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The prospect [of getting bought out by Internet giants] is a very stark one for people who work in, write, and edit newspapers. For these people do not think of themselves as "content providers." They think much more highly of themselves than that. They believe they play a vital role, perhaps the most vital role, in the defense of the freedoms of every citizen. After all, who else is there to keep a vigilant watch over the official custodians of society? Who else is there to protect the people from the depredations of business and government? Is not freedom of speech—the very freedom that enables journalists to ply their trade—the first of our freedoms, primus inter pares, and who will guard it if not they?
Historically speaking, this attitude is of relatively recent vintage. It may, in fact, be an artifact of the rise of the same highly profitable monopoly newspapers and shared-monopoly television networks that were so profitable and consequently grew so powerful that they gave the members of their news force reason to believe they were not just working stiffs—the general attitude of newspapermen throughout most of the preceding era—but akin to a democratic nobility.
The immodesty of this idea led many newspaper professionals of the late 20th century into a category error. They came to confuse the significance of the subjects they were covering with the act of covering them. Proximity to the news made them a species of news. They wrote about government; therefore, they were equivalent to the government in importance. They reported a war, and their act of reporting a war came to loom as large as the war itself. Today, the death of a journalist in a war zone is assigned vastly more weight than the death of a soldier.
This error is very much in evidence in the Newseum. Its grandest displays are giant artifacts. On the third floor, there is an East German guard tower attached to a slab of the Berlin Wall; on the first floor, there is a huge twisted piece of metal that was the World Trade Center’s broadcast antenna. These are remarkable to behold and to contemplate, and they encourage one to reflect deeply on totalitarianism, Islamofascism, and terrorism. But what is important about them, what is thought-provoking about them, has absolutely nothing to do with journalism or with journalists; it has to do with actuality. If anything, the unearned grandiosity at work in the news business is one of the key elements behind the deep and abiding disdain that the American people have come to harbor for it.