Fewer owners means fewer watchdogs By Warren Bluhm News-Chronicle Not long after I got into the radio news business in the 1970s, the big networks started shutting down their foreign bureaus. The economy was tight, and suddenly having a reporter in Frankfurt or Algiers didn't seem very cost-effective. As time went on, the bottom line began to come up in newsroom conversation more and more. I had labored under the impression that the news was not supposed to make money. It was an important public service, and so the expense was absorbed by other parts of the operation. I reminisced earlier this year about what it was like to have three radio reporters covering one Green Bay City Council meeting. With the two newspapers, that's nearly a half-dozen sets of eyes and ears. Think what that meant to you. The purpose of a reporter is to tell you the most important things that happened at that meeting. To tell you everything about a two-hour meeting would take, well, two hours. Each reporter filtered those two hours into a report that would take about a minute to listen to or read. That's five different impressions of the most interesting stories from that meeting - if some politician was trying to get away with something, that was five chances it wouldn't work. And we paid attention to each other: More often than not we'd say, "Hey, they caught something I overlooked; we should do a story on that, too." The result was something resembling in-depth coverage. Eventually the bean counters began to think of news as a product, not a public service, and pressure was exerted to make the news a profit center, too. That meant fewer reporters on the local level, just as the big guns had decided to make do with fewer reporters on a global scale. The generation before mine had a deeper understanding of world affairs because U.S. media had reporters in places like Frankfurt and Algiers. Now I sense people are losing their understanding of local and state news as those reporters start to disappear, too. Newspapers and TV staffs are smaller than they were 30 years ago, and radio news is relegated to the news-talk and public stations. When I arrived in Green Bay in 1984, there were 11 full-time reporters among three radio stations. When I left last year, there were three full-time reporters in one newsroom. Those who welcome deregulation of the broadcast industry point to the diversity of music formats - if someone owns five stations in a market, he doesn't want two country stations because he'd essentially be competing against himself, so maybe he'll make one of them a hip-hop or jazz station. Makes sense on the surface. But if you're a country fan, do you want only one choice? Given the controversy over the Dixie Chicks, for example, what if you like the band but your local MegaCorp station has banned them? Or vice versa? Where do you listen then? But it's the lack of competition in news that is most alarming in the long run. If one - or no - reporter is present where once there were five, that is the amount by which the public's knowledge of the news is reduced. Competition always sharpens the competitors, and competition in the news media strengthens the public's understanding. An editor under internal or external pressure to kill a story is more likely to stand firm if there are several other editors across town likely to run the story if he won't. The sad thing about the current debate is how long it took people to care, because the horse was out of the barn long before the recent FCC decision to relax media ownership rules even further. Deregulation and consolidation long ago took those eight radio news jobs in Green Bay away. One good thing is, with the Internet, it's easier than ever to find the information for yourself if newspapers, TV and radio fail to tell you while they're covering the latest murder in California. But watch out - the same politicians who used deregulation to reduce your over-the-air news and information options will no doubt grow irritated that people are keeping tabs on them online, and they'll seek a way to scuttle those options, too. Bluhm is editor of the Door County Advocate and former managing editor of The News-Chroncile. His column appears Tuesdays. Contact him via e-mail at [email protected] or call 920-743-3321