The First Amendment; Loren Ghiglione

WGBH Radio in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University now presents the First Amendment and a Free People, an examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. And now here is the Director of the Institute for Democratic Communication, Dr. Bernard Rubin. [Bernard Rubin] Welcome to this edition. Tonight we have Mr. Loren Ghiglione as our guest and my co-host is Professor Otto Lerbinger of Boston University. Mr. Ghiglione is the editor and publisher of the Southbridge Evening News, and is also a member of the National News Council as well as the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. And in a very important piece of research directed in 1974 the New England Daily Newspaper Survey, delighted to have Mr. Ghiglione with us. The subject, on this edition of First Amendment and a Free People is to see whether or not the economic conglomeration of newspapers and the print media in general are causing havoc with certain aspects of the First Amendment. Gentlemen I'd like to open by

giving you a few statistics from the Columbia Journalism Review. The issue of November/ December 1972. These statistics are not up to date but they are symbolic. This is from an article called "The Rush to Chain Ownership" by Robert L. Bishop who is on the faculty of the University of Michigan. First quote, "the percentage of American cities with competing newspapers fell from about 60 percent in 1910 to 15 percent in 1950 and is now less than four percent. The percentage of daily newspaper circulation held by group newspapers rose from about 43 percent in 1950 to more than 60 percent in 1972. Annual revenues of the 10 largest daily newspaper groups are estimated about 2.2 billion, approximately one-fourth of the total for the entire industry. Cross-media owners, that is holders of print and broadcast properties,

control 36 percent of all daily newspapers. They also own 25 percent of the TV stations, 8.6 percent of AM radio and 9.5 percent of FM radio." Mr. Ghiglione, I think the first question should be to you on the question of what does these, what do these figures mean? [Loren Ghiglione] Well I think they're going to, they're going to require careful scrutiny in the years ahead because as the trend goes now we could be coming down to a situation where maybe eight newspaper groups by the year 2000 would own all of the newspapers, the major dailies in the country. I also think there are some trends that are continuing, have continued since that article for example there are now 70 percent of the dailies, rather than 60 percent, that are owned by newspaper groups that we ought to worry about, as well as some new trends that should be, we should be concerned about. For example publicly held newspaper corporations are now

14 of them control about 25 percent of the circulation of dailies in the country, and for example the Boston Globe is owned by Affiliated Publications which is a small one but there are others that are giants and what impact these will have on the values of newspapers it's hard to say. I think we have some indications that they're for obvious reasons very concerned with profit. If you read statements by the owners of the newspaper groups, you see a real emphasis on the profit motive. And while this is important perhaps it's being overdone. For example Harte Hanks, the President Chief Executive Officer's talking in one of the trade journals, about profitability, "this is done by continuing to make our-- continuing to make our planning and control system a way of life at every level in our management structure by continuing our efforts to improve the professional skills of our management group, by continuing to offer

responsive training for our employees, and by continuing the cost effective introduction of new technology. These steps will improve profit margin and profit dollars." It's hard to realize that they're talking about newspapers. [Rubin] Well Otto, you're an economist. What question do you want to ask Mr. Ghiglione about these figures? [Otto Lerbinger] I'm concerned about service. Profitability is one thing but now how does the reader, the consumer benefit? If we look elsewhere for example, at the chemical industry, they would argue that one of the advantages of a certain degree of concentration of ownership or a certain degree of elimination of competition is that it enables them to conduct some R and D work. Now could you say that the equivalent was true in the newspaper field, that because more funds are available that there is better reporting, that there is more professionalism.

[Ghiglione] Well I think that you can argue in looking at a number of independent papers that have been owned by families for generations and that are really dead, that the newspaper groups have gone in and have improved the papers both in terms of the editorial product and as businesses and after all, the news operation is, it can only be as good in one sense as the money available. So if you are making a larger profit you theoretically have the opportunity to turn around put more that profit into the news operation. But there are other factors, one would-- particularly when a company goes public it does have to increase the dividends, it has to show growth to its stockholders. And there is the pressure to make to make larger and larger profit and to show growth, to buy more and more newspapers. And so I think there are at least two or three other trends that I think you can see happening. One, the individuality of papers is diminishing, that is that you're going to see fewer and

fewer editors as owners or people who come to newspapers primarily as maybe in a sort of romantic idealistic way, but they're interested about the news product first and they really don't care whether they make 20 percent or 15 percent or 5 percent or 30 percent. That is not their major reason for being in the business. You're going to see less of that and second I think you're going to see more and more concern about justifying the news product in terms of whether it's selling to the audience. We have marketing experts now coming into the newspaper field and they are attempting to tell the editors what the readers want and what therefore the editors should be putting in their paper and that should be of concern. And the third factor is if you look at the percentage of news content in papers, sure newspapers have been getting larger over the decades and therefore even though the news content as a percentage of the whole may be getting less, the number of pages devoted to news may be getting larger. But I think that recently in the last 10 to 10 year trend has been that the content of news, the percentage of news, has been going down while the content, the percentage of

ads has been going up. And what's going in, what's considered news, the soft content I would guess is increasing as well, it's features, comics, this kind of gossip columns as a front page story. [Rubin] This has got to have a remarkable effect on the on the First Amendment and the exchange of ideas. For example the newspapers are buying into the publishing business, the publishing business is buying into the newspaper business. All everybody is buying into the broadcast business. And yet when a story is to be gotten, we don't get enough concentration on stories. The Sun newspapers of Omaha, a small group of newspapers that have I think combined circulation of about 50,000 copies each week, in contrast to the Omaha World-Herald one of the two major dailies serving that metropolitan area, The Sun newspapers got the big Boys Town story. And I don't want to go into the details of the story, but it was the kind of a

local story that you get when you're interested in the news, you dig up the facts, you you send somebody to Washington to look at reports, you demand freedom of information material. We're not getting that from many newspapers, we're getting lots of features. [Ghiglione] Well I don't, you're right, I don't think you're getting that from newspapers whether they're owned by groups or individuals so I can't put the blame on the groups there, certainly there are individual examples of smaller papers throughout the country that are doing excellent jobs and for example the, one of the Pulitzers this year went to an Anchorage, Alaska paper for a study of the Teamsters Union pension fund and certainly the staff is a very small but they did an excellent job and that kind of investigative, hard-nosed reporting is great wherever we can find it. There's very little of it throughout the country. But I do think you know as A.J. Liebling said, "a free press belongs to those who own one." You know if you have the press, if you are the owner of the paper, in in essence

you do dictate the tone and attitude and approach to the news that is shown by the papers that you control. [Rubin] For many many years the Scripps Howard newspapers, the Hearst chain, I'm talking about in the '40s and '30s and '50s, they used to have this anomalous criteria that each paper in the chain was independent. But yet when you picked up a Hearst newspaper by golly you knew it was a Hearst newspaper and there were certain stories that never appeared, and Scripps-Howard was the same, Gannett newspapers for many years. I remember as a Rochesterian reading a columnist in front of every columnist in the in the early '40s I would say "this is a columnist whose opinions may or may not be the opinion of the newspaper," you're flagged off. Are we getting more of that trend all the time? [Ghiglione] No I think you're getting a different phenomenon to worry about, I think basically the impact of the chains or groups, as they like to be called, is away from the forceful statement by the publisher on the front page, the front page editorial, in fact just for to make the point I will overstate it by saying

we probably need more William Loebs in the world. My point being that very few editors and publishers-- [Rubin] You didn't hear an amen by the way, just want to put that-- [Ghiglione] I don't agree with him-- [Lerbinger] I restrained myself-- [Ghiglione] But the point is that there are very few editors and publishers I think in a group situation would dare to be as presumptuous or as outspoken and I think what you're getting now is a very, is a neutrality bordering on blandness because each, because the group knows that it wants to buy other newspapers and if it appears to be a very respectable stodgy corporation making good profits with very profitable stock, that the next owner down the line who wants to sell will look at them in a favorable light, whereas if they are outspoken on issues they may be upsetting the owner-- [Rubin] Well before I get to Otto, William Loeb and Westbrook Pegler are different, fulfill different roles in the newspaper history but yet they are iconoclastic curmudgeons,

I do agree with you, we do need that in the business. Otto? [Lerbinger] This I find to be the optimistic side of increasing concentration, namely if there is a divorce between owners and the managers and if the owners are primarily worried about profitability then I think that divorce will give the new staff, the editorial staff, greater independence. Now that's the optimistic view and then along with that there is also the view that's expressed in books like "Four Theories of the Press" that when there's only one newspaper in a city or a town then that newspaper has a responsibility, it's called the social responsibility doctrine, to present more than its own viewpoint. The idea of the op-ed page, the idea of giving access to many different groups, many different voices, to that one vehicle. Now that's the

theory. Is this practiced? [Ghiglione] Well I think it's it's practiced. Newspapers, or I think the Miami Herald in the Tornillo case where basically this school teacher running for office was attempting to, was attempting to get his point of view into the paper and The Miami Herald refused. That's that's that's a very strange case because I think most newspapers would bend over backwards to allow an opponent of the newspaper's editorial position to get their viewpoint in the paper. And I think certainly in smaller communities where letters to the editor are few and far between we'd love to get them, we know that people like to read them particularly when they attack our newspaper and other, and we feel a responsibility to put them in. The problem I am sure becomes more acute on a paper such as The Boston Globe or the New York Times where they get thousands of letters and they have to start selecting. But as a general rule I don't think that's a major

problem. In theory it is but I don't think it is in reality. [Rubin] Is the American newspaper reader, I want to get back to this question of the editor becomes sort of a gray flannel suitman, he works for the corporation, he's an executive, he thinks in terms of profit margins. What we call newspapers now you mention the Boston Globe and The Herald and The New York Times, to me are not only newspapers, great newspapers in the case of those three, but also a market baskets of feature articles that that just swirl in and swirl out. And I find more and more of a reliance upon that soft kind of stuff. Is this part of the result of having these these businessmen editors taking their seats? [Ghiglione] Well I think historically there's been a lot of that forever and ever, at least from the, since the days of the modern newspaper when it became a medium of mass communication. And the audience-- [Rubin] Entertainment counts. [Ghiglione] Exactly right, and if you look at the papers in you know the 1900s the same thing was going on, indeed it was perhaps worse in terms of what was on the

editorial page a mishmash of all kinds of advice from doctors, and social columnists and so on. Um so that I don't-- it may be getting worse in the sense that the marketing experts coming in and I think there's certainly there's more, there's a new trend toward gossip and titillation on items about personalities and in the news that the news value of that is marginal. So that's something to worry about. [Lerbinger] Isn't the point that since newspapers do face competition by radio and by television for hard news that that function is no longer served as well by the newspaper as it is by radio and TV and when I say news I'm meaning simply a reference to what's going on rather than coverage in depth, because after all the radio people claim that they are there when the news takes place, and then TV, they

have they have to lag by a number of hours but they too are claiming that with their porter packs and their miniaturized sets that they can get to the news and report it and interrupt a regular program. So couldn't you say that the newspapers have been forced in a sense to reach for other services? [Ghiglione] Well I don't know if they've been forced, I think they've overreacted to radio and television feeling that because they are not breaking with the story first and that television has it first, therefore they shouldn't cover the story at all. I mean I still think that people's, people are interested in a story when they when they hear it on radio or on television but they want more and that actually newspapers should continue to try to go beyond and sometimes they're not doing that. The second thing that's happening I think is that we're getting kind of the television nation of news, I don't know I'm just playing with words here, but basically what I'm trying to say is that people's sense of the visual is changing as a result of television.

And if you look at a program like "Hee Haw" or other shows where they have the quick joke and the visual images, the change from one shot to another is very quick, and then you look at magazines such as New York or you look at the Village Voice and see how they're treating the news with quick, very, you know photograph with very little text-- [Rubin] I'm trying to figure out whether you're talking about the present presidential preferential primary or Hee Haw because the same symbolism seems to come through. [Ghiglione] Yes well what I'm trying to say is that I think newspapers, how they are presenting the material, is being influenced by the electronic media. [Rubin] Now, are our politics being drastically altered by the fact that we're getting these these quick flashes, these instant presentations every day from newspapers and television? And in terms of constitutional rights of understanding, freedom of expression, the public more and more doesn't understand what candidates are saying, what they're doing, what they stand for or not. [Ghiglione] Well I think there's there's the problem of the candidate knowing that that the

television station needs that, that one minute of new, a new tidbit every day and so they can, the candidate does tend to feed it to the television station that way, go out to a visually appealing site, you know a school that's been in the middle of racial controversy or whatever and then talk about something that relates to that particular issue and that will make the television news and perhaps newspapers in turn follow the leader there so to speak and get into this bind as well. [Lerbinger] Now I'm wondering here, I'm not sure what the newspaper's reaction is, whether they try to duplicate and compete with television by also offering the kind of news for which in a sense radio and TV have served as your marketing arm. Are you then trying to compete with them on their own grounds or are you trying to provide some

other kinds of news that the newspaper can better handle? [Ghiglione] Well I think we're we're trying to do both. We're primarily trying to be a source of local news, for most newspapers in this country and I think we, remember you know when we talk about the Boston Globe or the Herald in New England or we talk about the New York Times whatever, we're talking about a minority of papers. In New England the average paper has a circulation of 20,000 and a news staff of about 20. That's the size paper you're talking about. Our newspaper runs between eight and 12 pages a day, it has a circulation of 6,000. So obviously we're providing local news, there is no local television news available to our readers. So we have as you as you might say a monopoly on local news and of course we do try to provide a smattering of international stories that will be covered and national stories that will be covered in television and I think that's the pattern throughout the, throughout the region. You are going to get I think increasing, television is going to cut into local markets both in terms of advertising,

revenue, and that's already happening and the local newspapers are feeling it, go out and talk to people in Greenfield, places like this, you'll see that they are they are being affected by television and I think that that will affect how the local newspaper treats local news too, when it has to-- [Rubin] And yet he local newspaper could go in the other direction. For example I happen to live in a western suburb of Boston. I can see a Weston-Lincoln-Wellesley-Natick-Framingham News, of just putting all of those titles together, delivering a paper to 200,000 people or 100,000 people and producing a kind of newspaper that could be a classy rival to the Boston Globe. It doesn't have to go in one direction does it? [Ghiglione] No I think you're if you want to look at a case study it would be the Framingham paper, it's now called South Middlesex News. Now there is a paper would say in 1969 circulation 19,000 it's up above 40,000 now, it has a Sunday edition.

And what it is doing is precisely what you're talking about, it's eating away at where the Boston Globe is weak in the news that affects these people living out in the suburban area. And so there is, there is a possibility there. [Lerbinger] Returning to economics again isn't it a factor that it's more costly to cover the local news than it is to simply make use of the wire services and talk about national and international news and, according to one study I looked at, that when there was a single, a single newspaper in the community the amount of local news was about 40 percent of total news. Then for a while when there was competition, the amount of local news rose to 50 percent. But then when the competition was eliminated went down again to 40 percent, which seems to indicate that if this economic factor holds, which I assume it does, then the economies seem to dictate what is done by the editors.

[Ghiglione] Well I think that's true there is a-- that's a good point and certainly it's much less expensive to put in wire service material or syndicated feature material rather than to have the local reporter or the local cartoonist or the local photographer. And and if you and if you study certain newspapers you will see a very high percentage of wire and syndicated material. [Rubin] How much of it is what is called "canned," canned in the sense that even the editorials are canned? [Ghiglione] Well when we surveyed New England dailies in 1974 approximately one-third of the region's papers still used occasionally, and most wrote local editorials on a fairly regular basis, but occasionally they would use canned material. [Rubin] By the way, the definition, for the audience, is that which comes in through the mail and you just reprint it. [Ghiglione] That's right it may come in for free, it may be coming from a service that-- [Rubin] A pressure group. [Ghiglione] Yes exactly right, a pressure group that has special interest group and or you may be paying for it. I recall that when we arrived in Southbridge the former owner was buying it from an

editorial service in Arizona, editorials for $4.50 a week and putting them in the paper. Now of course they could have no local content and they we're not talking about about local issues. But things motherhood and that sort of thing. [Lerbinger] Is there much use of, I'm inclined to call them volunteers, but that's not really what I mean, people who occasionally contribute an article, and I'm thinking here of what we constantly hear said the national trend with more and more people having a college education who are qualified and frustrated writers. Do they come to you and say "I want to contribute this article dealing with some local event" is this done, is there any trend of that? [Ghiglione] I'm sure they come to the Boston Globe but to a small paper we often have to go out and look for the experts and we do find them, for example we have a nutrition expert who does work with the University Massachusetts, is very familiar with specialized areas and has given us some very good articles about food and when there was a rush for canning lids last

year there were a number of companies just producing them for, who had never been doing it before, and she discovered that the canning lids were dangerous because they weren't getting the, giving a vacuum or a proper seal. And so this kind of expert is very important to a paper and we should make better, more use of them there's no doubt about that. [Lerbinger] Do you also make use of the publicist, the news release of various organizations? [Ghiglione] I think every newspaper does. I's it is a fact that the bigger papers, the better papers, rewrite this material, check out the facts. But in terms of announcements, of promotions from companies, or obituaries from funeral homes there is a heavy reliance on the release coming in. [Rubin] What what do editors and publishers of smaller-size newspapers say when they meet privately at their associations? What are their major concerns as differing from the larger newspapers in regard to freedom of expression?

[Ghiglione] I don't I don't know that the conversations would be that much different. We're concerned right now in Massachusetts with an attempt to modify the open meeting law that would would restrict the discussion of professional competence of public employees to executive sessions. We're fighting that and I think we may have killed this attempt at an amendment. We're concerned about judicial prior restraint in the courts. The concerns in the First Amendment areas are very similar and indeed we're faced by the police chief and the small town judge. There are just as bad if not worse in the small town arenas in the large city. [Rubin] Movie censorship issues at the local level are much more intense aren't they than at the national-- [Ghiglione] Well I would think so. They have not been-- censorship has not been a problem, you do get people trying to persuade the local movie theater owner that he shouldn't be showing certain movies.

[Lerbinger] One book that I recently read by Chris Argyris studied the management of a newspaper and they don't mention which newspaper it is, but it is one of the largest in the country. And he says that newspaper managers tend to be autocratic. A little dictatorial. They don't really listen too much to the people. Now going back to your earlier comment about the tendency to use more marketing surveys, do you feel that marketing surveys might democratize media management? Would this be a desirable trend from the viewpoint of access, from the viewpoint of public opinion playing a larger role? [Ghiglione] No I think that you've got two things mixed up there. One is the hierarchical arrangement of a big bureaucracy in a in a large corporation which is exactly what a newspaper or a metropolitan newspaper is, you know you have newsroom with 300 people working under deadline pressure, there just isn't the time to get to have a nice chat about

putting out today's paper. Somebody has to be the boss and say "this is the way we're going to do it today and that's it." Of course access is important from the public, and I do worry about that, but I don't I don't see an answer and I think it's somewhat naive to look at newspapers and not take into account the deadline pressures. [Lerbinger] You're saying crisis management occurs daily whereas in another kind of corporation it would be an irregular occurrence. [Ghiglione] Yes. [Lerbinger] And that justifies-- [Rubin] We've been circling around that phrase, "all the news that's fit to print" or "all the copy that we can fit in" and I want to thank both Otto Lerbinger my co-host and especially Mr. Loren Ghiglione, the editor and publisher of the Southbridge Evening News. Thank you for joining us on this edition of The First Amendment and a Free People. [music] WGBH Radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for Democratic Communication at Boston University has presented the First Amendment and a Free People, an

examination of civil liberties and the media in the 1970s. This program was recorded in the studios of WGBH Radio Boston.