The Search for a Standard: Markets and Media

Communication scholars are frequently oblivious to the market constraints on the media. We often operate in an imaginary world of an unfettered press and an informationhungry public. This diagnostic problem limits our ability through research to strengthen the press as an instrument of democracy. By glossing over constraints on the press— most notably, its need to attract and hold an audience and therefore its need to respond to audience tastes—we issue recommendations so unrealistic that they have no chance of being taken seriously by those in the news business, much less put into practice. In this context, John Zaller’s attempt to develop a new standard for press performance is a constructive one. Zaller proposes nothing less than a wholesale revision of how we think about the press’s responsibility in a democratic society, much like Michael Schudson (1998) recently did in reference to the citizen’s role. Indeed, Zaller’s standard is fitted to Schudson’s standard: a burglar alarm press in the service of the monitorial citizen. Zaller’s standard is constructed around behavioral tendencies. Citizens are said to have a powerful appetite for soft news. They are also said to have little need for highquality news information because their influence is felt primarily through elections where they base their judgments largely on long-standing partisan preferences. Because of these tendencies, says Zaller, the press fulfills its public duty by acting as a warning bell that alerts citizens to threatening developments. It is not obliged to furnish quality information. Most citizens neither want it nor need it. (Zaller excludes elite daily papers, such as the New York Times, from his burglar alarm standard. They would continue to be judged by the quantity and quality of the information they provide.) Is the burglar alarm standard the answer to our diagnostic and prescriptive problem? Does it provide a standard that fits with the press’s capacities and imperatives and with the public’s abilities and needs? Is it the standard we should apply to the performance of virtually all news organizations except the elite few? I believe the answer is no. Zaller’s argument rests on shaky assertions about the nature of citizens as audience and as public. I believe the traditional standard—what Zaller calls the full standard—is a better one, although we need to rethink its application.