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No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Journalistic solipsism requires that outside phenomena be treated with clinical detachment but those within the industry be screamed with lights and sirens. For instance, enormous nationwide job losses are dispassionately reported but high double digit layoffs in a newsroom are greeted with bold, caps, updates and overheated rhetoric. It also explains the myopia over what troubles the industry. We are in a recession, so it seems obvious that newspapers would be in the doldrums too. Yet the internet is the focus of their ire. Why? Nothing is on the scene now that wasn’t around five years ago. If the economy tanks then looking at your online operations should be part of weathering the storm, but why make it the primary focus?
In typically self-centered fashion news organizations only focused on the web’s "information wants to be free" ethos and expanded competition now that they are feeling its effects. It is nothing that travel agents, computer programmers and real estate agents have not already experienced. But newspapers observed changes in those industries without understanding their eventual impact on them. In fact, for all the distaste they have for bloggers, the latter have spent more time pondering it. Some, like Allison Hantschel (aka Athenae of First Draft) have a foot in both worlds. She has been posting over and over again for months about how newspapers’ wounds are largely self inflicted; that, for example, they consider a 16.7 percent profit margin cause for layoffs. (Ask someone in the airline or retail industries if they could make do with that.) As she points out:
If there was no Internet, if Craigslist disappeared tomorrow, if nobody ever blogged again, the greed, shortsightedness and selfishness that looks at a 40 percent profit margin and cries poverty – as was the case at some Gannett newspaper properties this year – would still smother newspaper journalism eventually.
Business concerns aside, the deeper problem is with content. Papers have gotten smaller and smaller. Last year I finally decided my local paper was too small to justify a subscription, and others may feel similarly. If you remove stock and mutual fund prices and point people online for them, can you be surprised if they begin to migrate? Also, sometimes the remaining content is shoddy. Bill Kristol offered consistently faulty takes on foreign policy and was rewarded with one of the most prestigious jobs in journalism – where he promptly phoned in more lazy and incorrect commentary. There is no room for a Daniel Larison who might offer a view of conservatism even slightly at odds with received wisdom. Similarly, Richard Cohen can identify himself as at least a tentative liberal but then claim Dick Cheney "poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?" Couldn’t the Post employ a fully self-identifying liberal like digby who both writes brilliantly AND understands that torture is a war crime?
The biggest problem is with the hard news though. Frank Rich issued this caution on Sunday: "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. Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for." But as Walter Pincus points out many investigative pieces are done with an eye on winning journalism awards, not serving the public interest. Even worse than indulgent reporting is that which is flatly wrong. The Iraq war utterly destroyed the credibility of not just the newspaper industry but news outlets in general. Every organization not named Knight-Ridder was more interested in working sources for access than independent reporting. The Bush administration was able to create links in the public’s mind between Iraq and 9/11 only – ONLY – because outlets refused to challenge the self-interested spin of government officials.
The elephant in the room for the industry is that on the most important issue of the last generation it routinely and wildly misinformed its audience. It is a systemic deficiency, not an isolated accident. It wasn’t just Judy Miller then, and it didn’t stop with the Iraq war. The Paper of Record still cannot bring itself to describe torture as torture when Americans do it. On this important issue papers continue (via) to mislead. (For hundreds of years and across all cultures nobody ever suggested waterboarding was not torture until George Bush became president; its defenders are the flat earth lunatic fringe of humanity and need no accommodation.) Subscribers are paying for that too, Mr. Rich. The biggest problem facing newspapers is a well earned skepticism that they will accurately inform their readers.
11 Comments
All of this bashing of newspapers is beginning to sound a lot like the old wingnut complaints about liberal bias.
It’s more a response to newspapers bashing the internet. Newspapers want people to think Huffington Post and Craigslist are killing them when it’s really greedy/incometent ownership, the elimination of content, shoddy analysis and a reporting paradigm that values cultivating sources over independent investigation & verification.
I’d like to think there isn’t any “bashing” in my post. Maybe calling the reporting “self centered” qualifies, but even then I provide examples to back up that assertion. I’d appreciate a couple of examples of what you consider bashing.
Your points about bad management are well taken. I worked for a newspaper for about five years and the management was really rotten at the top. Funny story: A poll was taken of the staff to find out what the top complaints were. Naturally, it was the pay. Then the publisher called a staff meeting to talk about the poll, but said he would talk about any subject EXCEPT the pay. Would you be surprised to learn that they later closed the newspaper and turned it into an internet news service?
But to your point. I think it is bashing to say that reporters and editors purposefully mislead the readers. Of course there are many failures, but most reporters and editors are trying to their job the right way. It’s the organization that employ the journalists that make it difficult or impossible. I feel bad for some of the reporters at Politico, for example. They are asking these reporters to file snippets of trivia multiple times during the day. How are they supposed to get any serious done?
Excellent post. It sure seems like newspapers and “news” media in general have a death wish. They have largely abandoned their core function of news. They keep cutting staff decreasing what little quality they have more and more. They ignore the interests and concerns of their readers. And then they blame us.
As for those stories that Frank Rich cites, they are in themselves quite telling about what is wrong in journalism. Poor care at Walter Reed had been reported on a year or two before but had not been picked up on by larger media until the Dana Priest articles. And yet Walter Reed is in Washington DC virtually under the noses of the entire Washington press corps. What Rich doesn’t say about the warrantless wiretapping story is that the NYT sat on it for over a year and through a Presidential election. And Enron? My memory is that story was pursued by just a couple of reporters in Texas. Big media couldn’t be bothered until Enron pretty much was at the point of collapse.
Beyond these, we had 8 years of the worst Presidency in our history. Where was the media during all this? There were probably 20 stories that were all bigger than Watergate. Yet during this time the media by and large refused to investigate, report, or take them seriously. Often they went out of their way to cheer them on and deride anyone who wasn’t as enthusiastic about them as they were.
How do you explain the unwillingness to challenge the administration in the run up to the war? Why were people like Scott Ritter accused of having Stockholm syndrome? In a sense I don’t really care about the motives or intentions of reporters, just the final product. Do you agree that however the sausage was made, the result was inaccurate reporting that misinformed the public? Or do you think the public was well served by the media?
Fantastic point. Salon broke the Walter Reed story.
you’re right danps.
(I love how you always protect AP content:)
I like to think of myself as a (relatively) informed and skeptical reader of the news. When an official of the administration or congress makes a statement unsupported by evidence, then I reserve judgement until more evidence is in. That is why I, like many FDLers, never supported the invasion of Iraq, torture, secret prisons, etc. Many thousands of us opposed the war, even though the Bushies and some of their flacks in the press told us it was our patriotic duty to do so. We look to newspapers for useful information, not for instructions on how to think.
In the end, your indictment of the newspaper business is simply too broad. Newspapers report the news: sometimes they do it well, sometime they don’t. If you want brilliant analysis and a clear-eyed view of the future, you are going to have to look a little harder than today’s edition of the newspaper. In the meantime, newspapers, with all their faults, are pretty damn important.
The heart of my criticism of hard news reporting is that most outlets (K-R excepted) would cultivate “high level sources” and print their unsubstantiated claims as the headline on A1, then pass along any (fact-based) reporting near the end of the article – on A-18. Making available facts the headline, with anonymous hints of classified – secret – claims to the contrary buried on A-18 isn’t instructing me how to think, it’s responsible journalism.
Thanks for your responses, by the way. I appreciate the exchange.
Thanks. It’s pretty easy once you get into the habit. :)
And thank you.
On a lighter note, I suspect you and I were sharing a laugh at some of the teevee reporting of the White House Correspondents Dinner last week. This had to be the most laughable group of over-fed, self-satisfied blowhards since…the Republican National Convention.