspaper critics seem
to insist that broadcast journalism be like their
journalism
and measured by their standards. It
cannot be. The two are more complementary than
competitive, but they are different.
The journalism of sight and sound is the only truly new form of journalism to come along. It is a mass medium, a universal medium; as the American public-education system is the world's first effort to teach everyone, so far as that is possible. It
has serious built-in limitations as well as advantages, compared with print. Broadcast news operates in linear time, newspapers in lateral space. This means that a newspaper or magazine reader can be his own editor in a vital sense. He can glance over it and decide what to read, what to pass by. The TV viewer is a restless prisoner, obliged to sit through what does not interest him to get to what may interest him. While it is being shown, a local bus accident has as much impact, seems as important, as an outbreak of a big war. He can do little about tlrs, little about the viewer's unconscious resentments.
Everyone in America watches television to some degree, including most of those who pretend they don't. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter was right; he said there is no highbrow in any lowbrow, but there is a fair amount of lowbrow in every highbrow. Television is a combination mostly of lowbrow and middlebrow, but there is more highbrow offered than highbrows will admit or even seek to know about. They will
THE MEDIA 267
1.
continued
make plans, go to trouble and expense, when they buy a book or reserve a seat in the theater. They will noi study the week's offerings of music or drama or serious documentaries in the radio and TV program pages of their newspaper and then schedule themselves to be present. They want to come home, eat dinner, twist the dial and find something agreeable ready, accommodating to their schedule.
TV programming in America consumes 18 to 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. No other medium of information or entertainment ever tried anything like that. How many good new plays appear in U.S. theaters each year? How many fine new motion pictures? Add it all together and perhaps you could fill 20 evenings out of the 365.
Every new development in mass communications has been opposed by intellectuals of a certain stripe. I am sure that Gutenberg was denounced by the elite of his time—his device would spread dangerous ideas among the God-fearing, obedient masses. The typewriter was denounced by intellectuals of the more elfin variety—its clacking would drive away the muses. The first motion pictures were denounced—they would destroy the legitimate theater. Then the sound motion picture was denounced—it would destroy the true art of the film, which was pantomime.
To such critics, of course, television is destroying everything.
It is destroying conversation, they tell us. Nonsense. Nonconversing families were always that way. TV has, in fact, stimulated thousands of millions of conversations that otherwise would not have occurred.
It is destroying the habit of reading, they say. This is nonsense. Book sales in the United States during the lifetime of general television have greatly increased and well beyond the increase in population. At the end of a program with Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, we at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) announced on the air that if viewers wanted one of those little copies of the Constitution such as he had held in his hand, they had only to write to us. We received about 150,000 requests at CBS—mostly, I suspect, from people who didn't know the Constitution was actually down on paper, who thought it was written in the skies or on a bronze tablet somewhere. After my first TV conversation with Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman and author, his books sold out in nearly every bookstore in America—the next day.
TV is debasing the use of the English language, they tell us. Nonsense. Until radio and
Eric Severeid
then TV, tens of millions of people living in sharecropper cabins, in small villages on the plains and in the mountains, in the great city slums, had never heard good English diction in their lives. If anything, this medium has improved the general level of diction.
The print-electronic adversary relationship is a one-way street. Print scrutinizes, analyzes, criticizes us on TV every day; we do not return the favor. We have tried now and then, particularly in radio days with "CBS Views the Press," but not enough. On a nationwide network basis, it's almost impossible because we have no real national newspapers—papers read everywhere— to criticize for the benefit of the national audience. Our greatest failure is in not criticizing ourselves, at least through the mechanism of viewers' rebuttals. Here and there, now and then, we have done it. It should have been a regular part of TV from the beginning. The Achilles heel of TV is that people can't talk back to that little box. If they had been able to, over the years, perhaps the gas of resentment could have escaped from the boiler in
There is the myth that since the pioneering, groundbreaking TV programs of Edward R. Mur-row and Fred Friendly in the 1950s, CBS News has been less daring, done fewer programs of a hard-hitting kind. The Murrow programs are immortal in this business because they were the first. Since then we have dealt, forthrightly, with every conceivable controversial issue one can think of—drugs, homosexuality, government corruption, business corruption, TV commercials, gun control, pesticides, tax frauds, military waste,
268 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP
1.
continued
abortion, the Vietnam War—everything. What shortage has occurred has been on the side of the materials, not on the side of TV's willingness to tackle them.
I have recently inquired of other CBS News veterans if they can recall a single case of a proposed news story or a documentary that was killed by executives of the parent organization. Not one comes to anyone's mind. Some programs have been anathema to the top executive level, but they were not stopped. Some have caused severe heartburn at that level when they went on the air. Never has there been a case of people at that level saying to the News Division, "Don't ever do anything like that again."
For more than 13 years, I have done commentary—personal opinion inescapably involved— most nights of the week on the evening news. In that time exactly three scripts of mine were killed because of their substance by CBS News executives. Each one by a different executive, and none of them ever did it again. Three—out of more than 2,000 scripts. How many newspaper editorialists or columnists, how many magazine writers, have had their copy so respected by their editors9
There is the perennial myth that sponsors [advertisers] influence, positively or negatively, what we put on the air. They play no role whatever. No public affairs program has ever been canceled because of sponsor objection. Years ago, they played indirect roles. When I started doing a 6 p.m. radio program, nearly 30 years ago,
Ed Murrow, then a vice-president, felt it necessary to take me to lunch with executives of the insurance company sponsoring the program. About 14 years ago, when I was doing the Sunday night TV news, a representative of the advertising agency handling the commercials would appear in the studio, though he never tried to change anything. Today one never sees a sponsor or an agency man, on the premises or off.
After all, in the United States TV network broadcasting might at its inception have become an appendage and apparatus of government; it might have gone completely Hollywood. It did neither. It grimly held to every freedom the law allows, and it fights for more.
We are not the worst people in the land, we who work as journalists. Our product in print or on the air is a lot better, more educated and more responsible than it was when I began, some 45 years ago, as a cub reporter. This has been the best generation of all in which to have lived as a journalist in America. We are no longer starvelings, and we sit above the salt. We have affected our times.
It has been a particular stroke of fortune to have been a journalist in Washington these years. There has not been a center of world news to compare with it since ancient Rome. We have donethe job better, I think, than our predecessors— and our successors will do it better than we. ■
Copyrights
1976
by
SATURDAY REVIEW/WORLD, INC
Saturday
Review: a
bi-monthly general arts review.
Christian Science Monitor: daily evening paper; general political tendency: independent; Christian moral attitude.
Gutenberg, Johann: (circa 1400—1468), German inventor of movable type. Vietnam War: see page 15.
THE MEDIA 269
The
Nature of TV
in America
Richard Burke
Richard
Burke is Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana.
least objectionable programming. And by least objectionable' what people mean is, it doesn't have to be good. You don't have to take any risks with it. You don't have to put a lot of time into it. It just has to be less objectionable than what the other network is looking at. Because the theory is that large numbers of people don't watch programs anyway. They watch television. They go over to the television and say, "What's on?" and keep turning through or pressing the buttons, and somebody says, "Oh, that's okay. Stop there. That's fine." Well, in this theory that I am explaining very superficially here, what you finally stop at is what's least objectionable, at least for you. So the networks will take and have taken this position that you don't have to win, you just don't fail. You see if you take big risks, you are likely to fail. So don't fail. That would be a primary rule. Don't lose your one third, and try to produce the least objectionable programming possible.
PART II: Now, if you subscribe to this analysis of television programming, particularly by networks, what you find out is that there isn't really as much diversity as there appears to be. I look at the schedule sometimes and in my best efforts to find something least objectionable what I have to conclude is that it's all objectionable and I'll be better off to go for a walk or listen to music or do anything but watch the television. And I think if you looked at this and if you look at a weekly television guide, you'd say, "Yes, yes fine, I see 15 or 20 or 25 opportunities here, but I don't have any real choice at all. It's all
pretty much the same stuff." Then, of course, the networks of those programs would say, "You're being much too demanding." This is after all a mass medium and you may have highly advanced tastes." I don't really. I like police dramas a lot, but I can't always find them when I want them. So the argument here is that this compulsion to do the least objectionable, the least risk in fact leads to a rather mediocre, rather bland diet of the kinds of programs that you would see listed here. In attempting to stay with programming that has the broadest mass appeal they obviously will take programs which are pretty safe. [And they will take programs which aren't very controversial, and they will do programs which have obvious large audience appeaLJ Now in programming I think it is reasonable to say that the great bulk of it is designed for mass entertainment, as opposed to news, information, education, instruction. I think if you counted up the hours here and you looked at a week's worth you'd say, "This is clearly an entertainment-oriented medium." Now, what is the nature of this entertainment, of all the possible formats that we produce, of the western, the action drama and the variety show and this kind of thing. This so-called situation comedy is by far the most popular format that you would see here and also over a long period of time. When people are asked in various kinds of surveys what have been their favorite programs from 1950 on invariably 50 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent of that would identify the so-called situation comedy, that is to say a situation which is artificially contrived and created each week with a cast of characters that essentially remains the same. People come in and out. And that's really, not only this season, but over a long period of time probably the predominant format in this entertainment programming.
From: A talk by Richard Burke,
delivered at Bloomington, IN,
April 24, 1986
270 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP
The
Herald-Telephone, Thursday, April 24,
All