As a career journalist, I used to always joke that news ink flowed through my veins. In this day of digital journalism, where everyone can get their news on their cell phones in a matter of minutes and read the headlines as they scroll along the bottom of their television screens, people often ask if there is any future in newspapers.
Having owned a newspaper and having witnessed the downsizing of newsrooms and the shuttering of newspapers over the years, I often wonder the same thing. Small towns are often left in the dark if their local news outlet chooses to become part of a larger chain or shuts its doors completely. When I was in Gallup, New Mexico not too long ago, I heard that many residents on the Navajo Reservation do not even have Internet access and they rely on the local newspaper to stay informed about local, national and international events.
Although I do get a portion of my news from a variety of apps on my phone, there is just something about holding a printed version of the newspaper in my hands that cannot be denied. The smell of the ink and the newsprint, the ink stains on my hands when I am done reading it and the overall feeling of holding it in my hand.
The very history of newspapers in this country goes back to its very foundation. Newspapers replaced the street-side news hawkers of the early republic. So, it is the very bedrock of our democracy.
So, I lament the demise of newspapers as I struggle to maintain my hold on what many consider a dying profession, especially in the days of what the president of the United States calls "Fake News." When, in reality, he actually makes up a lot of it as he goes along and often forgets what he said from one day to the next. When newspapers die, so does democracy, as Washington Post says on its masthead, "Democracy Dies In Darkness."
Overall, it has been a particularly rough start to the year for those who care about local journalism - and that should be every American citizen.
In January, Warren Buffett sold his 31 newspapers, which shows a powerful vote of no confidence in their financial future. A huge hedge fund with claws like a raptor dug its claws deeper into Chicago Tribune chain late last year, which includes New York Daily News and Baltimore Sun. Gannett and Gatehouse, the two largest newspaper chains in the country, continued to merge. That development is almost certain to mean more staff cutbacks in what are already small newsrooms, only a shadow of their former glory.
And then, more recently, came more devastating news. Weighed down under an enormous debt, McClatchy newspaper chain, one of the nation's largest newspaper publishers and owner of Miami Herald, among others, was filing for bankruptcy protection.
It is certainly no exaggeration to say that much of the American newspaper industry is in a death spiral and has been for years. One in five newspapers has shuttered since 2004. Newspaper employment is down by nearly half. Yet, local newspapers are relatively well-trusted and the vacuums created as they fade allows false information to spread through the rumor mill.
There are those who think that almost all newspaper companies, even in their print and digital form, are a lost cause. I, of course, am not among that number. Even now, I see local newspapers doing important work, not just crucial watchdog journalism, but cultural coverage that knits a community together.
But what, if anything, can be done?
American citizens and big thinkers need to buckle down - fast - about substantial policy changes that could involve both direct and indirect public funding for local journalism, which would, arguably, take us in a more European direction.
Nicholas Lemann, former dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, recently explored this very subject. Writing in a piece for New York Review of Books, he said that public-service journalism, no matter where or how it is produced, needs some type of outside support system or it will disappear. He argued that it will take a whole new set of arrangements and a new way of thinking to solve the crisis presently facing journalism.
Recent headlines make the point that the crisis is deepening daily. Journalism is more important than ever and there is no time to waste in saving it.
The decline in journalism has been named as the result of declining ad revenues as advertisers seek out social media platforms like Facebook or other forms of communication to get the word out about their businesses.
But, overall, how did we get here?
Some of it may be narrowed down to an overall mistrust of journalists. It is the alarm of our moment, and one gets the sense that the pitch of anti-press sentiment is now the most fevered it has been since the founding of the republic. In fact, presidents from George Washington on, including Thomas Jefferson (whose statue stands outside Columbia Journalism School in Missouri), judged newspapers to be full of lies. Editors did not have much regard for their own kind, sometimes challenging one another to duels. And there is a history of popular violence against the media, notably against abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War and against black journalists and institutions at various points thereafter - a matter not of distrust, but of hate and fear.
People tend to think of journalism in a more favorable light than, say, the White House or Congress, but as less trustworthy than medicine, education, the military, organized religion, or major corporations. In the 1970s, faith in all these institutions began to decline. That may have been a necessary corrective to a sense of complacency that had been creeping in - among the public and the news media - that allowed perhaps too much trust: we accepted President Eisenhower’s lies about the U-2 spy plane; President Kennedy’s lies about the “missile gap"; President Johnson’s lies about the war in Vietnam; and President Nixon’s lies about Watergate. It took the cultural revolution of the 1960s to bring down that overgenerous level of deference to America’s bastions of power.
As for “the media” specifically, before television network news established a settled place in America’s living rooms (in the mid-to-late 1960s) with its cautious, measured, oh-so-sober and soporific tone, there really was no such thing as “the media.” There were several large metro dailies in essentially all sizable United States cities, and they were known to have political commitments one way or another on the editorial page. But “the media” as a general term for what we now call “the mainstream media” was not in common use. Its full entrance into the American vocabulary was strategically promoted by the Nixon White House. To refer to journalists as “the press” ceded them an emotional upper hand, an aura of rectitude and First Amendment privilege. That advantage - unacceptable to Nixon, whose aides sensed that reporters held a bias against him - could be removed by calling journalists “the media.”
Even if we can agree that trust in government and trust in the media were too high before Nixon, it might still be that trust today has sunk too low. Has a healthy skepticism become a civically disabling cynicism? That is what Donald Trump feeds on: engendering such distrust in the media that around 40 percent of Americans seem to accept almost everything he says, even in the face of incontrovertible reporting to the contrary, as a kind of thumb in the eye of the so-called coastal elites.
The problem here transcends the Trump presidency: the old days of ritually objective news reporting (he said/she said) are not gone but have been reduced in importance from the 1970s on, as mainstream outlets have increasingly emphasized analysis in news coverage - not quite so much “who, what, when, where” as “why.” There has been a profound cultural shift in journalism during this period. The limitations of straitjacketed objectivity came to be understood and journalism began to embrace the necessity of interpretation, as both quantitative studies and journalists’ recollections attest. In the face of the severe economic problems afflicting daily newspapers, leading metro dailies have continued, whenever possible, to pursue aggressive, analytical journalism. This places great responsibility on readers to discern for themselves the difference between what can be trusted as factual and what represents the reporter’s judgment - a judgment that, however conscientious, goes beyond documented facts.
News organizations should have to explain themselves - to communicate the difference between the news department and the editorial page (more than a quarter of Americans do not understand the distinction); to show how they gather their news; to clarify why they sometimes cannot divulge their sources; to explain why it matters that nearly all scientific authorities believe that the most important element in global warming is what humans contribute to it.
It may also be time for journalists to acknowledge that they write from a set of values, not simply from a disinterested effort at truth. This will not be easy, since journalists have spent decades denying that their personal values have anything to do with their news reporting. And yet, most do adhere - quite passionately - to professional values, just as doctors take seriously the Hippocratic oath. Journalists in the mainstream media almost all feel strongly that (1) they should seek truth; (2) they should hold government publicly accountable; and (3) government officials - elected and appointed - are public servants and should not be in government to line their own pockets. My guess is that those values would resonate with readers, if only they were articulated.
Perhaps it is not surprising to learn that journalism’s self-defined mission of “holding government accountable” is hurting trust. In the past 40 years, “accountability journalism” has come to assert itself as a defining feature of mainstream newsrooms. The news is much less deferential than it once was to institutions and people in power. That may be good, but it also means that a lot of people are going to distrust the media, particularly when their favorite politicians or the parties they identify with are critically appraised or openly confronted by journalistic investigation, information, or opinion. What people do not like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes. It is just more comforting and - let us face it - more human to blame the messenger than to take critical reports seriously.
“The media” is more responsible, more accurate, more informed by sophisticated analysis (rather than partisan reflex) than it has ever been before. But, political opinion has grown more polarized. And that is reinforced by the press: as the once-reliable business model of news gathering disintegrates, polarized politics becomes, sadly, a delicious topic upon which highly competitive outlets report.
Can journalism curb its passion for play-by-play news? I do not see that happening; on the contrary, matters only get worse with the 24-hour news cycle. Can journalism break its commitment to holding politicians accountable and treating them with skepticism? I hope not, even if that might increase trust. What we really need to keep newspapers alive in the future is responsible, accountability-centered journalism.
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