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4฀ Dividing฀and฀Distracting฀the฀Media The impact of investigative reporting on policy and public opinion depends in part on how the rest of the news media react to muckraking stories and any countercharges they provoke. The news media provide the main public forum for subsequent discussion of issues raised by investigative reporters. The media can keep a story alive and build momentum for reform by treating investigative reports as credible, repeating their charges, engaging in further investigation of them, and offering space for like-minded speakers to confirm their analysis of problems and offer policy solutions. Or the news media help kill stories and block change through inattention, refutation, and diversion from the issues raised by muckrakers. Just as investigative reporters frame reality, so the rest of the media frame investigative reporting and its controversies. In these case studies, critics and proponents especially cited print commentary as a resource for attacking and defending reports, the networks ’ right to muckrake in general, and broadcast regulation. Print coverage of television documentaries has not been studied systematically in the past. Instead, scholars and journalists have tended to cite only the verdicts of television reviewers, who were boosters for the documentary format. Relying on reviewers has offered a deceptively rosy image of how the rest of the media reacted to disputed reports. Little attention has been paid to how network affiliates reacted to investigative reporting despite the fact that the networks depended on these stations to serve as the local outlets for their programs. In addition to the importance of the media as a public forum, there is another compelling reason to study other news organizations’ response to network muckraking. If journalism as a whole became more adversarial to government and business in the 1960s and 1970s, we would expect the rest of the media to have affirmed contentious network documentaries in several ways. First, at a bare minimum, we would expect that other media paid attention to these reports and the controversies they provoked rather than allowing 04.141-161.Raph.indd฀฀฀143 6/23/05฀฀฀8:46:13฀AM 144 Representation the stories to die on the vine and the pressure on journalists to go unexposed. Second, we would expect that other news organizations reacted affirmatively to the reports. If the media were oppositional, they would have agreed with the political analysis offered in the documentaries. We would expect other journalists to have endorsed television reporters’ news gathering and storytelling methods, which were at issue in so many inquiries. We would imagine that the media defended television reporters’ First Amendment rights to investigate and take positions on controversial issues. After all, the print media faced many of the same attacks on their rights, especially during the Nixon years, and broadcast affiliates’ news operations would have been subject to the same regulatory constraints imposed on the networks that emerged from these government probes. Third, we would expect an adversarial news media to keep attention focused on the issues raised in muckraking reports rather than diverting attention to the procedural claims made against them. As we have seen, attacks on documentaries were, in part, attempts to redirect the public gaze from antipoverty, Cold War, and consumerist struggles to the ethics of television news gathering, editing, and balance. Did media response focus primarily on the charges raised by the documentaries, conferring additional credibility and authority upon them by advancing their stories, or did the media emphasize the charges against television reports, thereby permitting critics to frame the controversies as about broadcast news rather than the issues it covered? Three documentaries, one from each major issue area that generated controversy, sparked longer controversies and attracted attention from more government agencies than their counterparts, and so were likely to have attracted more media attention as well. Hunger฀in฀America,฀The฀Selling฀of฀the฀ Pentagon, and Pensions took liberal stands on highly disputed issues, and the media reaction to these can be studied. Affiliates’ reaction to these controversies can be assessed by examining broadcasters’ actions at industry meetings and in regulatory arenas. Print response can be measured through a content analysis of major newspapers’ opinion articles (including editorials, op-eds, columns, and reviews) as well as coverage in the three major newsmagazines.1 Opinion articles have the advantage of offering the least ambiguous expressions of support or criticism for the documentaries. Furthermore, reviews, especially in prestige papers such as the New฀York฀Times and Washington฀Post, were influential in the...

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