Posted on 02/02/2009 8:44:22 PM PST by Reagan 2.0
William Murchison, a journalist who has spent more than four decades in the newspaper business, has an interesting piece about the cause of the newspaper industry's impending death at The American Spectator.
I think a strong case can be made for dating the newspapers' plight from 1974. Does that ring a bell? We were then just winding down a political cataclysm... Watergate.
..A pair of newspapermen, as Americans were regularly invited to acknowledge, had contributed significantly to the downfall of a president...
(D)ue in large measure to Watergate, and the go-get-'em spirit Watergate inspired in the liberal breast, the relationship of the business to the customers began to change. There appeared in newsrooms, from the '70s on, larger and larger numbers of people largely unlike those who had populated that workplace earlier.
If I am wrong about this, at least I have been telling the story the same way for quite a while, based on first-hand observation. The story is of a profession invaded and subjugated by a type of journalist far less like the average reader than like, well, the members of a political science seminar at an upscale Eastern or West Coast university... They tended to see journalism as a platform for identifying, investigating, exposing, and addressing social and political grievances: such grievances as often enough the customers didn't see for themselves, but here was a new breed of newsmen to show them what they had missed.
I believe he's dead-on correct. I took a news writing class in journalism school with approximately 20 students. On the first day, our professor asked everyonewhy they wanted to work in the newspaper business. All but three answered with some form of "I want to change the world..."
(Excerpt) Read more at patriotroom.com ...
90%+ of most press Rooms are democrat party activists. They systematically alienate half the market with their bad reporting and propagandizing. Even democrat voters don’t trust the crap they read in the liberal papers anymore.
It wouldn’t be so bad if newspaper “journalists” were equal opportunity go-get-’em crusaders. But they go after Republicans almost exclusively and are generally shills for equally offensive Democrats.
They bring their bias, instilled and cultivated in college, to everything they cover.
That’s the same time the MBA’s (Master of Business Administration) starting infiltrating banking. Up until then, a lot of bankers got their educations in-house. Everything switched to the bottom line ONLY and being a good citizen of the local community fell away.
It is the college education that, from that time on, has taken the goodness out of a lot of professions. No more working your way up from the mailroom, etc. No more human kindness or respect for tradition and the wisdom of experience.
Things were pretty much the same in the sixties.
I agree with you. In fact, my father was a print journalist in the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. By the end of the 50’s as I would talk to him about newspapers vs TV news (which was coming into dominance), he expressed the view that TV reporting was qualitatively different in that there was so little time and so few words available to fully explicate the story. So, what he was seeing (and describing to me, thank God) was how the TV stories were highly selective in what they showed and explained and a very high proportion of the time was devoted therefore to making a value statement (vs. making a full reporting of the facts the focus with the “editorial” content very limited and usually very indirect). He told me that during his time, people went to the newspapers for a full story that could be relied upon to be truthful and to provide needed background and context. The audience might hear about a story on the radio, but they went to the newspaper to get the full story. But by the early 60’s this was beginning to change, he said, because newspapers were beginning to respond to the competition by becoming more like TV and radio in the “depth” of their reporting.
bup
Careerism and globalism both have antipathies towards tradition, and both are among the most influential mindsets on college campuses. Perhaps campus leftism is a side-effect of these, and not an independent phenomenon.
Yes - or perhaps a chicken and egg thing.
Some of us in journalism make up the other 10 percent, you know.
I’ve never been a liberal or a Dem or a socialist and never will be. Instead I’m a veteran, functional Republican (but registered unenrolled), concealed carry gun owner and deer hunter.
But I’m stuck on the same sinking ship with Chris Bleeping Matthews and the NY Slimes.
Well, it was an honor bringing you your daily news all these years. At least I’ll go down with my ethics intact.
I'd beg to differ, and just point you toward the current occupant of the Oval Office......a totally empty suit with no credentials who got annointed by said "dead media".
The readership of the American newspaper was middle-class, patriotic, churchgoing, optimistic. Along came these guys (and, subsequently gals) from Columbia U. and Berkeley to tell readers just how morally burdened and ripe for reform their country was. It wasn't precisely what the customers wanted to hear. In fact, it was the opposite of what they wanted to hear.
Fascinating, and quite similar to what we've been discussing on FR for some time now. Good to hear it from an inside source.
It should be no surprise that young people trained to regard the government from a top-down, dole-to-the-proles model should think of their own profession that way. To them the customer is going to get what's good for him, not what he wants. At some point they started to take seriously the old "comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable" journalistic saw, which is fine so long as you remember that the "comfortable" here is the paying customer.
This mindset leads directly to a demand - so far muted but very definitely out there - for government subsidies for failing newspapers, predicated on the fallacious premise that their function is too important for them to be allowed to fail. These people are serving something other than the customer, it's as simple as that, and it is a lesson that is not new to the newspaper business but has been re-learned over and over again. Rupert Murdoch created an empire off it.
And that's what I think is likely to be the outcome this time around that same old block. There will continue to be successful newspapers, it's just that they will be local, responsive to the customer, and focused on something other than changing the world through propaganda. They won't pay very well (they never did), will be run by non-college-degreed people who, knowing their own inadequacies, will rekindle the art of researching the topic before committing it to print. Nothing new here.
What the journalistic world needs, in short, is far less celebrity and far more humility. And it's going to get them both, the hard way.
I can't deny your point, I am sorry to say!
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