Commentary –

Meaningful News And Chandra – Both Missing

By Meredith Arndt

For the past three months my television has bombarded me with the story of a missing woman in Washington, D.C. And yet, despite the seriousness, not to mention the frequency that people turn up missing in this country, the media attention has focused on Chandra Levy’s personal life, as opposed to the fact that she is missing.

The fact is, I know more about Ms Levy’s intimate life than I do about some of my friends’ or family’s. Thus, since Ms Levy is neither a friend of mine nor related to me, I find myself asking two questions. First, is the excessive coverage of the story justifiable? And consequently, is this all I am to expect from television news?

I am not arguing with the fact that this story deserves national attention. But why is Chandra Levy being singled out? According to FBI statistics, 98,000 people are currently considered missing in this country; 55, 000 of those are female. So we are left with 54,999 women whose stories are not being told on television, but should be.

The story being told is not about a missing woman. It is about a young woman who was having an affair with a married man, who is a public figure. It is about the media’s need for conflict and drama to boost ratings. And it is about the audience who receives the “news,” and their inability to know what news is.

Reuven Frank, an executive producer of NBC, stated that every news story should “without any sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama.” Frank is explicitly stating the power of media to construct the news as they see fit, and their willingness to do so.

I have continually witnessed the quality of news content to be just as Frank implied, as a conscious construction by media moguls, egotistical reporters, or inept copywriters. From JonBenet Ramsey and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, to the coverage of political campaigns and Olympic Games, the news is more concerned with sensationalizing the event than it is with adhering to professional and ethical codes of journalistic conduct.

A 2000 study, conducted by Thomas E. Patterson at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center, found that 50 percent of today’s young adults recall that “not much” attention was paid to politics in their formative years. This explains, in Patterson’s view, the diminished interest among young adults in daily news and politics. His media surveys show that “hard news” consists of stories about political leaders or “significant disruptions of daily life,” and political coverage consists of the latest sex scandal by a particular politician and his intern.

It is at this point that perhaps we should just turn our televisions off, and demand better, more credible news. The disappearance of Chandra Levy is not, in answer to my first question, credible news. I do not want to learn more intimate details of a young woman’s life whom I do not know. I do not want to hear how much of a womanizer Representative Condit is, or of their life together.

If the television media is so concerned with her disappearance, the focus should be on what is legitimately being done to find her. Period. The focus should be on the austerity of the fact that another person is missing, and there are no answers.

As an audience, our focus should be on the independence and good conscience of Dan Rather of CBS, who has strayed from the pack of media hound dogs, and contends that the media coverage by others has “been excessive and unfair.” As the anchor of a reputable evening news program, Rather has almost entirely ignored the intimate details of the story, reporting only the known facts and progress being made to find Levy. It seems then that Rather has learned his lesson from the 2000 Presidential Election: rejecting speculation in search of truth.

Dan Rather has thus answered my second question. The manipulative, sensational, and deceitful news that television media broadcasts in the interest of economic stability is not a standard that we, as viewers, have to accept. He has acknowledged this, giving hope that others will follow. But until the news is designed to inform, and not entertain, we must be active viewers voicing our concern to change the standard.

(Meredith Arndt is a research associate for Rocky Mountain Media, a Denver-based nonprofit organization calling on news media to meet the highest standards of professional journalism.)