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To conservatives especially, much of network reporting, and not just at CBS, can seem highly editorialized. The Administration contends that defense expenditures help stimulate the economy. ABC's Economics Editor Dan Cordtz countered, in a report, that a major military buildup would provide "the wrong jobs in the wrong places." ABC closed its evening news program a few days before Christmas with a montage of children on Santa's knee in Beaver County, Pa., asking not for toys but for jobs for their unemployed fathers.
On occasion NBC has also been harshly judgmental. Its portrait of the President at mid-term included an appraisal of Reaganomics by Correspondent Mike Jensen, who came close to calling Reagan's stewardship a failure. Jensen summed up: "It soon became apparent that something was wrong. Business got steadily worse. Factories closed. Layoffs. Bankruptcies. All we can really count on is that President Reagan will be guided by an optimism that not everyone shares."
The networks are not necessarily hostile to Reagan. Rather, they are motivated by competition for the largest possible audience and thus face a self-imposed pressure to give their stories emotional impact. The Institute for Applied Economics, a business advocacy group based in New York City, reviewed 491 hours of network news aired between July 1981 and June 1982. It found that "stories selected to inform the public on the nature of Reaganomics were typically human interest interviews with victims of recession," and cited 37 examples.
Yet all three networks are expanding their serious economics coverage. Each now employs three reporters or commentators on the subject to serve both evening and morning news programs. Each airs more prime-time documentaries than ever before on business and finance, even though the programs are unlikely to rival the movies of the week for ratings points. A few weeks ago, ABC profiled a subject that would have been unthinkably arcane before the onset of the recession: the arbiter of the nation's money supply, the Federal Reserve System. Correspondents Cordtz and Mike Connor blamed the recession not mainly on Reagan but on the Fed's tight-money policy that had been introduced to stem inflation. Indeed, ABC asked whether the independent Fed should be more closely controlled by elected Government.
On Christmas night, CBS aired a symposium among reporters and business executives exploring why each side mistrusts the other, and asking whether the network overemphasizes negative news. NBC, since 1980, has aired three shows on the abstruse topic of competition between the U.S. and Japan for productivity and export trade.