“It is unfortunate that most people’s experience of television news is confined to this small but highly visible group of on-camera performers, because of course virtually all of the major journalistic decisions—what stories to cover, what ‘theory’ of a story to adopt, which facts to stress (and not stress), whom to interview, etc.—are made by off-camera officials or specialist employees. It is perfectly natural, if a viewer feels that a story on the evening TV news has been distorted, for him to blame Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings. Who would dream of blaming Thomas Bettag, William Wheatley, or William Lord? Who … outside of the television world, has ever heard of any of them? And yet they are … the executive producers of the CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and ABC’s World News Tonight. As such, they have far greater control over the content—not to mention the slant—of these programs than their three superstars.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media bias, governance, media, political-strategy
