September 20, 2004, 8:22 a.m.
The Fall of the News Oligopoly
As CBS News tumbles, so will a media way of life.

I confess that I am fascinated by the CBS documents scandal. It reminds me of the last gasp of the “scientists” who were certain that the sun revolved around the earth rather than the other way around. Historians call this a “paradigm shift,” when the intellectual support for a long-held but incorrect idea finally collapses under the weight of contrary data.

CBS is clearly operating under the old paradigm, in which only a chosen few media outlets are allowed to present the news. Economists call this an oligopoly — a market with only a few sellers who can set prices in a quasi-monopolistic manner.

In this case, however, the thing being set is not prices, but a single mindset of what constitutes “news.” This mindset has been the same for about 50 years, from the time at which meaningful newspaper competition began to decline and television became the dominant news source for most people.

It used to be that newspapers were the principal disseminators of news. In all major cities, there were at least two newspapers — one or more in the morning and at least one in the afternoon. This created competition for ideas as well as readers.

In any town with two or more papers, one paper would tend to be liberal and another one conservative for purely competitive reasons. In practice, this usually meant that the major paper (usually the morning paper) was liberal and the secondary paper (usually the afternoon paper) was conservative.

Changing work schedules, rush hour traffic, and the advent of evening television news broadcasts killed the afternoon paper. I don’t know of a single one left in the country. Unfortunately, this tended to kill off the conservative paper in most markets.

Another factor in all of this was the changing economics of newspapers, with large advertisers choosing to advertise only in the dominant paper in a market. This created a vast majority of one-newspaper towns. The number of major cities with more than one paper today is very small.

Sadly, the achievement of one-paper status has tended to neuter the political edges of every paper that has achieved it. These papers, once proudly liberal or conservative, are now mostly mushy centrists. All their editorials seem to be of the “on the one hand, but on the other hand” variety with no firm conclusions. One wonders why they even bother publishing editorials at all.

Finally, there has been a consolidation of the newspaper industry into a few large chains — Gannett being the largest. Their principal editorial goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, especially advertisers. The result is a homogenization of editorial policies; these papers do little more than echo the conventional wisdom.

Of course, there are still a few trendsetters, such as the Wall Street Journal on the right and the New York Times on the left. But this combination is a poor substitute for the dynamic local-newspaper markets of years past.

Everything bad about the newspaper market goes double for television news. At least newspapers allow dissenting voices and publish corrections. Television news operations not only rarely allow dissenting opinions to be aired, they rarely admit their errors. They say it’s because of time constraints, but that’s just an excuse.

This “we know the truth and we are never wrong” attitude is in the process of destroying CBS News, once the very best in the business. When confronted by compelling evidence that the Bush National Guard documents were forgeries, the network simply refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of these claims. The Nixon White House never circled the wagons as tightly.

In the old days, this might have worked. But today cable news, C-SPAN, talk radio, and the Internet raise questions and disseminate raw material to millions of people who are no longer bound by the quasi-monopoly of three television networks and one-newspaper towns. They can now get news that otherwise would be suppressed or ignored, check original sources for themselves, and draw their own conclusions.

It has long been a mystery to me why the major televisions networks (and CNN) decided to broadcast exactly the same things in exactly the same way with the same identical liberal spin. One would have thought that for purely competitive reasons, at least one network would have appealed to conservatives — just to have an edge and make an extra buck. Instead, the majors all decided to be exactly the same, varying only in the degree of their contempt for Republicans and anything remotely conservative.

To his credit, Rupert Murdoch saw this opening and created Fox News, which beat every other network during the Republican convention. The imminent collapse of CBS News as a serious operation will only boost Fox and the alternative media even more.

— Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis. Write to him here.

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