If the demise of newspapers meant that people will now be better informed, who could be against it? But that premise is untrue.
The population, especially the young, today is very poorly informed on all matters, especially national and international matters. They don't read much of anything except their call screens.
The “new media” is not utilized, for the most part, for enlightenment. Rather, it is utilized for entertainment and personal applications.
. . . the papers were generally well-written, and that the readers were generally pretty well-informed about what was happening in the world.
I agree that the demise of newspapers will not increase the likelihood of people being "pretty well-informed about what is happening in the world." My critique is more radical than that; my complaint is exactly that it is possible to be so fixated on "what is happening in the world" that you lose your perspective and are lost in the fog of breaking news (of which "the fog of war" is a special case).Journalism as we know it didn't even exist when the First Amendment was ratified; without the telegraph the newspapers didn't have unique access to "what is happening in the world," and consequently were not in the business of selling extremely perishable news. That is why so many "newspapers" of the day were weeklies rather than dailies; some didn't even have a deadline at all and just printed when the printer was good and ready. Newspapers were written in a completely different style then than they have been for the past century - they were openly partisan and didn't claim to be objective. So a Thomas Jefferson and an Alexander Hamilton could, without raising an eyebrow, each openly sponsor a newspaper to attack the politics of the other.
All that changed, over a period of time, after the advent of the telegraph and (1848) the Associated Press. The AP was an aggressive monopolizer of the business of sharing news among newspapers, and it was rightly challenged on the basis that that was an undue concentration of public influence. The AP's defense was that, since the newspapers in its association were famously fractious and represented any point of view that you could name, the AP represented no viewpoint but was objective.
That might sound good in theory, but the argument is nonsense because, de facto, the AP had co-opted those various viewpoints. The newspapers remained "independent," and at loggerheads on the editorial pages - but the editorial pages were no longer the main course of the newspapers. Because, suddenly, the newspapers were in the business of printing "what was happening in the world." And that meant that the various newspapers shared content. Now all of a sudden, it was possible to claim with a straight face that your newspaper was objective - not because it was so in reality, but because all the other newspapers were claiming the same thing - that "journalists" - in general - "are objective." So, far from effectively being at loggerheads due to differing policy prescription preferences, journalists have been effectively been in lockstep since the advent of the AP.
When Eisenhower was forming his cabinet in 1953, he named General Motors CEO Charles E. Wilson to be SecDef:
Wilson's nomination sparked a major controversy during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, specifically over his large stockholdings in General Motors. Reluctant to sell the stock, valued at more than $2.5 million, Wilson agreed to do so under committee pressure. During the hearings, when asked if as secretary of defense he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors, Wilson answered affirmatively but added that he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa." Later this statement was often garbled when quoted, suggesting that Wilson had said simply, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." Although finally approved by a Senate vote of 77 to 6, Wilson began his duties in the Pentagon with his standing somewhat diminished by the confirmation debate.The picture journalists painted of Wilson - that he thought that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" - is precisely my opinion of Big Journalism under the aegis of the Associated Press. They think that whatever is good for them is good for the country. And while in 1953 there was something to be said for the fact that GM was such a bellwether of the US economy that what was good for GM would be reflected in the general prosperity of the country, that simply is not, and could never be, the case with journalism. That could never be the case, because "No news is good news" - which implies that bad news for the country is good for the journalism business. As witness, the flurry of journalistic activity - and readership/viewership - which accompanies a war or natural disaster.And, of course, we are all familiar with the tendency of journalism to find fault with businessmen, the military, and the police - the more we need to be able to trust an institution, the more of a target that institution becomes to journalism. Journalism promotes itself by tearing down others. Journalistic criticism does not face a bottom line; if the things journalism promotes for others to do turn out to be disasters, journalism simply changes the subject. And invites us further into the fog of breaking news, and away from the clarity of retrospectives which would, for example, show that journalism was insistently, determinedly, fanatically wrong about Ronald Wilson Reagan.
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore RooseveltWhen Madison was saying that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . ." the content of "the press" of the day resembled the Rush Limbaugh Show of today far more than it did that of The New York Times of today. And that is why I can be entirely sanguine about the troubles of Big Journalism today even as I assert that we today need more, rather than less, adherence to the First Amendment.Venerable Newspapers Face Extinction
The Economist ^ | May 1, 2008 | Staff
Steve Boriss writes:
45To: conservatism_IS_compassionAllow me to share Boriss' succinct history of the AP:Almost from the very beginning, the Associated Press (AP) has been a greedy deal among newspapers at the expense of their readers. It started innocently enough as a group of New York newspapers pooling their resources to get news from Europe faster. But soon, it degenerated into an anti-competitive scheme resembling a cartel, with AP member newspapers at times banding together to snuff-out would be competitors by denying them membership. Worse still, it created an unhealthy culture in which newspapers viewed themselves as collaborators, not competitors. It’s not a daily miracle that virtually every mainstream outlet covers essentially the same news items – it’s an AP-created culture in which papers refuse to compete for readers by offering different stories.
45 posted on 05/02/2008 6:52:27 PM PDT by Milhous (Gn 22:17 your descendants shall take possession of the gates of their enemies)
46The New York Times and the Washington Post took de facto collaboration one step further.As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago, the Post and Times send each other copies of their next day's front pages every night. The formal sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.
(Thought that might interest you, Larry).The vision presented here is quite different from much of the current thinking. Its foundation is research and analysis I conduct for the class “The Future of News” that I teach at Washington University in St. Louis.