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The American Press on Suicide Watch
IF you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That's when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq). To prove the point, the partying journalists in the Washington Hilton ballroom could be seen (courtesy of C-Span) fawning over government potentates - in some cases the very "sources" who had fed all those fictional sightings of Saddam Hussein's W.M.D.
Colbert's routine did not kill. The Washington Post reported that it "fell flat." The Times initially did not even mention it. But to the Beltway's bafflement, Colbert's riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.
The bad news about the news business has accelerated ever since. Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn't make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it's bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on "The Future of Journalism."
Not all is bleak on the Titanic, however. The White House correspondents' bacchanal was on tap for this weekend. And this time no one could accuse the revelers of failing to get down with the Colbert-iTunes-Facebook young folk: hip big-time journalists now stroke their fans with 140-character messages on Twitter. Or did. No sooner did boldface Washington media personalities ostentatiously embrace Twitter than Nielsen reported that more than 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a single month.
The causes of journalism's downfall - some self-inflicted, some beyond anyone's control (a worldwide economic meltdown) - are well known. To time-travel back to the dawn of the technological strand of the disaster, search YouTube for "1981 primitive Internet report on KRON." What you'll find is a 28-year-old local television news piece from San Francisco about a "far-fetched," pre-Web experiment by the city's two papers, The Chronicle and The Examiner, to distribute their wares to readers with home computers via primitive phone modems. Though there were at most 3,000 people in the Bay Area with PCs then, some 500 mailed in coupons for the service to The Chronicle alone. But, as the anchorwoman assures us at the end, with a two-hour download time (at $5 an hour), "the new telepaper won't be much competition for the 20-cent street edition."
The rest is irreversible history. This far-fetched newspaper experiment soon faded, even in San Francisco, the gateway to Silicon Valley. Today The Examiner, once the flagship of William Randolph Hearst's grand journalistic empire, exists in name only, as a flimsy giveaway. The Chronicle is under threat of closure.
But this self-destructive retreat from innovation is hardly novel in the history of American communications. In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet - television's emergence in the late 1940s - the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as "the monster," and by 1951, the editor of the industry's trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would "eventually swallow up practically all of show business." Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: "NBC's New ‘Today' Attacked by Papers as Competition" screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.
The vulnerable establishments in all these fields went nuts. Most movie studios pushed back against the future by refusing to sell their old movies to television or allow their stars to appear on it. Few seized the opportunity to produce programs for the new medium. Instead, some moguls tried to compete by exhibiting sports events by closed-circuit in networks of movie houses. In 1952-53, Cinerama, 3-D and Cinemascope were all heavily promoted to try to retain movie audiences. None of these desperate rear-guard actions could slow the video revolution. Movie newsreels, movie palaces, radio comedy and drama, and afternoon newspapers, among other staples of the American cultural diet, were all doomed.
And yet in 2009, Hollywood movie studios, radio and the Broadway theater, though smaller and much changed, are not dead. They learned to adapt and to collaborate with the monster.
In the Internet era, many sectors of American media have been re-enacting their at first complacent and finally panicked behavior of 60 years ago. Few in the entertainment business saw the digital cancer spreading through their old business models until well after file-sharing, via Napster, had started decimating the music industry. It's not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it's only journalism that's essential to a functioning democracy. And it's not just because - as we keep being tediously reminded - Thomas Jefferson said so.
Yes, journalists have made tons of mistakes and always will. But without their enterprise, to take a few representative recent examples, we would not have known about the wretched conditions for our veterans at Walter Reed, the government's warrantless wiretapping, the scams at Enron or steroids in baseball.
Such news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating - including that practiced here. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise, some of them gems, even as we might be moved to write our own blogs about local restaurants or the government documents we obsessively study online.
But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it - monitoring the local school board, say - can and is being done by voluntary "citizen journalists" with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can't have serious opinions about America's role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can't know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can't yet imagine.
It's immaterial whether we find the fruits of their labors on paper, a laptop screen, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or podcast. But someone - and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests - must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won't.
One of the freshest commentators on Internet culture, Clay Shirky, has written, correctly, that nobody really knows what form journalism will take in the evolving post-newspaper era. Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg's invention of movable type, he writes, "We're collectively living through 1500, when it's easier to see what's broken than what will replace it." So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? "Whatever works." Every experiment must be tried, professional and amateur, whether by institutions like The Times or "some 19-year-old kid few of us have heard of."
What can't be reinvented is the wheel of commerce. Just because information wants to be free on the Internet doesn't mean it can always be free. Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering. If a public that thinks nothing of spending money on texting or pornography doesn't foot the bill for such reportage, it won't happen.
That's why the debate among journalists about possible forms of payment (subscriptions, NPR-style donations, iTunes-style micropayments, foundation grants) is inside baseball. So is the acrimonious sniping between old media and new. The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?
It's all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.
By all means let's mock the old mainstream media as they preen and party on in a Washington ballroom. Let's deplore the tabloid journalism that, like the cockroach, will always be with us. But if a comprehensive array of real news is to be part of the picture as well, the time will soon arrive for us to put up or shut up. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.
35 Comments so far
Show Allmaybe the death of the "traditional" media is related to the fact that about 90% of what e.g. the NYTimes publishes is totally irrelevant to about 90% of the population? even on important issues, most of it is junk.
the vampire capitalism is about to drive a stake thru the heart of its day-time familiar, the traditional MSM, and that MSM is not going to do anything to stop it.
(and thanks, frank rich, for pointing out the big loan carlos slim just gave the NYTimes to keep it running. "we rich people can't have our most respected propaganda outlet go bankrupt, can we?")
does anyone know whether other countries (britain, etc.) are having similar problems? if americans are forced to look to india, france, and chile for some decent reporting, that might not be a bad thing....
yeah, and let's keep paying someone to tell us that paying for news is the best thing. the bbc/pbs model is far from perfect, but there is something to the idea of news not driven by simple profit. (cockburn at counterpunch had a great article a while back about "the news hour" on pbs, how it got ramped up right after watergate w/the purpose of "castrating the news." make it as dull as humanly possible. some of that touches a lot of the MSM, too. maybe one of the reasons Fox & Friends are popular. at least they appear passionate and court controversy (mostly false controversy, but still, the point is some Drama)).
no tears for you, f. RICH
Mainstream media is staggering toward the cemetery because corporate sponsorship of news is so often incompatible with the process of revealing the truth, and people know it. It is sometimes difficult for the average person to find exposure to the real story but usually it's not from a lack of information. It's from so much competing propaganda from mainstream media outlets being thrown up as dust to hide the complicity of their masters.
are "most" americans aware of the corporate sponsorship of the news? i'm not sure it dawns on most readers of, e.g., WaPo, that the page before the two pages of op-ed is a full-page ad for Lockheed Martin. do they notice all the commercials while watching olbermann or hannity? i don't think so.
Maybe what it's coming down to is more, shall we say 'open source' journalism... and maybe a new version of dropping out and turning on that doesn't involve drugs (in fact prefers wide awake clarity and is vigilant to avoid addiction) but does involve rejecting the box that mainstream media thinks and works and makes its money in).... the rot at the core is becoming pretty dang pungent. The planet itself cannot be privatized except in the MINDS of the privatizers (and those who wittingly or unwittingly go along with their agenda).... This delusion can be gone along with or refuted for the fallacy it is. It isn't and won't be easy, considering the momentum of the corporatized Frankenstein monsters we've allowed to be or actively created. Of course the privatizers assume they will enjoy permanent rule with their iron economic and militarist fist, and we all partake to varying degrees in 'their' delusions, but even some of the most entrenched must be growing disenchanted and eventually see the hell-on-earth being created via the 'wisdom of the marketplace' and be suffocating from always towing the 'ownership society' line. Happiness can be equated with self-aggrandizement only so long before one has to grow up or else regress to infantilism. I figure it's all coming to a head and we as a species are going to wake up -or not- to just basic willingness to tell/hear the truth and put our 'think tanks' to work figuring out creative ways to live peaceably and respectfully on this beautiful planet as an alternative to attempting to own/mine/control it.
You are giving JOURNALISTS credit for reporting steroids in baseball?
Freaking utterly hilarious. For years, decades even, journalists ignored and / or otherwise badly misreported the use of banned performance enhancing substances in not just baseball, but ESPECIALLY in FOOTBALL. As it is, there is still an omerta among mainstream journalist about talking about the use of banned performance substances in FOOTBALL. The NFL claims that it is clean and pure. And the journalists all blindly and willfully go along. Please.
In fact, the linked article to the Balco reportage is an example of just how wrong the reportage of steroids in baseball is, and still is. The mainstream press for a long time tried, and still continues to try, to lay the blame, on those athletes that the reporters have a grudge against. Barry Lamar Bonds being the prime example. He was vilified by the MSM, portrayed as an evil villain, likened to Adolph Hitler, because the press hated him, and because he broke the "sacred" home run record. In truth, as more and more players are revealed to have tested positive, Bonds was really no more "evil" than most other baseball players.
The MSM continues to want to play a game of heroes and villains when it comes to steroids in baseball, despite ever mounting evidence that use of steroid was / is endemic in American pro sports. Furthermore, use of banned performance enhancing substances, such as amphetamines, "greenies / speed", has been endemic in American pro sports for a long time.
"Just because information wants to be free on the Internet doesn't mean it can always be free"
All information wants to be free. Anywhere. Always. You cannot control distribution of information the way you can control the distribution of shirts or shoes. Someone who buys one shirt, has only one shirt. If he gives it away or sells it, he no longer has it. Information does not work that way. Traditionally, the distribution of information has been controlled by the media on which the information was, whether print, or radio, or tv. Buy one book, and you have only one book. Give the book away, and you no longer have it. Most people lack the resources to be able to broadcast radio or tv programs. Etc. Digital media, and the ease with which digital media is produced and distributed has changed that.
Nonetheless, my nitpicking aside, an OK article, if for nothing more than the willingness to look in the mirror and accept fault, and the lack of the kind of whining, and demand for subsidies, that are so common among articles of this type. Though Colbert's excoriation of the MSM was too glossed over, and the "lack of innovation" too heavily emphasised.
As long as most media are owned by large corporations, we will get what those corporations want printed or aired. That's why so many of us stopped buying newspapers. I can't trust that a story about Chevron is going to be balanced when a full page add for Chevron is on the opposite page. The Examiner is now a free rag that is instantly tossed into the blue recycle bins that are ubiquitous on trash collection day. The Examiner is nothing but a collection of advertising with a few news stories littered throughout the pages. I dropped the Chronicle when they booted the liberal commentary of Stephine Salter. Which seems so odd considering how liberal San Francisco is seen through the eyes of the media. The bottom line IS the bottom line. It isn't what's the truth or what's important, it's for sales or ratings and that's based on the populace of which, seriously, the US population ain't too bright. Other countries double over in laughter when they see us put someone like Sarah Palin on the VP ticket.
Freedom of the Press, freedom of speech, those are just catch lines that really mean the freedom to make money anyway possible. How else to explain a billion dollar industry based on herbal remedies that don't work or that pornography is an art form? I'm sure the founding fathers never intended for these rights to be used so that Nike could argue that freedom of speech means it's okay to lie about conditions in the sweatshops (seriously, that was their defense). Unfortunately, I believe most people don't want the real news because it's not always good. Like our current economic situation. The media is already talking about a recovery but when you crunch the numbers, there isn't going to be a recovery for at LEAST six years. But the public doesn't want to hear that, and won't be inclined to pay for the privilege to read the bad news (just do a trend of unemployment filings which is still in a virtual nosedive).
As long as newspapers have to consider what they print against the ads they carry, their writing will be compromised. How many books and movies are there about just these kinds of events?
Added to the "owned by Corporations" should be "Infiltrated by the CIA".
"...Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard..."
Which now is as full of advertising, and as run for the advertisers, as free broadcast TV - which with digital can now offer as many channels a cable from the existing 4 or 5 transmitters most small to medium US cities already have.
I'll never pay for cable - it is a scam.
And while suggesting that USAns need to be willing to "pay up" for advertiser-free news media, It fails to mention the best example of how this could be done - A British style national fee of TV's, radios and internet connections.
You'll never pay for cable, because it is a scam. Yet you believe that a government funded, via forced taxpayer subsidies, and subject to the government, broadcaster is the best idea? Seriously? Hint, it isn't the BBC that has reported on, that has broken the news on, the whole host of issues afflicting the UK government, on the corruption in parliament, the Ian Tomlinson case, etc.
Me personally, I have no problem directly paying the writers I want to support, be they Amy Goodman, Glenn Greenwald, or whomever.
@rfloh: Couldn't agree more. What just two "bloggers", Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald produce on a daily basis is worth more to me than the combined daily output of the entire MSM. I am quite happy to pay them for providing a service which has become scandalously rare in this country: speaking truth to power.
And therefore, they should be publicly funded through a dedicated tax. No different than the regional assets sales tax that supports every kind of cultural activity in my city.
Why? Pay yourself, directly, for the writers you want to support. Why is that such an unacceptable concept? You want to read a Greenwald article, you pay him directly.
Why do you believe that writers like Goodman or Greenwald would be funded via a publicly funded system? A publicly funded system is going to end up funding mainstream writers. Mainstream writers who generally don't rock the boat, with the kind of neo liberal bias that you say that the BBC's directors have.
Writers who are paid directly by their readers are only responsible to their readers. Not some directors or funding program manager looking over their shoulders. Why do you want to see money diverted to other sources, other than the writers producing the work themselves? Shouldn't leftists and progressives want to support the workers, ie the writers? Why add multiple layers of management?
The funding is from a dedicated excise tax going directly to the media, so government cannot interfere with how it is allocated in any way.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "forced". The Federal highway excise tax on gasoline is "forced" too, as is Medicare, social security, and any future tax on National Healthcare. All taxes are "forced". This is not a "Reason Magazine" forum. If you are going to fall for the Reagan/Ayn Rand idea that "government is the problem" then you have completely conceded to the argument of the Corporate Right.
Like the US federal excise tax on gasoline, which goes directly to highway funding and nowhere else, the dedicated BBC funding is free from political manipulation.
While the BBC may be affected by broader neoliberal cultural pressures from it's well-off yuppie directors, it is immune to government as well as corporate pressure to a degree that impossible to conceive in the US advertiser-paid media. It still regularly produces news programming that one would never, ever see in the US corporate news media, like the series "The Power of Nightmares" and an earlier one (forgot the name) on Bernays, Lippman, and the rise of the psychology based PR industry.
By, "forced", I mean people in the UK often end up paying the TV tax even if they do NOT have a TV. People are taxed the TV tax, "just in case" at some point later on, you do buy one.
And please stop bringing the Rand strawman into this. One can be suspicious of concentration of power in any body, whether it be government, corporations, etc, yet still at the same time not be a Randian "there is no such thing as society", "death to all government" lunatic.
"Like the US federal excise tax on gasoline, which goes directly to highway funding and nowhere else, the dedicated BBC funding is free from political manipulation."
No it isn't. You are deluding yourself if you believe that the BBC is not subject to governmental pressures. Who do you think comes up with the rules governing the behaviour of the BBC?
"While the BBC may be affected by broader neoliberal cultural pressures from it's well-off yuppie directors, it is immune to government as well as corporate pressure to a degree that impossible to conceive in the US advertiser-paid media. It still regularly produces news programming that one would never, ever see in the US corporate news media, like the series "The Power of Nightmares" and an earlier one (forgot the name) on Bernays, Lippman, and the rise of the psychology based PR industry."
I'm not saying that the BBC is useless. It has its uses. Critiquing the government, holding up an unflinching mirror to society, even if society hates what the mirror is showing, is generally not one of those uses. The BBC has been a day late and a dollar short and many of the issues relating to the use of power of the UK government. Issues that have been reported by both the left and right wing press, by liberals, progressives, conservatives, by normal citizens carrying videocameras, by normal citizens writing on blogs, etc.
I'm disagreeing with your belief that a government funded public broadcaster is a great solution.
Matangicita, mentions Open Source, as in Indy-Media or Wikipedia.
All the media outlet needs to know is, is this source reliable.
Why not use news sources who are actually in the middle of the news story?
Their credibility will be proven by time so the outlet is off the hook is it's sources fabricate something. Heaven forbid like they aren't fabricating NOW!
What they need to do is stand up for the truth.
If they want the advantage than hire professionals like Robert Fisk and pay them well, instead of the will paid flunkies that repeat propaganda.
If there are zombie banks, there are also zombie media. The MSM blew its brains out more than three decades ago when they put the double barreled Reagan shotgun in their mouths and gleefully pulled the trigger. They then rose, headless, from the dead and started feeding on the truth, sucking it up through the bloody, shredded stump of their neck . . . and have ever since. If there is any group of people who deserve to accompany George Wanker Bush and Cheesedick Cheney to the inner sanctums of Hell, it's the MSM!
The economy must be one factor on why newspapers aren't making it anymore.
Who wants to spend a dollar for a daily paper? Or much more to subscribe and then have a GIANT stack of newsprint- mostly advertising- to have to recycle every month?
For me, besides not trusting the content- it's also the dang ads.
I've given up on the daily papers- I subscribe to alt journals, read the articles I want online and go to the library- another essential democratic institution that is horribly underfunded.
You can see the trend here- complete and utter corporate control of what we read and what we know. Or at least a desperate attempt at it!
Bravo. I live in San Francisco. Herb Caen and Art Hoppe must be spinning in their graves as the SF Chronicle dies too. I would pay a dollar or more to have truth in print as I commute on the busses. The daily paper is fluff. The Sunday paper used to be a 1/2 day education. The paper is mostly junk.
As the best investigative reporters lose their jobs I willingly subscribe to online sites (Glenn Greenwald, Counterpunch, this site, Free Press, Democracy Now! and Pacifica radio). Although the internet seems free, it is not. The next media fight is already here - net neutrality. Pay workers (reporters), not AT&T, etc.
You make an excellent point here, Penelope May 10th, 2009 1:28 pm, as to the declining readership of daily newspapers.
I haven't subscribed to, or regularly read, a daily newspaper in years, but many months ago I got a free copy of the Chicago Sun-Times. Decades ago, the Sun-Times was a 'liberal/labor/progressive' paper that counter-balanced the conservative- Republican Chicago Tribune, until Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1984 and turned it into a seedy right-wing rag like his New York Post. Rupert then dumped it off to the crooked Conrad Black, and it's been through several owners since.
Reading through my free copy, I did a rough count on the front section of the paper, the 'news' section. About two-thirds of the news pages were filled with ads and, of the one-third supposedly devoted to the news, at least half was rewritten wire service copy, some of it of the empty-headed "Octomom Answers Critics" variety. There was one decent local investigative piece that stopped short of calling for the removal of some local pols from office, and another report from Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet, who seems to hunt for reasons to lavish praise on Bush Republicans.
Meanwhile, stuck in the middle of the paper was a section on 'Style' as large as the news section, and another on entertainment. The 'Style' part mainly featured 'inexpensive' yuppie digs in downtown Chicago that can be had for a song -- if your musical score includes $200K to $500K for a condo or converted loft. There was something laudatory about the House of Blues and Trump Towers, both locations the average working stiff can easily afford. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Then there was a piece about having your own stone and rock garden in your city apartment's backyard. Wonderful, if you can afford $10 to $20K for stone statues and wrought-iron sculptures.
Except for a decent film review by Roger Ebert, the entertainment section could have been written by a press agent.
This is what happens when you turn a good newspaper with a loyal readership and a point of view over to accountants and investors -- it turns into an execrable yuppie fish-wrapper, apparently designed to appeal solely to the well-heeled members of the board of directors and their spouses who can afford all of this upscale crap they dote on. Did it ever occur to these people that readers buy newspapers for the news? It seems not.
The problem is even mistated - it isn't that most major newspapers in the US are losing money -- with the notable exception, I'm happy to say, of Murdoch's aforementioned NY Post, which has never turned a profit under his ownership -- it's that they are making less profit than they used to. So is everyone else these days, so I'd just stop whining.
BTW, the Chicago Sun-Times filed for bankruptcy protection March 31, 2009, following the lead of the Chicago Tribune, which has also been bankrupted under the ownership of non-newspaperman, but staunch corporate conservative, Sam Zell.
Funny story: Zell actually used the employee pension fund of the Trib workers without their permission to purchase the vast Tribune media conglomerate. Zell only put up about $300 million of his own money on a $13 billion debt. Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NY Times wrote:
"Mr. Zell financed much of his deal’s $13 billion of debt by borrowing against part of the future of his employees’ pension plan and taking a huge tax advantage." [...]
"Mr. Zell isn’t the only one responsible for this debacle. With one of the grand old names of American journalism now confronting an uncertain future, it is worth remembering all the people who mismanaged the company before hand and helped orchestrate this ill-fated deal — and made a lot of money in the process. They include members of the Tribune board, the company’s management and the bankers who walked away with millions of dollars for financing and advising on a transaction that many of them knew, or should have known, could end in ruin."
(Read "How Sam Zell and Tribune Management Screwed Employees": http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/how-sam-zell-and-tribune-management-screwed-employees )
Wonder how this is even legal? Join the club.
And now that the Trib is bankrupt, Zell is first in line to be paid back while the employees and their pensions can go hang.
An object lesson of what's happened to the news business, why newspapers are 'dying off,' and the workings of the modern corporate kleptocracy.
The Hutchins Commission of 1946 warned against increasing concentration of newspaper ownership.
In 1947, media critic A.J. Liebling said “anybody who talks often with the people about newspapers nowadays must be impressed by the growing distrust of the information they contain.” “I cannot believe that labor leaders are so stupid they will let the other side monopolize the press indefinitely.”
Former New York Times book reviewer John Leonard once said that journalists now “have more in common with Henry Kravis and Henry Kissinger than they do with papermakers and deliverymen, or those ABC technicians who were so alone, on strike, on Columbus Avenue.” What happened to labor reporting in the eighties and nineties? Journalists, who once thought of themselves as blue collar workers, now thought of themselves as professionals and closer to management. Read James Fallows's Breaking News, which is about the changing class interests of journalists and their consequently skewed perspectives.
Former CBS Evening News producer Richard Cohen wrote in 1997, “The dumbing down, the demise of news is all about the hunger for advertising revenues and that plays out in the newsroom. The real crisis in television news today is about corporate control and the emerging corporate culture.”
How did our nation get into this current mess without anyone hardly saying a word about what was truly going on? How is it possible that so little attention was paid to such drastic changes? How could such revolutionary changes have taken place with so little public discussion?
What killed organized labor, also killed journalism.
Frank (whose writing I have always admired) writes:
But we can't have serious opinions about America's role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there.
Please Frank. By now you should know that a fully-expenses-paid reporter from CNN sitting in a room in the Green Zone, or embedded with a unit of American killers somewhere in Afghanistan, is the last person from whom we expect to learn "what is actually going on there".
All around the world, ordinary people are starting to catch on that the best way to know "what is actually going on there" is to take cameras and camcorders and capture the truth themselves.
When the British police wont tell the truth about murdering a member of the public (Ian Tomlinson) in broad daylight, and the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commission lies to protect the police it is supposed to be monitoring, it is the ordinary members of the public armed with camcorders who expose the truth, not "brave and knowledgeable correspondents".
When the American military lies about the slaughter of women and children (i.e. everytime it opens it's mouth), we turn to amateur photographers and the victims themselves to tell us the truth.
I wont shed a tear for the demise of the entire MSM. Surely it is inconceivable that whatever takes its place could be as mendacious and self-serving.
What about Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan? That fits in with his description of "unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there."
I subscribe to Brave New Foundation's email list, and received plenty of emails asking for donations to fund his visit to Afghanistan, to pay for local camera crew and set up interviews, transcripts, researchers, etc., and mentioned the security concerns about the trip. This is the kind of journalism we need and that we need to support, not "embedded journalists" (captive propagandists).
http://rethinkafghanistan.com/
This is the kind of journalism that I would be glad to pay for. Thank you for the link.
AS Terence McKenna says " media is darkness moving at the speed of light"! good riddance.
People do not want to know that they are slaves so they avoid the truth/news/facts.
the writer is caught in the old paradigm. step out of it and you see that the truly useful functions of journalism are already appearing in new forms via new kinds of communication between people, including between 'insiders' and the rest of us. wikipedia is an example of this. whatever the 'professionals' say about it, it is overall an extremely useful forum within which people inform one another.
History often moves forward due to a set of unforeseen circumstances at the proper time for change. For death of newspapers, this has occurred. Several factors came together at once: the popularization of the Internet as a media source, American journalism becoming a semi-official propaganda arm of Dubya, Cheney, & Co., incompetent corporate bosses (like their fore-bearers mentioned in Rich's piece) who did not recognize the impact of new technologies, & an ever savvy audience who's rabidness for alternatives to the corporate media that increases with Internet penetration.
It is well past due that news outlets adopt what The Progressive magazine does: offer online only subscriptions, and let the marketplace decide.
Frank Rich wrote:
"conditions for our veterans at Walter Reed, the government's warrantless wiretapping, the scams at Enron or steroids in baseball."
______________________________________________________________________________
The NYTimes sat on the warrantless wiretapping for more than a year before
reporting it??!! They reported on Enron scandal after the fact.
Steroid in baseball and Walter Reed, well that is not critical news like
Judith Miller acting as mouth-piece and steneographer for the white house
to pave the way for the attack on Iraq.
No serious reporting about the current economic crisis until the shit hit the
fan and till now nothing written on who is responsible and demanding accountability.
All in all, the record of journalists in last 30 years is disgraceful and if
the newspapers go under, they would'nt be missed.
I buy my city paper just for the local news and events and depend on off the
main stream internet web-sites(like common dreams, counter punch ...) for serious news and analysis.
Mr. Rich. I see you got this printed in The Times. I hope you can make something of the old gargoyle yet.
I love newspapers. I love the look and feel, and I appreciate that investigative reporting requires an investment.
I just find it so hard and so unreliable to filter through the things that get published to please some advertiser or get gutted for some source or for the owners' self-interest or ideology. I do not feel that you-all failed some previously sterling standard; I never did like the pretense of objectivity in the depths of prejudice has been the center of the writing that's called "news." But these days I can flick a couple keys and get something that's engaged, for better or worse, something from someone who is little beholden.
The Net has a lot of tripe, but if one can used to advanced searches in a couple search engines, one seldom need bother.
I buy information, including news, and I donate to public media. I would gladly pay a subscription service that I might find reliable. I am looking. But I will not pay commercial media for whitewash when media operating on a fraction of their budget consistently produce better information. I will not pay subscription rates to someone who edits news to government or corporate standards. Those folks can pay for their own ads and read them themselves, for all I care.
Newspaper management has to learn that obscuring point of view behind passive verbs does not increase objectivity, that eschewing speculative language does not help one guess correctly, and that elite consensus has little to do with reasonable informed opinion or public opinion.
Best of luck to you and The Times. Keep swinging.
If you think American "professional" journalists are any better than bloggers, why is American "news" so pro-Israel, and why are more and more news stories being broken by independent (not corporate) media and picked up three days later in "professional" newspapers?
Frank Rich unironically cites things that were obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense -- namely, that financial statements by the wonder-companies like Enron were as juiced as the suddenly-able-to-smack-65-plus homeruns players were. It was only necessary to look at the Bush smirk to know that his denial that he'd approved illegal wiretapping meant that it was going on -- and of course Rich's employer sat on the story at the bequest of the criminals in the White House.
Isn't it common knowledge that newspaper journalists write for readers at a 9th grade education level? So it follows that they print lies easily recognized by a 10th grade drop out. Just as certain that perents can tell when their children lie, so too the children know when they are being lied to. Then there is the hypocracy of of First Ammendment protections for a free and open press while the Corporate Media spikes stories of Fourth Ammendment eviscerations ala BushCo crime family; sneering derision of an accused who exercises his or her Fifth Ammendment rights; and the abject hatred by Corporate media of the Second Ammendment. Such that an industry enshrined to be vigilant as protectors of freedoms willfully whores itself to agendas counter to freedoms. Then Corporate media denigrates us into a category of consumer rather than Citizen so that it can sell rather than inform. A trust has not been broken it has been obliterated.
Suicide watch? Too vague a metaphor. Try whore with self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head while passers-by write their own captions of 'Do not resuscitate' and no organs worth transplanting.
Oh yeah, I refuse to buy anything advertized. Especially those god-damned adult diapers the media seems so anxious to scare me into wearing.
All I want Frankie, is the truth. All I get from the Times is BULL. I am not going to give you a dime. If you get as poor as I then maybe, just maybe, you will see that the truth of the street and maybe it will rub off on the manipulators who write for the Times.
"You want the truth? You can't handle the truth."
michael jordan
http://sites.google.com/site/apolloguide/