American media should be more like the BBC

It is late July, 2003. American troops in Baghdad are said to have killed two sons of the former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and many Iraqis — as well as many Americans — don't know whether to believe it, despite graphic photographs.

Revelations over the past spring and early summer indicate that President Bush, knowingly or not — and there is some question about which — used information from faulty intelligence when he claimed in his State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. And then there is the matter of the nonexistent or yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction.

Most Americans who are still paying attention to these matters feel they are getting spun continuously, and almost jokingly offer up facts and arguments they've read or heard — and their opposites. Citizens are asking journalists and media critics why the media don't "do something" to discover and publish "the truth." Why don't journalists seem to be trying to get to the bottom of this?

Why, indeed.

Is it because they don't have the staff? The contacts? The resources? The will? The courage? Are they afraid of being labeled "unpatriotic" by some secret, hidden government observers? Do the journalists, or at least the industry's leaders, think the American public simply isn't interested enough for them to dig more deeply into the issues?

As a loyal American trained as a journalist some 45 years ago, I am convinced that journalists in the U.S. feel increasingly trapped between their professional values and the marketing/profits mentality so evident now everywhere in the news industry. The old professional values urge them to dig, investigate and bring to the light of day the relevant facts and issues, while the market/profit mentality asks, "Is it worth it? Do enough people care?"

It seems clear enough that the market/profit mentality has won out, especially in electronic news, and to a considerable extent in the print media. While it is impossible to ascertain a cause-and-effect relationship, there does seem to be at least correlation between the media coverage — or lack of it — of government and citizen attitudes toward both government and the media. Trust in both seems to be nearly gone. Meanwhile, the push for corporate profit margins much higher than those of average American businesses goes on — with 40 to 100 percent in the electronic media and 12 to 45 percent in the print media common during 2003.

The trend has been discussed by journalists for years, and well-known editors have resigned rather than cut their news budgets more deeply than they already had in order to meet new, higher corporate demands for profits.

Rather than bemoaning this issue further, I believe we — Americans who worry about these issues — should probably finally accept the reality that nearly all American television is market driven, will only become more so as time goes on, and as such cannot be counted on to provide news that American citizens need to evaluate their governments and communities, or to use as the basis of their civic participation in voting and other democratic activities.

Newspapers, and some magazines, on the other hand, still seem to have some options, and at least some are trying to engage in serious journalism and should be encouraged and supported in their efforts, and rewarded for their successes.

In my view, the nation needs for the sake of its highly touted democracy to develop and support a nationally broadcast British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)-type channel (or two) of television news, a fully supported National Public Radio, and methods for supporting and rewarding courageous, high-quality and responsible print media.

As America watches, the BBC is currently engaged in a war of its own with the government of Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to the point of suing the government over some of the same issues about truthfulness regarding the Iraq war, facts regarding uranium from Niger, and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction supposedly capable of being deployed in 45 minutes.

Britons trust the BBC, and what it broadcasts about the government and other issues. In fact, many Americans trust the BBC, too, making efforts to hear broadcasts on public radio, and via the Web.

The BBC is an independent creature of the British government, funded through excise taxes collected at the point of sale of televisions and radios, and through some annual assessments. It is run by an independent board theoretically unrelated to the current politicians holding office, and beholden only to the British people.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is modeled after it, and many European nations — Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Lithuania, to name a few — have similar stations/channels, funded in similar ways, though the details differ from place to place. Britain and the other nations also have commercial stations funded as ours are through advertising. Britons trust their national, non-commercial channels, and turn to them and the "elite" newspapers for serious news and information affecting their lives and their decisions.

Why hasn't such a system evolved in the U.S.? Our feeble attempts — PBS and NPR — are so underfunded, with continuous funding threats from Congress, that it is virtually impossible for them to be thorough and courageous, and beholden only to the public. Local station leaders seem to be full-time development officers whose programming decisions reflect fund-raising strategies more than their communities' information needs.

We need a stronger, more viable system, and should give the BBC model a try. We can't lose; the result can't be worse than what we have now.

Margaret T. Gordon is a professor of news media and public policy at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, and was formerly the dean.