The New Media Environment And Changing Influence Of The Press

By Author: Amandda
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Twenty-four-hour-a-day news on CNN and MSNBC and 24-hour-a-day access to up-dates on the Web sites of the world's newspapers has created a changed media environment. Among other things, continuous news rather than news punctuated by the deadlines of going to press or going on air at a specified, predictable time also increases the likelihood that news outlets will carry Tag Heuer Replica Watches inaccurate, incomplete, or false stories. "The problem nowadays," writes former White House correspondent James Naughton, "is that we're expected to make the right calls on the run. Many journalists now spend valuable time scanning the Web and surfing cable channels to be sure they're not belated in disclosing what someone else just reported, breathlessly, using sources whose identity we'll never know."

In the era when three major television networks and a morning or evening paper were the primary sources for news, media elites such as Walter Cronkite had considerable sway with both citizens and leaders. President Lyndon Johnson, for example, knew he had lost public ...
... support for the Vietnam War when Cronkite, anchor for the CBS net-work news, opined: "It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of the conflict] . . . will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could." After this declaration, Johnson continued to defend his policies but shifted his rhetoric to that of unification. Cronkite's message changed Johnson's stance toward the political offensive in Vietnam. "It was the first time in American history that a war had been declared over by an anchorman," wrote David Halberstam. "Lyndon Johnson watched and told his press secretary, George Christian, that it was a turning point, that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost Mr. Average Citizen."92 Today, it is unclear who the media elites are, and none have the influence that Cronkite had in the 1960s.

In a bow to the influence that once belonged to the press and as a sign that that influence is a memory, on the weekend after his August 1998 confession that he had misled the public and his family about his relationship with Lewinsky, Clinton went for a widely publicized boating outing with Cronkite. The message was not lost on the press. "Not only did he choose to align himself with a figure of larger-than-life rectitude," noted Michael Wolff, "but he chose one who provided a Omega Speedmaster Replica Watches marked contrast to the present-day faces who deliver the news. . . . Cronkite, the last and greatest figure of an all-powerful network-news media that offered not only information but temperament, credibility, heroism even, proffered a cheerful wave and a sage smile as his sloop moved out of the Vineyard harbor past the press jackals on the shore."

In this changed environment, the press has lost the respect that enlarged its power to contest with the president over the national agenda. Forty-eight percent of the public believes that the media play a negative role in society; 46 percent trust the media less than they did five years ago; 79 percent think the media rearrange and distort the facts to make a better story; 71 percent believe legitimate news outlets are sinking to the level of tabloids with gossip and unsubstantiated stories; and 45 percent regard the press with indifference, 22 percent with respect, 20 percent with disgust, and 6 percent with admiration.

The effects were evident in the inability of the press to set the agenda on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal or to establish it as a matter of importance in assessing Clinton's performance as president. From January 1998, when the scandal broke, through January 1999, in the wake of Clinton's impeachment by the House and trial in the Senate, public approval of Clinton's performance in office did not drop below 60 percent. That finding is remarkable in the face of a consistent assumption by reporters for much of that time that the affair with Lewinsky and Clinton's concealment of it would spell the end of the public's confidence in him as president.