The other coast weighs in

Los Angeles: "New York seems to float away from America'

BY STEVE WASSERMAN, BOOK REVIEW

The idea that a New York media cabal continues to exercise significant influence west of the Hudson is a notion so self-serving that it could only have been hatched at Elaine's. The big story, largely missed by the media sultans of Manhattan, is how New York has lost its buzz and no longer has a full Nelson on the nation's cultural life. Increasingly wealthy, wired, and worldly, Americans no longer take most of their cultural cues from a tribe of Gotham commissars whose greatest gift is their capacity for self-absorption. Does anyone seriously believe that the values to be found in the pages of, say, Vanity Fair are more those of Manhattan than Hollywood? What is striking is the degree to which ordinary Americans no longer pay much attention to the pronunciamentos delivered on high from the traditional organs of the eastern press. For example, during the long and forlorn impeachment year, a majority of Americans refused to endorse the media fatwa, led by the excellent New York Times, to condemn President Clinton for his unruly sex life. It was almost enough to give one hope in the citizenry's collective sobriety as much of the New York punditocracy grew ever more shrill as they faced the fact of their diminishing influence.

To be sure, New York pulses with money and Wall Street financiers batten on get-rich schemes for which they find a market of millions of gullible Americans. But media clout? That is another matter. It was AOL, after all, based outside of Washington, D.C., that gobbled up Time Warner, based in Manhattan. And, arguably, it is Los Angeles, the redhot center of the nation's industrial-entertainment complex, which dictates (for better or worse) what Americans watch on television and see in Cineplexes. As for radio, last time I looked, neither Minnesota Public Radio nor National Public Radio had relocated to Manhattan. Influential opinion magazines like The New Republic and The Atlantic, Salon and Slate, to name only a few, are to be found elsewhere. Meanwhile, technology has democratized book production, and the specter of the e-book has plunged publishing into its greatest structural crisis since Gutenberg. Moreover, the single most important individual influencing book-buying habits across the country is a woman named Oprah who runs a media empire out of Chicago.

But nostalgia is a commodity whose value increases as the world it seeks to recall disappears. The very idea of a list of the most important New York media people betrays status anxiety. Is New York still important? Of course. Is it still an island? You bet it is. And increasingly it seems to float away from an America whose disdain it foolishly courts even as it presumes to speak for the rest of us.

San Francisco: `There has always been a sense of entitlement on the East Coast'

BY PHIL BRONSTEIN, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

East Coast bias. That's the theme of my assignment from those sanctimonious, condescending, dismissive New York s.o.b.s at CJR.

What do they know? Nothing. And whatever I say, they won't take it seriously. They'll snicker and give each other secret handshakes. All of them in their tweedy, faux-intellectual outfits. Or maybe their pinstripe suits and tasseled loafers. Whatever. They're all originally from The New York Times anyway, those paunchy people with middle initials. Or a few from the Washington Post - blue blazers and khaki pants and beards. Except for the women, not that there are a lot of those back there.

Do I sound bitter? Or angry? Pardon me. I'll just go see my tantric, macrobiotic, vegan, reincarnated, homeopathic therapist and figure it out. It's all about me, after all.

You think I'm being too sensitive? You judge. Here was the query:

"CJR is working on an issue on the New York media elite and how the concentration of media power in one location distorts the news and information the rest of the country receives." You wish. How typical is this East Coast assumption from the East Coast? This question is not "if" but "how."" If you ask my opinion, you distort your own news just by that thinking. Way out here, we just figure that's presumptuous and move on.

"The three major television news organizations, Time and Newsweek, The Associated Press, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and scores of magazines are among those clustered on the island of Manhattan." Sure, remind us again that you've got all the power. All the old - some of it fading - power. We've got Napster and Intel and Salon and CNet and @home and Variety and Sunset and our own scores of magazines and a bunch of other important media outlets. Don't you think you're being a little near-sighted and stuffy? Hello! Like, Wake Up!

Sorry, but people don't need all you New York media elite as much anymore (or me, or us either). Smugness could kill us all.

"We would like the perspective of people outside New York on this phenomenon." How generous. Thanks for caring. "Specifically, would you write 400-500 words on how - if at all - the New York media elite affects what goes on in your newspaper?" Ah, there, at last, is an "if." Thank you for that. But you think I can scrounge up 500 words on how the snooty, self-obsessed East Coast media elite doesn't affect my newspaper? It's a loaded deal, right? I wasn't born yesterday. Okay, maybe reborn. But still.

"Finally, what (if anything) should be done to confront the power of this group? And how does one go about doing it?" Are you really going to do something about it? Am I? Although we're not really into confrontation out here, how about this: We could start an anti-Latitudinalism League. Or just ignore it.

Remember: we started Beat and hippies and Bierce and Hendrix and love-ins and Niners and Raiders and movie studios and agents. And we invented the Internet. Really. Jack London and Jack Kerouac liked us better. So wise up, East Coast Media Elite. You're living in the past.

On the practical side, we have a few anecdotes. For instance, the experience of a current colleague at the Chronicle who was a Nieman finalist and who was interviewed by a panel including the then managing editor of a major East Coast daily. "The interview was great," the reporter said, "but the last question came from [that editor]. It went something like, `We say at [my paper] that San Francisco gets the lousy newspapers it deserves. What do you think?'"

Well, we say at the Chronicle that rudeness and dumb questions are no substitutes for intellectual dexterity or wit.

You see, the bias you ask about only af-- fects us when we're obliged to answer some haughty question like that. East Coast slant is a state of mind, mostly residing in the cerebra of East Coast media elite, to use your phrase. (This CJR assignment itself actually came from a highly respected former West Coast editor.) It's not really about geography so much as collective conceit.

Strip the thing down and really it looks like a lot of whining outside the East Coast and snobbery inside turned into something conspiratorial, like the Salem witch trials, amplified by fear, a willingness to believe and reinforced by a bunch of people acting badly, like that Nieman judge.

The truth is that there has always been a sense of entitlement and superiority on the East Coast, a belief that the West Coast is populated by foolhardy dreamers and thieves and whackos run out of New York by the prejudice of closed doors and minds and institu tions. The entire middle, all that red territory that voted for George W. Bush, doesn't exist. But that's a blind spot from both coasts.

The phenomenon of East Coast bias works only if you pay attention to it. Frankly, most of those Time and Newsweek cover stories about life-style "trends" are months and even years behind the rest of the country. Like stock tips for the common person: once you get the information, everyone else already has it. If Newsweek or the CBS Evening News or The New Yorker consigns us outlanders to some screwball stereotype, it only hurts their own readers, and us if we believe it. If we do believe it, it will slap us in the face and make us mad. We'd like to be affected differently. We wish there were more there to inspire instead of just offend.

The New York Times is a special case, I have to concede. No newspaper that large has had such a specific mandate to do serious journalism for so long, and has done it. Adolph Ochs reinvented it not as a vanity sheet or partisan press, but as a newspaper qua newspaper as we know it today. Not that they're unsoiled by mistakes. My friend Ray Bonner was slimed by his Times employers when he tried to report an actual massacre in El Salvador. Then there's Wen Ho Lee.

But, while we take stories from the Times's wire service, it doesn't run us, or determine how we practice the craft. Things like Pulitzer tilt aren't about coastal bias, so much as they are about the biggest papers being able to afford the most talent.

There. You have a lot more than 500 words. You got me going, even though I'm saying your bias doesn't affect us.

Go ahead. Be Elite. We'll be here, soaking our heads in the hot tub.

Portland: `Personal crises become real only when they happen to New York editors'

BY SANDRA MIMS ROWE, EDITOR, THE OREGONIAN

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, crafted a "Talk of the Town" item during World Series week that contrasted the fun and games of the series with the serious mischief going on around the world. Of New Yorkers, he wrote: "wallowing in exquisite nightly drama and unapologetic self-regard, New Yorkers seem for the moment to need nothing, and no one else, in the world."

So, what's new? I wondered, seizing the snarky Left Coast lens with which I now view New York.

Yes, even way out here at the edge of the continent, we see The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as the gold standard for the newspaper world. We read both every day (No, they don't come out weeks later by Pony Express; they actually deliver that day's edition every morning on your doorstep if you choose). But much as we read, rely on, and revere the New York-based media kings, they are occasionally so culturally out of touch with the rest of the United States that it's fine sport for us to skewer them.

Certain crimes do not occur until they occur in New York. The city's crime news - whether about a child beating, an attack with a brick on the street, murder at a Wendy's, or a shooting by cops - gets disproportionate national coverage. Similar incidents happen all over the country and get little coverage. The concentration of big media in the city sometimes distorts news stories, making them larger than life.

Cultural trends never happen until they happen in New York. Even personal life crises only become real when they happen to New York editors. An Oregon editor who left the Center of the Known World for the West Coast (and whose friends assured her when she moved she would, for all practical purposes, cease to exist), swears she can track the personal lives of about a dozen top New York editors by what social phenomena appear in news features on the front pages of the Times or The Wall Street Journal. When The New York Times discovers that Spanish lessons are all the rage for Manhattan toddlers, she knows just whose child is now learning how to lisp uno, dos, tres.

Or when she notices an authoritative piece on chiropractors, she suspects she knows whose back is acting up. And when she reads about fair ways to split 401(k) assets between feuding spouses, she wonders if she-knows-who is contemplating you-know-what.

Ethical issues also receive attention when they come up in the New York media world. I got into a tiff last year with Steven Brill when he sent around his proposal for voluntary restrictions on covering the bereaved after the deaths of loved ones. He identified this as a problem only after the death of New Yorker John Kennedy Jr. It sent me over the edge. Out here in the real world the rest of us inhabit we deal with this on a regular, up-close-and-- personal basis, I wrote him. We actually live with the people we cover, grappling with coverage issues around funerals when police officers fall in the line of duty, when young drivers with more confidence than skill manage to kill themselves and others, even when sick children take guns into schools and open fire. It sounded to me as though Brill had never wandered into the world where folks go to Rotary Club meetings, attend raffles to raise money for community projects, and find social life revolving around youth soccer games.

I've always wondered what it must be like for the many top editors who have spent their entire lives working and living in New York City where doormen walk dogs and supers fix sinks and dinner is delivered in white cardboard boxes by men on bicycles and only the insane talk to the people they pass on the streets. Is it any wonder in their anthropological forays into the real world, New York journalists "discover" the quaint practices of the natives? Editing by Braille, I call it.

San Jose: '...trapped in a self-contained and self-reinforcing world-view'

BY JAY HARRIS, EDITOR, THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS

The major New York-based news organizations seem trapped in a self contained and self-reinforcing world-view that permeates the "Bos-NY-Wash" corridor and the various elites who live and work therein. It is the regional equivalent of "inside the Beltway" thinking that at times makes Washington-- based journalists, and the public figures and institutions they cover, seem out of touch with the rest of the nation.

That said, the concentration of major news organizations in New York is not a problem for the Mercury News. If anything, it constitutes a competitive advantage for us.

Our daily report is more relevant to our readers, more reflective of their priorities and perspectives, and therefore of greater utility to them.

Such differences in perspective lead us to approach some stories differently than our brethren in Manhattan both in the priority we give them and the approach we take.

A few examples may help make the point:

* We recognized the importance and potential impact of the Internet earlier than most news organizations. We committed heavily to the story of the emerging news medium for commerce and communication years before others did.

* Early on, thanks in part to feedback from our substantial Asian community and in part to the diversity of our newsroom staff and leadership, we took a more skeptical view of the government's allegations in the Wen Ho Lee case than some New York-based news organizations.

* In November, when a major Japanese firm agreed to pay a $4.6 million settlement to the relatives of Chinese who were forced to work under slave-like conditions during World War II, it was a front-page story for us. In the national edition of The New York Times the story appeared on Page A16.

In the same way, we have been more aggressive as a business - and as a news organization - in responding to the reality of the increasing diversity of our audience.

As long as we chart our course by our own compass, the perspective and priorities of New York-based media are no threat. Rather, they provide a useful point of comparison and valued supplement to our own endeavors.