The Media: Degrees of Coverage

Gene I. Maeroff

Professors who study news coverage are fond of content analysis. One approach calls for measuring articles by column inches. Or, in the case of broadcast journalism, counting the number of minutes devoted to a particular topic. This is a crude form of analysis, but it bears some connection to the real world. A comparison of the coverage of higher education and K–12 education, for example, would almost certainly conclude that the space and time that the media devote to colleges and universities pales by comparison with that lavished on elementary and secondary schools. This is so for five reasons.

1. More Americans have an active link to K–12 schools than to higher education and, presumably, have more interest in K–12.

2. Taxpayers plow much more money into elementary and secondary schools, and have soaring property tax bills to show for it.

3. The news media perceive the issues in K–12 as more compelling — and therefore more worthy of coverage.

4. The media fail to see higher education as a landscape rich in story ideas and instead tend to focus on a few predictable subjects, giving far less attention to issues of teaching and learning.

5. This is the way it has always been, and the status quo counts for a great deal in journalism.

These truths add up to a situation in which higher education, surely among society's most valued public goods, escapes scrutiny by the media, one of the few forces with the authority to question the quality of a college or university education. Given higher education's social and economic importance to individuals and to the nation, one hopes that journalism will begin to take its responsibility as an agent for accountability more seriously. Yet the reasons why this has not happened are abundantly clear.

When it comes to the size of the enterprise, it is not surprising that journalists deem precollegiate education worthy of more coverage than higher education. After all, the number of students (53.8 million vs. 15.9 million), institutions (100,000 vs. 3,500), and teachers (3.5 million vs. 1.9 million) in elementary and secondary classrooms dwarfs colleges and universities. Such factors help determine news coverage — the size of the potential audience in terms of those affected and those interested in a subject. News organizations simply do not think that colleges and universities warrant the degree of coverage given to elementary and secondary schools.

As for expenditures, the best advice comes from the film character Jerry Maguire: Follow the dollars. If you ran along the money trail, you would see that precollegiate education is a monstrous $500 billion-a-year enterprise. That is the major part of state and local government expenditures. In most locales, the largest portion of property tax supports K–12 education.

How do schools spend this money? Do they adhere to high standards? What do the taxpayers get for their investment? The pursuit of answers to such questions drives the coverage of elementary and secondary education. Journalists quickly conjure up a plethora of possible articles fraught with the tension and conflict so attractive to the media: Why don't students score higher on tests? Why don't teachers do a better job? Why are members of school boards always squabbling? Why aren't reading, math, and almost every other subject taught better?

Journalists could ask similar questions about higher education, but they usually do not. They act as if it were an article of faith that America's higher education is the best in the world — almost beyond criticism — while considering precollegiate education seriously flawed and, therefore, ripe for scrutiny. The image of a supposedly high-quality system of higher education, operating with the precision of a fine engine, seems to awe journalists. Like most Americans, journalists do not see past the ivy.

Higher education's weaknesses and shortcomings remain largely out of sight to reporters, many of whom are quick to seize on almost any foible at the elementary and secondary level. In other words, higher education is Teflon-coated, remarkably immune to criticism. It is easier to assume that when students do not succeed at colleges and universities, it is because high schools have not prepared them properly, not due to any deficiency on the part of institutions of higher education. Charles B. Reed of California State University and Edward B. Rust of the Business Higher Education Forum think that institutions of higher education can make themselves more accountable by defining their goals and providing evidence that they have met them. Surely such steps would lead to more transparency in judging quality.

The implementation of the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act, however flawed it may be, forced journalists who cover elementary and secondary schools to delve into achievement as never before. Higher education has no analog to that law, though the renewal of the Higher Education Act could contain language that may compel colleges and universities to divulge a great deal more information than they do now about various performance indicators.

Journalists have shied away from using their power to examine how well institutions of higher education discharge the responsibility of educating their students, particularly undergraduates. Instead, similar stories, repeated over and over, dominate the coverage. Not counting college athletics, which is in a class by itself, the big two are tuition and admissions.

The news media convey the impression that nearly every college costs a potentate's fortune and that most institutions are so selective that only super-students need apply. "Reporters...