Eastern Media Bias : Read All About It--if It’s in N.Y.

Ginny Carroll, the Newsweek bureau chief in Detroit, says that when she was in Houston for the magazine last year, she tried to interest her New York editors in a story on ocean pollution and sewage washing ashore on the beaches of Galveston Bay, an alarming problem that had received considerable coverage in the Texas press.

Bacterial pollution had forced the closure of more than half of Galveston Bay previously used to harvest shellfish, a whale had died from an infection contracted by swallowing debris in the bay and in one three-day period, 7,000 volunteers had picked up more than 200 tons of debris on Texas beaches.

The superintendent of one beachfront national park called his span of beach “the dirtiest national park in the nation.”

But Newsweek editors weren’t terribly interested in the story, Carroll says.

Then, on Aug. 1, 1988, both Newsweek and Time did cover stories on what Newsweek called “Our Polluted Oceans.”

Why?

” . . . for the past several weeks, beaches from Staten Island to eastern Long Island (the beaches where New Yorkers go for sun and fun) have been intermittently shut down by a trickle of potentially hazardous medical waste” washing ashore, Newsweek reported in its cover story.

Editors at both Time and Newsweek say it was the medical waste that made this ocean pollution especially newsworthy, and Time editors say their ocean pollution story was in the works before the medical waste washed ashore in New York.

But while both stories included references to the ocean pollution problems in Texas, neither was published until ocean pollution had suddenly become an issue in New York, and the Time story began with a clearly dyspeptic account of “thousands of New Yorkers” seeking relief at the beach from “a succession of torrid, hazy and humid days” and finding instead “to their horror and dismay . . . (that) from northern New Jersey to Long Island, incoming tides (had) washed up a nauseating array of waste.”

Media Based in New York

Time and Newsweek are both based in New York. So are the three major television networks, the major national wire service, the two most influential national newspapers and virtually all the most important book and national magazine publishers. No wonder stories like ocean pollution washing up on the shores of New York get more attention than similar stories elsewhere in the nation.

Recent attempts to avoid this media myopia notwithstanding, Time’s account of “horror and dismay” on the beaches of New York is no isolated example of what many see as a clear East Coast bias in the national media. There are many similar examples:

- When a young woman in Diego, Tex., was publicly gang-raped by more than 20 of her husband’s friends, then ostracized for going to the police, there were no stories in most of the major national media. But when a young woman was raped in a bar in New Bedford, Mass., while several men joined in and others stood by cheering, it became a national scandal, with stories on the network news and in the news magazines and on the front pages of the major newspapers.

- When a former hospital orderly confessed to killing dozens of patients in a Cincinnati hospital “to relieve their suffering,” the story wasn’t even mentioned in Newsweek. But when authorities in suburban New York ordered the exhumation of seven bodies after the indictment of a nurse in the death of a patient, Newsweek published a story on the “growing list of grisly hospital murders,” including not only the New York and Cincinnati cases but earlier cases in Ohio and California as well.

- When a Latino youth from an Orange County barrio enrolled at Harvard University and, struggling to deal with the pressures of being suddenly thrust into a highly competitive, Anglo-dominated environment, wound up spending parts of his summer vacations at home as an armed robber, only the New York Times among the major, East Coast-based national media paid any attention to the story. But when a 17-year-old from a black family in Harlem, newly graduated from an exclusive Eastern prep school, was fatally wounded by a white New York police officer he’d allegedly attacked, it became a major national story, an occasion to examine the pressures on a ghetto youth suddenly thrust into a highly competitive, white-dominated environment. There was even a hard-cover book published on the case.

Publishers’ Read Papers

The phenomenon of the New York event that, almost overnight, becomes a book is--like the stories themselves--largely a matter of book publishers who live in New York reading about something in the New York press and deciding it’s a subject the rest of the nation would like to read about too. But if that same event happens elsewhere . . . .

When the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 1985, there was one book published on their surprising triumph; when the New York Mets won the World Series in 1986, there were 11 books published on the team, its players, its manager, even its announcer.

In the “claustrophobized” world of New York publishing, “some . . . people are important because they’re covered so much. . . . You’re famous for being famous,” said Stuart Applebaum, director of publicity for Bantam Books. “There is the supposition that the New York sports teams get the play (in the media), and because they get the play, they create this interest (nationwide).”

This is true in virtually every publishing category; the current edition of Books in Print lists more than seven pages of books on various aspects of New York City--more books than are listed for Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Dallas, Philadelphia and Houston combined.

But the “very powerful, sometimes even insidious influence of the New York opinion-making community . . . influences . . . (book) acquisitions . . . that may or may not be valid for the rest of the country,” Applebaum said.

After all, the three best-selling sports books of recent years involved men not from New York but from Seattle (Brian Bosworth), Chicago (Jim McMahon) and Indiana (Bobby Knight). Moreover, although the New York metropolitan area remains the largest book-selling market in the country, six of the other nine top book-selling markets are in the West and Midwest. Among the top 20 markets the dollar volume is more than 50% higher for book sales in California than in New York and New Jersey, according to estimates by the U.S. Department of Commerce. On a per-capita basis, that same study shows, San Jose, Seattle and San Francisco all have higher book sales revenue than does New York.

Most other East-based media would find it equally difficult to cite population-cum-profit reasons as the explanation for their seeming preoccupation with Eastern stories. Both Time and Newsweek sell more copies in California than in New York and New Jersey combined, more copies in Illinois than in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., combined and more copies in Texas than in Pennsylvania.

Television is the one news medium that can legitimately invoke population figures to justify some of its policy decisions.

Westerners are often angry that the networks seem to schedule sports events--the Olympics, Monday night football and baseball, the baseball playoffs and World Series--to run in prime time in the East, even if that means viewers on the Pacific Coast are still in traffic on the way home when the events start. This was most distressing to many baseball fans in California last month when two California teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Oakland A’s, had to play at 5:30 p.m. on three consecutive weekdays so that most of each game could be seen in prime time in the East and Midwest.

But this scheduling was not done simply for the convenience of NBC’s corporate executives and their colleagues, friends and neighbors in New York. About 50% of the television audience is in the Eastern time zone and 30% is in the Central time zone; only 20% combined is in the Pacific and Mountain time zones. So NBC, like the other networks in similar situations, was simply accommodating the greater number of viewers--and maximizing revenue and minimizing problems in the process.

Networks can sell commercial time for more money when their largest viewing audience is in prime time, and they can avoid conflicts with their local affiliates when network programming does not extend so far beyond prime time that it wipes out the affiliates’ own late-night local newscasts, a lucrative source of income for most stations.

Thus, a baseball game starting at 7:30 p.m. Pacific would have delighted Dodger and A’s fans, but it probably wouldn’t have ended before 12:30 a.m. in the Midwest and 1:30 a.m. in the East, by which time all but the most dedicated fans in those heavily populated time zones would probably have been asleep. Knowing that, sponsors wouldn’t have paid top dollar for commercials on the World Series--and there probably wouldn’t even have been a local newscast to interrupt with commercials after the game.

The networks are often guided by similar concerns--Eastern audience size--when they decide which sports events to televise in the first place.

Jim Spence, former executive vice president of ABC Sports, insists that there is no bias involved in these decisions, but he does concede “an oversensitivity to the New York market. . . .”

“What did that translate to?” he asked. “It translated to a lot of Yankee games, a lot of Mets games.”

All this is not to say that network television is indifferent to anything that happens west of the Hudson River. Far from it.

Michael Gartner, the president of NBC News, was born and reared in Iowa, and he says he still goes back to Iowa every weekend, in part because “it helps me keep perspective.”

In fact, the “NBC Nightly News” is probably more sensitive to news from the West than are its two competitors. NBC broadcast “The Nightly News” from the West Coast every night for a week in 1986, and “The Nightly News” also broadcast two stories earlier this year on the Pacific Palisades oil-drilling controversy involving Occidental Petroleum Corp. NBC’s “Nightly News” was also the first network to report on the Hollywood writers’ strike and the first to make this summer’s fires in Yellowstone National Park the lead story on its evening news.

One reason for this interest may be that Tom Brokaw, the NBC anchor and managing editor, was born and educated in South Dakota, worked for seven years in Los Angeles and maintains close ties to the West.

There are similar differences at the news magazines.

Newsweek was for many years more open than Time to stories from west of the Hudson River--in part because Newsweek was the more innovative, outside-the-Establishment magazine, in part because it was quicker than Time to permit its correspondents to write their own stories (rather than simply provide long files to be rewritten in New York) and in part because one high-ranking Newsweek editor, Maynard Parker, was born in California and educated in California and Oregon.

Parker is the No. 2-ranking editor at Newsweek; his boss, Richard Smith, was born and reared in Michigan. Another top editor came to Newsweek after five years at Texas Monthly, and the editor of the National Affairs section is from a small town in Illinois.

At Time, for the first time, the managing editor is a former longtime field correspondent and a graduate of a West Coast university (Stanford); the most recent editor of the magazine’s Nation section spent his first 26 years in Louisiana.

Correspondents at both magazines say these changes have significantly reduced both the insularity and the ignorance at their publications. Regional reporters for national newspapers and the television networks have made the same happy observation about changes at their home offices.

For years, reporters based outside the East used to regale each other with the latest example of geographic ignorance perpetrated on them by their Eastern editors--all of whom seemed to think the vast “out there” beyond the Hudson River was all about 20 square miles.

An editor in New York once asked a reporter in Los Angeles to stop in Yuma, Ariz., on his way to San Diego. Another New York editor was surprised that his reporter in Houston couldn’t get to Lubbock in an hour and that Idaho wasn’t next to Texas. A reporter in Carlsbad, N.M., once had to explain to her editor in New York why, no, she couldn’t be in Bismarck, N.D., before noon and, on another occasion, that, no, Boise wasn’t really “right next to” Yuma.

Reporters say that as their editors have become more knowledgeable about other parts of the country, they have also become less insistent on stories that fit predictable stereotypes.

Nicholas Lehman, a former editor of Texas Monthly and now national correspondent for Atlantic monthly, says that in both New York and Washington, there has long been “a kind of underlying belief that . . . ‘Anybody who is really smart . . . would’ve ended up here.’ So there’s a tremendous temptation to treat anyplace else as the simple, ordinary folk of America, with their quaint, colorful customs. . . .”

Until relatively recently, reporters based in Houston and Dallas knew they could always interest their New York editors in stories on outlandish, Paul Bunyanesque Texas characters, especially rich oil men given to extravagant behavior.

Texas-Bashing

“There was a tendency, particularly during the boom years . . . to do a lot of sneering stories about Texas, laughing at Texas . . . funny people, funny language, funny costumes, funny food, all these strange customs,” says Robert Reinhold, former New York Times bureau chief in Houston and now the paper’s bureau chief in Los Angeles. “I thought my chief accomplishment in 5 1/2 years in Texas was that I got beyond that stereotype. . . .”

Correspondents in Los Angeles and San Francisco have had similar problems with editors’ stereotypes through the years. They have often been unable to interest their editors in serious stories from the West Coast, but they knew they could almost invariably sell them on a story about the latest kooky coastal fad.

This approach became self-perpetuating.

Stories on “bizarre exotica” wound up on the front page, says Jay Mathews, Los Angeles bureau chief for the Washington Post, and since reporters wanted to be on the front page, they wrote more and more bizarre exotica.

“If I chose to write a story about the Bhagwan (an Indian guru who settled in Oregon in 1981) or highways or Medflies or Jerry Brown . . . or anything . . . about California that Johnny Carson would tell jokes about . . . I sensed a much warmer reaction . . . a high level of hilarity and congratulation from my desks . . . than I might have gotten from other kinds of stories.”

For the Washington Post--and many other Eastern media--Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. was “the ultimate California story,” Mathews says. Brown was both flaky and famous--an important politician with novel ideas and a rock-star girlfriend--and California-based correspondents found their Eastern editors eager for virtually any Jerry Brown story.

But Brown, at least, had some substance; he was a governor, a thoughtful political leader, and the Post--to its credit (and Mathews’)--has increasingly covered serious California stories in a serious fashion, post-Brown.

The basic attitude of most news executives in New York toward most other California stories, however, was, “You people are all sitting in hot tubs, wearing gold chains around your neck and eating alfalfa sprouts,” said David Browning, senior producer for the “CBS Evening News” in Los Angeles.

California Indulgences

Worse, when those editors came to Los Angeles, they insisted on indulging in the very activities they would then cite to prove how insubstantial life in Los Angeles was.

The top editors would come here and “want to have dinners with Goldie Hawn and Raquel Welch and . . . go to Spago and . . . they then go back to New York to talk about how shallow we are,” said Peter Greenberg, a former Newsweek correspondent in Los Angeles.

New York hasn’t altogether abandoned those stereotypes, of course. Jonathan Beaty, a correspondent in Time’s Los Angeles bureau, said there is still a “denigration” of events that happen in Los Angeles.

“If it’s kooky, socially aberrant, the editors back East still think of it as a quintessentially West Coast story,” he said. “Somehow, the West Coast is (seen as) less vital, less important, less serious, less a part of the mainstream than the New York-Washington corridor.”

Just last summer, when a Time writer in New York did a story on the insurance initiatives on the November ballot in California, Beaty said, he had to intervene to prevent the story from beginning, as originally written, “In California, where kooky trends begin. . . .”

John McCormick, based in Chicago as Midwest bureau chief for Newsweek, says that he, too, has had to dissuade New York editors from stereotypical stories born of their “New York self-absorption.”

But McCormick and most other correspondents say their editors are now more interested than ever before in serious stories from “out there”--even, at times, stories that run counter to existing stereotypes.

Most weeks, Newsweek continues to provide better coverage than Time from “out there”--thorough examinations this year on rural poverty, the Texas savings and loan crisis, youth gangs in Los Angeles and the young, black residents of a housing project in Chicago. But Time, under Managing Editor Henry Muller, has begun to close the gap on Newsweek--and sometimes to surpass Newsweek--in its coverage of stories outside the New York-Washington power axis, not only in periodic, major projects but in its regular “American Scene” columns (about half of which emanate from outside the East Coast) and in its “American Notes” news roundup.

Nevertheless, Eastern editors continue to succumb to an Eastern bias more often than not in every journalistic arena from art to Zionism.

One major reason for that is the unique role of the New York Times and, to a much lesser extent, the Washington Post in setting the agenda for the rest of the nation’s media, especially the New York-based media.

A story on Page 1 of the New York Times almost automatically ensures further attention from other media, print and electronic--not only because it’s seen by all the major media executives in New York. For many media executives everywhere, Page 1 of the New York Times is the barometer of what’s truly important in the world.

“Nothing (is) more frustrating than to have suggested a story two or three times (to my editors) to no avail and then have it appear in the New York Times and within hours receive a query from New York wanting to start up . . . (that same) story, as if simply being in the New York Times has given it a legitimacy,” said Time’s Beaty.

Correspondents for other publications have the same complaint.

They point to stories over the years on subjects as diverse as the “Valley girl” fad in Los Angeles and bid-rigging on highway construction in the South to panhandling in the big cities and downward mobility in the middle class as examples of stories their publications didn’t do until they had been in the New York Times.

N.Y. Times Influence

Michael Reese, Newsweek bureau chief in Los Angeles, says he tried, unsuccessfully, to interest his editors in a story on the Cirque du Soleil when it was performing here, but he found no interest until the New York Times said the troupe was coming to New York. (He also wanted to do a story on the slow-growth movement in California but says he couldn’t get the go-ahead until the Washington Post did the story last summer.)

News magazine editors concede that they used to be heavily influenced by the New York Times.

Three to five years ago, said Muller of Time, it was “very legitimate” to say “Time won’t write . . . a trend story unless it’s been confirmed by the New York Times, regardless of how many distinguished (Time) correspondents have called our attention to it.”

But Muller and executives at other news media insist that this is no longer the case.

“It’s more likely that a story will have a harder time getting in the magazine because it’s appeared in the New York Times than vice versa,” said Richard Smith, editor in chief of Newsweek.

Correspondents acknowledge this change, but they say the New York Times influence remains disproportionately strong.

Indeed, some reporters have grown so frustrated with this syndrome that they have deliberately leaked stories to reporter friends at the New York Times, knowing that publication of the stories in the Times might be the quickest way to get their own, otherwise uninterested editors suddenly interested in the story.

Janet Lundblad of the Times editorial library assisted with research for this story.

20 LARGEST BOOK MARKETS

New York is the headquarters of the U.S. publishing industry and the largest book-buying market; not coincidentally, books by and about New York are published in far greater numbers than others. But six of the other nine top book-selling markets are in the West and Midwest.

Est. Bookstore 1984 Sales/ Sales Household City/Area (in mill.) (dollars) New York, N.Y. $278 $87.54 Los Angeles $176 $61.61 Chicago $126 $58.60 San Francisco $124 $92.90 Boston $111 $85.34 Washington, D.C. $102 $83.89 Philadelphia $86 $52.59 Seattle $67 $105.09 San Jose $63 $124.74 Dallas-Ft. Worth $63 $52.28 Detroit $58 $39.02 Long Island, N.Y. $52 $61.82 Houston $52 $45.45 Orange County $47 $59.93 Minneapolis $45 $59.27 Denver $43 $63.63 Baltimore $43 $54.81 San Diego $42 $54.89 Atlanta $40 $48.48 Cleveland $32 $48.13

Source: U.S. Commerce Dept.