April 13, 2006 | By Tom Roeser

Using new media to get a balanced press

Editor’s note: Talk show host and Chicago Tribune columnist Tom Roeser made the following remarks at Heritage’s Chicago Business Luncheon last December. The annual event brings together the leading businessmen in Chicago to hear from a variety of public policy leaders.

We’re at a fascinating media time in U.S. history. For the first time in memory, newspapers are in trouble. The Project for Excellence in Journalism completed a 200-page study in 2004. Here are the highlights.

First let’s look at the Old Media: the traditional forms we’re used to: newspapers, newsmagazines and broadcast TV. The root problems for newspapers extend back to the 1940s when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop-but for years the country’s population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and after 19’70 remained stable. Then, in 1990, circulation began to drop in absolute numbers. Today just more than half of Americans—54 percent-read a newspaper during the week. Somewhat more—62 percent—read a newspaper on Sundays but the number is continuing to drop. The only exception to the 20 year decline is USA Today which went from a dead start to a circulation of 2.1 million daily.

The same with newsmagazines.  Time’s circulation has fallen by 13 percent from 1988 to 2002.  US News has lost as well, falling also 13 percent in the same period, 1988 to 2003.  Newsweek is significantly better, dropping 3 percent—but trends are down.  Now broadcast TV:  More Americans get their news from evening TV newscasts—some 30 Million—but their ratings have dropped 59 percent since their peak three decades ago.  And the audience is aging—nearly 60 years old on average—while the average age of Americans is 35.

While cable has cut into broadcast news, contrary to press reports, the cable audience appears to have flattened since 2002 and is not growing.  As of early 2004, roughly 2.2 Million viewers typically watch the three cable news networks every day in prime time, about the same number as in 2002.  They kept none of the viewers in gained during the start of the Iraq War in 2003.  As most systems already carry Fox and MSNBC, continued growth may be slowed significantly.  Fox is gaining in ratings; CNN and MSNBC are losing.  At any given point, Fox’s audience is 60 percent higher than CNN’s.  A January 2003 Gallup poll found that 22 percent of Americans relied on talk radio as their primary news source, double from four years ago.  Cable and talk radio are two legs of the New Media.  And the trend is for more talk radio stations to embrace a particular political philosophy—conservatism.  WLS, my station, is the leading largely conservative talk station in the city and my show gets a goodly chunk of the market when it airs.  I am not known as a liberal but each show features a conservative in addition to me and a liberal—I try to moderate and be objective.  The format which has gone on for 10 years is successful in that listeners feel they are hearing both sides of the issues, I think of myself as a referee and studies show listeners know I’m conservative but regard me as fair.  Liberal radio talk show hosts are very scarce:  hardly existent.

Now the real growth area is on the Internet.  In September 2003, over half the people in the United States—150 million—went online.  And half to two-thirds of those who go online use it at least some of the time to get news.  One research group—Jupiter—predicts that usage of the Internet overall will grow because it expects household penetration  - the percentage of homes connected to the Internet- to rise from 63 percent in 2003 to 73 percent in 2007.  The question is, if Web usage continues to grow will it kill the Old Media?  That’s the fear of the newspapers.  They worry that as more people turn to online news, it will sharply accelerate the pace at which their audience will shrink.

In summary, newspapers, the Big Three newsmagazines, CNN and the networks are slipping—while the blogosphere, Fox News and talk radio are rising.  You know what that tells me:  Conservative views dominate the winners.  As a result, I think we’re seeing a slowly changing trend in print journalism.  Many of us remember, especially in Chicago, when newspapers were frankly partisan.  Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune on the right, the Daily News in the center but slightly more progressive, the Hearst Chicago American on the right and fighting the Tribune for conservative readers and first The Times, then the Sun, then the Sun-Times taking readers on the left. 

But after the Second World War a so-called “reform” took over newspapering.  Newspapers decided to proclaim that their news coverage would be “objective” and only their editorials would take a position.  But the journalism schools employed what they called “Interpretative Reporting” pioneered by the Medill School, using a text and teaching guides put out by Curtis MacDougall.  But “interpretative journalism” encouraged students to apply a creative phase of reporting.  You know what happened:  for most of the big newspapers, interpretative reporting in the hands of young, idealistic, often left-leaning writers gave us the journalism typified by the New York Times and to a surprising degree other major dailies.

What is happening now is that the public has caught on to “interpretative reporting” when they’ve been getting a liberal dose of flavored news.  And increasingly, some papers are returning to the old partisan stance:  the Washington Times, The New York Sun and others.  The Tribune, fifty years after McCormick’s death, is slowly tacking to the right, first in economic positions and slowly in cultural positions.  I can tell you first hand what the Sun-Times is doing.  The two alleged crooks who ran the Sun-Times may have been rascals but they were more conservative than their successors.  I was sort of the token conservative over there.  I got my walking papers one day and signed up with the Tribune as a columnist for its Sunday op-ed the next.  Papers are becoming more officially partisan—and I think it’s a good idea. 

But the power of the Internet came home to me just a month or two ago when I listened to the advice of some of my friends and started my own blog—featuring my views every day.  I am sort of a one-man media guy.  I announce on my radio show that I’ve got a blog as do some of my colleagues on the station.  The blogs in turn push our radio programs.  It’s only been going a short time and already I’m getting some 4,000 hits a day and rising.  When the hits reach a certain number I’ll announce that I’m accepting product advertising to pay the cost of my webmaster who I’m paying out of my own pocket.  Not bad.

This is an exciting time for conservatives in journalism.  We have a leg up in the fast-growing New Media market—talk radio, cable TV and the Internet—while at the same time we should be able to capitalize on the trend of more newspapers to adhere to a firm philosophical line of reasoning.  The tag team of cable TV, talk radio and blogs teamed up to dump Dan Rather.  And it’s not all conservative.  They also teamed up to call attention to Trent Lott’s rather stupid endorsement of 100 year old Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign.  Blogs captured the falsity of John Kerry’s statement, unchallenged by many, that he was in Cambodia for one Christmas.  They captured his military record by alerting a group that arose and formed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.  They tagged out Dan Rather on Bush’s National Guard service.

What should be recognized now is that the new media has a philosophical direction but it won’t necessarily be put to the service of the Republican Party.  Let the Republicans take a lesson from the Democrats:  lie or stretch the truth and you will find the wrath of the new sheriffs in town.  A million new sheriffs, armed with research and energy.  This energy can be harnessed for good purposes – to save and build up this greatest country on God’s green earth.

Tom Roeser is a Chicago-area talk-show host and a columnist for The Chicago Tribune.