If you are a journalist, then, you are only as good as the risks you take because newspapers were supposed to be here to take risks exposing power, not playing the system.
The wire services are the death of journalistic independence. Before the advent of the AP, newspapers were mostly weeklies, and printers didn’t have independent sources of news of far-flung disasters. So newspapers were about the opinions of their printers - much like the EIB is about the opinions of Rush Limbaugh.It took a generation or two, but the fact that wire services are continual virtual meetings of all major journalist - and the veracity of
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)combined to produce the “objective journalism” cartel which promotes the opinions of journalists as a class. And that class is anti fragile at the expense of the fragility of society. That is, journalism is the bad news business, and as such it profits from disaster. Society, OTOH, is damaged by it.Worse, the “objective journalism” cartel promotes the fellow travelers of journalists - whom journalists call “liberals,” and whom journalists promote to infest the government. Government “liberals” also are anti fragile at the expense of society. Which is another way of saying they don’t have skin in the game.
The advent of the wire services created the “objective journalist” myth. With that myth firmly established, the Warren Court in 1964 unanimously awarded journalism the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision, which awarded the “objective journalism” cartel freedom from any duty to be truthful. It did so by dismissing almost two centuries of jurisprudence with the fatuous claim that
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment”The framers of the Bill of Rights were all about suppressing controversy over the effect of the Constitution on the rights of the people. Assaying to modify libel law would have been a funny way indeed of assaying to suppress controversy, and before 1964 no one seriously suggested that they had done it.Since Republicans are the only ones who get libeled by “objective journalism," Republicans must sue for the dismantling of the (inherently anticompetitive) wire services (their raison d'être, the high cost of telegraphy bandwidth, is ancient history in the Internet era). And sue for libel in the teeth of Sullivan. I see no other way that the truth crisis of journalism can be ameliorated.
You added some nice analysis, as well, on the no-skin-in-the-game journalist set. I liked reading about how the libel laws have changed to support today's status quo. Interesting.
I think you're right about the wire services. The richest of the kingpins of wire services, of course, is Michael Bloomberg. The local newspapers liked the economics of relying on national stories instead of hiring a lot of reporters. That and the rise of social media, Youtube, and internet is causing major pain.
As a tech industry journalist and analyst myself, I can see how useful an independent observer can be in getting practical information distributed and helping create a marketplace for industry innovation.
The town and small city newspapers live off the local community, the restaurants, car dealers, etc.
But there are also plenty of American businesses that are usually B2B and national/international in scope -- software firms, franchises, industrial product firms, even cloud franchisers.
I did a back-of-an-envelope analysis and figured there's room for another 4,000 journalists in America to follow these national and international business segments, many of whom don't have a educational outlet to reach their markets effectively.
But the national journalists who cover government and big business chose the dark side, with Watergate and the rise of "tough guy" like Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson.
And as Taleb pointed out, the reality is these nose-in-the-air columnists like George Will, Paul Krugman, and Thomas Freidman are actually Intellectual Idiots.
Finding dirt and exposing fraud was sexier, paid better, and earned more Pulitzer Prizes than explaining the ingenuity companies bring to market. 20 years ago Fortune Magazine was great at cheerleading American business, but no longer: see my 2019 vanity: Fortune Cookie News: American Business Magazine a Propaganda Tool of China?
Trump is doing the best you can do -- expose their lies, laugh at them, embarrass them, and shame them to the point where being a journalist isn't something you can brag about at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Finally, to your point of making the society more fragile, I made some comments in that direction in a meme about Angry Red Hens.
Cheers, my FRiend.