| | Give Us Today Our Daily Paper 
Newspaper readership in the United States has declined substantially and does not seem to be recovering. In 1970 when the population was about 205 million, 62 million read a daily paper. Thirty years later, in 2000, readership had dropped to about 56 million, but the population had grown to 282 million. The percentage of readers had declined by one third. One reason for this is probably people’s television viewing habits. Some will view the product of a certain station or network and will get the “News” in the late afternoon or at 11 o’clock without making an effort. Others will go out of their way to tune in to “News” or special news programmes. Since one monthly, one biweekly, three weeklies and a daily come into our household, I have very little time to watch television. I have long suspected that television, even a news channel like CNN, is no substitute for a daily paper. As a consequence I decided to analyze a relatively small but respected paper, The Providence Journal (circulation 162,000 daily – 232,600 Sunday), page by page to see what was being covered on a weekday. The reason I chose The Journal and not The Washington Post or The Chicago Tribune was that I felt that The Journal was probably more typical of papers across the country than are the two famous dailies.
On Friday, September 3rd, 2004, the paper comprised 48 pages. Section A, dealing with general news, had eighteen pages of which eight were advertising. However, while many of the ads were interspersed in the text, some of them were not intrusive. For example, pages 5 and 18 were entirely devoted to ads, and other ads appeared in half-page format. A glance sufficed to determine whether these were of any interest. This contrasts with television ads that are very intrusive even when a mute button is used. To be fair, the amount of time spent on ads in a 30-minute news broadcast was somewhat less than the full ten minutes I expected.
Section A — General News
Page 1: President Bush at the Republican Convention, plus photo, with additional text continued on an inside page; a hostage taking in Russia, plus photo, (continued inside); Hurricane Frances, (continued inside); and index to inside pages with brief summaries of some of the articles.
Page 2: The Pope praising efforts to address damage of sex abuse by priests; an evangelizing bus used by Southern Baptists; a sit-in by parishioners protesting the planned closure of their church; and advertising.
Page 3: South Korea admitting uranium enrichment; seven large paragraphs summarizing national and international developments; the appointment of lawyers for Slobodan Milosevic; the impending criminal trial of Kobe Bryant; and photo taken in Katmandu of damage caused by Nepali rioters with explanatory caption.
Page 4: Mostly advertising; Islamic students in France and the head scarf controversy; and the outcome of a trial in Argentina of five persons accused of participating in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre.
Page 5: Advertising only
Page 6: Advertising; the possibility of an Israeli attack on Syria since Hamas seems to have launched the latest suicide bombings from there; and the end of a hunger strike by Palestinians in Israeli jails.
Page 7: Advertising; and Malaysian former prime minister being released from jail (extensive article).
Page 8: Advertising; Hurricane Frances with photo of evacuation centre; and continuation of story on the same storm from p.1.
Page 9: Advertising; and the nomination of Representative Porter Goss to head CIA, discussing interviews, etc.
Page 10: Advertising; the continuation of Russian hostage-taking story from p.1; and new measures to screen aircraft flying non-stop from Moscow for explosives.
Page 11: Advertising; and Russian hostage taking with eyewitness accounts by parents and students (long story).
Page 12: Bird Influenza; the negative side effects of low carb. Atkins diet; and two deaths due to Eastern Equine Encephalitis.
Page 13: Hostages being held in Iraq as well as item dealing with a news agency driver being killed there.
Page 14: The release ordered by a judge of 500 protesters at the Republican Convention in New York City, plus photo; Senator Kerry’s rebuttals to charges involving his war record (two items); and Democratic Senator Zell Miller goes over to the Republicans.
Page 15: Convention coverage including Rhode Island delegates by The Journal’s political columnist and other Journal staffers with photos by a Journal photographer.
Page 16: Photos of the Republican Convention by a Journal Staff photographer.
Page 17: Various aspects of the Convention (four short items); and continuation of Convention coverage from p.1.
Page 18: Advertising only. Section B — Rhode Island
Page 1: Variety of city news.
Page 2: Variety of news from R.I. communities other than Providence.
Page 3: Advertising; and continuation of articles from p.1.
Page 4: Three editorials written by Journal editors on two local matters and the appointment of Dr. Susan Hockfield, a neuroscientist, as President of M.I.T; and two guest columns.
Page 5: Editorial about Massachusetts’s politics by a Boston Globe editor; two other guest columns; and letters to the Editor
Page 6: Mostly advertising with the continuation of an article on R.I. State spending from p.1. Section C — West Bay
Seven pages. More local news including school matters. obituaries, weather reports and forecasts. Section D — Sports
10 pages with only a quarter of a page of advertising. football, fishing, golf, baseball, cross -country running, and extensive tabulation of scores and statistics. Section E — Business
Four pages with no advertising. Pages 1 and 2 general business news. Pages 3 and 4 stock tables, earnings and dividend reports, foreign exchange, etc. Section F — Advertising Supplement
Seven pages mostly classified ads with more than one page of legal notices. Section G — Lifebeat (not Lifeboat!)
10 pages of cinema time tables, film previews, film reviews, video rental statistics, critics’ corner, TV schedules, background stories of film people, etc. It is to be noted that much of the material in The Journal originates from the wire services and other newspapers. The origin of each article is identified as to source and most of the local and regional material is written by Journal staffers. With a circulation of 162,000 one cannot afford bureaus in Washington and Beijing. Is the paper politically “balanced”? I don’t know. But there is a journalistic tradition of dealing with both sides of an issue. Guest columns and letters to the editor provide views which do not originate in Providence. As far as public policy is concerned, the sheer quantity of solid information cannot but help to educate the reader. The News in Videoland
In our local newspaper, about 46 channels beamed from the United States are listed. Our cable subscription allows us to access only a limited number of these stations. Nevertheless, a thorough review of all news broadcasts which are available would take many weeks. As a consequence, I have sampled only the regular news broadcasts of ABC, NBC, CBS, and portions of CNN. I have also sampled news-oriented programs such as 60 Minutes, Face the Nation, Washington Week in Review, and the Jim Lehrer News Hour. While we can see most programming on the FOX channel, we cannot see its news programs, which are apparently pre-empted by local and regional news from upstate New York and Vermont. I conclude from this exposure that there is much highly professional work being broadcast and that some thoughtful people are being heard. I had never seen the Lou Dobbs Tonight show on CNN and was favorably impressed. I also noticed its efforts not to show bias. For example, there was a debate on the Lehrer show between a Democratic Senator from California and a western Republican Senator who is also a director of the National Rifle Association about the extension of the ban on assault weapons. Such a debate could not be held in any other industrial country. Only in our country could the popular repugnance of these weapons, which are useless for sport or self-defense be overcome, by a special interest group. Anyone who is blind or so visually impaired that reading newspapers is difficult, can be kept up to date by a combination of TV news and related programs. TV news has to be immediate and only a small portion of newspaper stories falls into that category. Comparing what a reader gets from a weekday Journal and what she or he gets from TV illustrates that whole categories of information in the print medium are not covered on TV. Most of the follow-ups are lost. Obituaries of people who made significant contributions in their communities are absent. All news items that are not of immediate interest but nevertheless significant, simply disappear. If one extends the comparison to the weekend features of The Journal or to large newspapers such as The New York Times or Los Angeles Times, there is no contest at all. Individuals who no longer read their daily paper are the poorer. What Can Not Be Said
In spite of efforts of the media to be impartial, certain subjects seem to be as verboten as any discussion of sex would have been in 1904. These subjects include no health insurance for 41 million Americans, the lack of low-income housing, low salaries and wages earned by the tens of millions of our fellow citizens which make them part of the “working poor,” and the failure to address environmental dangers. Anyone who raises these issues is now often characterized as “liberal,” a newly despised group. This is an insult to millions of conservatives who have traditionally been concerned with social problems but who have often had a different slant on solutions from those who were politically more to the” left.” | | |
