Press Gangs

DECIDING WHAT'S NEWS by Herbert J. Cans Pantheon; 393 pages; $12.95

For more than a decade, Columbia University Sociologist Herbert J. Gans spent his spare hours watching journalists go about their jobs at CBS, NBC, TIME and Newsweek. The result, Deciding What's News, is too plodding to knock David Halberstam's gossipy competitor off the bestseller charts. But Gans does offer some shrewd observations about life on the other side of the headlines, and some provocative notions about how it should be changed.

Gans found his journalists to be predominantly upper middle class in origin and outlook, overworked, deskbound, interested more in pleasing their peers than their audiences; and determined to keep their reports free of bias. Gans did, however, see them subconsciously defer to a set of "enduring values": democracy, responsible capitalism, individualism, moderation. He concludes that the press pays too much attention to the nation's Government and corporate ruling elites, and too little to the poor and powerless. As one remedy, he proposes a national Endowment for News to ladle out Government money to improve coverage of ordinary folk, and even to buy TV sets and newspaper subscriptions for poor people. That scheme is so wildly impractical, so ripe for abuse that it would probably get the sociologist laughed out of every writers' saloon in the nation. A pity. Gans has done a lot of thinking about an important group of professionals who, in his view, are too harassed by deadlines and other burdens of the trade to think as much as they might like.

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