Book Reviews
Bartholomew Sparrow, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Austin, makes his case against the news media in more systematic and amply documented fashion than many other critics. In the opening chapters of Uncertain Guardians, the author delineates the role of the media in American politics in fairly conventional ways. But when Sparrow turns to a critique of media performance, his approach becomes prosecutorial. Because the media failed to cover many important stories in ways that Sparrow deems adequate, he pronounces them guilty of joining public officials in cover-ups and betraying the public’s interests. To make his case, he presents damning, albeit often highly controversial, evidence from the political communication research literature and from interviews with news practitioners.
The indictment is devastating, indeed. Sparrow starts from the premise that the news media are a powerful branch of government that should monitor government performance and keep citizens well-informed about public affairs. Instead, the media act like pressure groups primarily pursuing their own economic welfare and neglecting their public service mission. Sparrow selects two areas of news for close analysis of journalists’ behavior: coverage of policy contests where neutral reporting is difficult because competing stakeholders make contrary claims and coverage in situations of policy monopoly where small cadres of officials attempt to conceal information from public gaze.
Sparrow carefully grounds his analysis of coverage of particular problems in descriptions of the political and economic contexts in which the media operated at a particular time. Echoing much of the relevant current literature, the author points out that journalists must balance their self-interests with the demands of their bosses, advertisers, sources, and audiences while trying simultaneously to serve the public interest, broadly conceived. Although journalists have developed tactics designed to maintain control over the news, they are often checkmated by other stakeholders who want story selection and news framing to foster their interests. For the most part, self-interest propels the media to side with the political establishment. That turns them into lap dogs, rather than attack dogs, when they report the activities of the government and the Big Business enterprises that fund journalists’ paychecks.
Public interest considerations suffer and are further harmed by restraints on reporting created by cost-cutting maneuvers and media owners’ fears of costly libel suits and adverse legislation that might hurt profitability. In the newsroom, ultimate control over what is published rests with business executives aiming for high financial returns. The public does not understand the constraints under which news is produced and why it is numbingly uniform throughout the country. The media should publicize this situation but fail to do so. Their dereliction on this and other scores results in news that fails to keep citizens adequately informed about major public policies and about unofficial appraisals of the political scene that could challenge official views.
Sparrow presents five case studies of the type of deficient coverage that results from the media’s neglect of their duties as the watchdog of government and guardian of the public’s interests. One case study concerns the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, which rallied public support behind the war without revealing the facts about prior relations between the United States and Iraq. The cases also include the Korean airliner crash in 1983, which, Sparrow claims, involved the dissemination of false claims to cover up illegal U.S. military ventures. On the economic front, Sparrow characterizes news about the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s as a disastrous instance of insufficient coverage at the expense of the public and for the benefit of Big Business enterprises. Similarly, great harm has been caused by tardy coverage of the developing AIDS epidemic and by lack of coverage of the development of a new diagnosis and cure for cancer.
Sparrow makes an excellent case on the prosecutorial side, but what about the defense, which remains largely unstated in the book? Many important points should have been addressed by the author. To mention a few: Making judgments years later about what the media should have covered is risky. Hindsight never equals contemporary insights, especially when critics view the situation through different political lenses. Decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable to the politicians, expert sources, and journalists involved in them at the time are apt to take on different hues when assessed later by unsympathetic judges.
Even if Sparrow’s appraisals are correct in the five examples that he details, questions about the role he assigns to the news media beg for answers. When public officials and journalists disagree about the merits of public policies, should the elected officials’ views be subordinated to those of journalists who are selfselected individuals not accountable to the public? Sparrow accuses the media of focusing on the wrong stories, using the wrong interpretive frames, and trusting the wrong sources. Absent consensual judgment standards for choosing and framing stories, is it appropriate to second-guess media professionals and condemn them for their choices? How well-grounded is the claim that the public craves more detailed political news, especially from unofficial sources, when the author presents no supporting data?
These are troubling questions that have long puzzled media scholars and dulled the sharp edges of media criticism. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that reforms are needed. Many of Sparrow’s suggestions for reform are worth pondering. After all, one can often treat symptoms of ill health successfully even when the road to an ultimate cure remains disputed.
