The Strange, Sad Death of Journalism

Townhall.com ^ | November 27, 2009 | Michael Gerson

[Kaslin]

WASHINGTON -- Like the nearby Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Newseum -- Washington's museum dedicated to journalism -- displays dinosaurs. On a long wall near the entrance, the front pages of newspapers from around the country are electronically posted each morning -- the artifacts of a declining industry. Inside, the high-tech exhibits are nostalgic for a lower-tech time when banner headlines and network news summarized the emotions and exposed the scandals of the nation. Lindbergh Lands Safely. One Small Step. Nixon Resigns. Cronkite removes his glasses to announce President Kennedy's death at 1 p.m., Central Standard Time.

Behind a long rack of preserved, historic front pages, there is a kind of journalistic mausoleum, displaying the departed. The Ann Arbor News, closed July 23 after 174 years in print. The Rocky Mountain News, taken at age 150. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which passed quietly into the Internet.

What difference does this make? For many conservatives, the "mainstream media" is an epithet. Didn't the Internet expose the lies of Dan Rather? Many on the left also shed few tears, preferring to consume their partisanship raw in the new media.

[y6162]

I read the NY Post Daily. It’s a great newspaper as it treats the powerful the same as the average Joe. No worshiping at the altar of political correctness.

The Post is sexy and funny too.

[Gaffer]

To the best of my personal recollection, there hasn't been any true Journalism, at least that exhibited by the 'acceptable' icons of the MSM.

NYT, LAT, WP, BG et al have embalmed their still-animated corpses with the diseased liberal bias they let infest their 'journalistic works.'

As for electronic MSM (the big three and their bastard cable children), well, they're not even relevant anymore. Fox has proven that.

[pnh102]

Journalism died a long time ago.

[STONEWALLS]

...I started drifting away from the MSM because I got tired of their constant attacks on the Pentagon/FBI/NSA/CIA/Army....their Muslim sympathies after 9-11 was the last straw.

[pepsionice]

I will offer this analysis.

First, papers of a major nature...got a funny idea to escalate their benefits packages and salary of their top reporters....this is especially true in New York, Boston, Chicago, LA, Seattle, Denver, Miami, Dallas, and St Louis. This started in the 1980s...and everyone was convinced to pay a growing rate to reporters who barely contributed anything each week.

Then the crowd that they did keep...felt their job was to slam anything that was non-Democratic in nature. So stories were rigged. The subscribers...were unhappy and each month...a couple just gave up on reading the paper.

So as the papers were spiraling into debt in the 2000-2005 era...naturally, they went to the bank and asked for credit. They figured it was a low period.

By 2008...they patted each other on the back and but then the bank came calling...and the debt was way more than what was acceptable.

So papers failed.

My hometown paper is surviving...but it’s designed for a town of 40,000 and they never had that much in national news...doing mostly local and state news...and mostly balanced.

Up the road a piece...is the Nashville paper....which is in serious trouble...and tried hard to be a regional paper and a heavy player of democratic issues. They’ve already laid people off and trimmed back on the budget. The guys in charge? They don’t want to admit that subscribers left and won’t come back....but they can’t attract anyone to buy a daily copy. So, it’s a sad story...which won’t correct itself and certainly won’t get better.

Eventually...the paper will be worthless...and some smart conservative guy will waltz in with a million, and buy the paper dirt cheap...then transform it.

[McBuff]

It’s not “sad” and its not “strange”. . .no more than when the buggy whip industry collapsed. It’s just that, today, we have many more portals from which to glean information and form our opinions of the world.

[Hardastarboard]

"As Walter Cronkite prospered in the old environment," says Starr, "Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann thrive in the new one.

The author pines for a better, more romantic era in which journalists were more ethical, more concerned for the well being of their country, and less partisan. Of course, the above quote from the article quite tellingly reveals the fact that in the old media model, there was only the one view point, from the left, and no one disputed it. I'll take today's model over yesterday's, thank you very much.

The author also notes that most internet news is based on the borrowing of material from other sources, leaving the organization that incurred the cost to bear that burden with little to no associated revenue. I understand his point, but I would suggest that it's not my, nor his, issue if the news gatherers can't figure out a successful business model. Fresh information DOES have value. A well-designed business model will inevitably profit from that value.

What the author doesn't understand is that traditional news gathering organizations have two issues caused by their failure to adapt to a new paradigm. The first is bias, which has become screamingly apparent due to the diversity of views now available. The second is clinging to the old business model like a drowning man to a board. They will either adapt, or die. Given their inherent bias, and the incredible damage that it's done to America, I know which one I'm hoping for.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Big city papers lost circulation when the productive in those cities moved out to the suburbs. Newspaper owners looked at what they had left, the poor, uneducated, recent arrivals, etc., and trimmed their sails to reflect the new audience. The new audience has little need for daily news.

[abb]

Of course, the above quote from the article quite tellingly reveals the fact that in the old media model, there was only the one view point, from the left, and no one disputed it.

Have you ever wondered if "And that's the way it is..." wasn't?

[CIB-173RDABN]

A couple of points.

1. I did not stop reading newspapers because of the price of the paper. I was willing to “pay” for my news. However it should be noted that newspaper did not make money on subscribers. They made money selling advertisement. This is the dirty little secret newspapers forgotten.

2. The content of the newspaper is what brought “readers” to them, the more readers, the more they could charge for adverstisement. However, as their bias become more evident (pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-illegal immigrants, anti-war, anti-military, anti-business, anti-traditional values, anti-guns and so on) it became harder to read. They had an agenda and nothing, not even the truth would get in their way. Every day like a small leak they lost subscribers and without “eyeballs” merchants are not willing to pay for advertisement.

3. I think newspapers and news magazines best days are in their past, however they have hasten their death by their own actions.

The death of newspapers was not murder, but suicide.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

The second oldest profession, like the oldest, is suffering from competition from talented amateurs.

I think Woodward and Bernstein had a lot to do with the decline of “journalism”. Adversary journalism, defined as opposition to the Republican Party, became the mode in American Journalism. It's like the CRU, when your biases overwhelm intellectual honesty, your product suffers. The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe and Time are unreadable, not because they are politically uncongenial, but because they are insufferably boring, which is what happens when you are constrained by the straitjacket of you own prejudice. (Actually, the Washington Post is pretty readable for a Democratic Party organ.)

Foreign journalism doesn't suffer nearly so much. The Toronto Globe and Mail has what I find to be a liberal point of view, but it is invariably well written and interesting. The same can be said for almost any British paper.

[GOPJ]

...Cable and the Internet now allow Americans, if they choose, to get their information entirely from sources that agree with them -- sources that reinforce and exaggerate their political predispositions.

LOL - it used to be that ONLY liberals got news from sources that totally agreed with them. Now conservatives have a small taste of what it's like to read something that's NOT a condemnation of their beliefs.

It's not just "bias" we object to - it's fraud. Global warming lies, ACORN corruption, dem corruption - ALL OVERLOOKED. While EXXON, or Haliburton or conservative wrongs are "gone over" repeatly with fine tooth combs...

Journalism in it's present biased form needs to fail. It can be replaced by something worthy of "freedom of the press"...

[GOPJ]

The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe and Time are unreadable, not because they are politically uncongenial, but because they are insufferably boring, which is what happens when you are constrained by the straitjacket of you own prejudice.

Insightful.

[Wonder Warthog]

"The death of newspapers was not murder, but suicide."

You got it! I was going to make the same point.

[CIB-173RDABN]

If you want to know what is going on behind the scene at newspapers right now, visit www.angryjournalist.com.

You will not be allowed to post any comment (they do not want to read what people think of their profession.)

They are in a world of hurt, and denial. They just do not understand why they are failing.

Go visit, get some insight to what is going on right now.

[Phlyer]

I would suggest that it's not my, nor his, issue if the news gatherers can't figure out a successful business model. Fresh information DOES have value.

Exactly!! The issue about why anyone would pay for something that others are giving away free is a smokescreen for the larger issue of why others can give their service away for free. And the reason is that they have lost the confidence of the great middle of the country. If they were reasonably 'fair and balanced' in providing fresh information, people would be willing to pay. But why should we pay for someone else to express their opinion? We can do that ourselves . . . for free.

[Hardastarboard]

I was just thinking this morning that I would LOVE to be able to get the newspaper again. I used to love to sit and read it over breakfast, or sit on the couch in the evening and relax and read it. Having said that, I'll be damned if I'm ever going to give a dime to any lying, filthy Marxist news organization so that they can destroy America.

So, I've adopted their ideology - private property is morally wrong, even intellectual property. Oddly enough, though, Marxist news organizations(and musicians, I notice) don't care much for it when you redirect their ideology against them.

[Hiddigeigei]

Journalism died a long time ago.
Journalism was aborted at birth! We’re just catching on.

It is true that most of the “news” we read on the internet still comes from the MSM.
But the latest and greatest story is about the “hacked” emails and data from the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia which exposed the fraudulent basis of the global-warming scam.
This story originated on the internet, was spread by internet sites and blogs, and was largely ignored or dismissed as irrelevant by the main-stream media.

[The Great RJ]

The death of journalism and the old media is a product of two things. First, the new media allowed people for the first time to get news stories from different points of view. For many it became very obvious that the traditional media were biased and condescending. The success of Fox News is not as liberals maintain due to the general ignorance of the public, but that the public has come to believe that Fox is less biased and more objective.

The second factor is the growth of technology. I no longer have to rely on my local newspaper for anything even the weekly ads as I get them from Internet sources.

Even the small town newspapers are being replaced with Internet based systems. My sister in law works for a start-up local news site in a market of of less than 15,000 people. This site has localized news reporting through video streaming as well as the content typical of a small town newspaper. It is almost like having a mini TV station with video feeds from school sporting events, interviews and local news. Even my 80 year old mother in law now surfs in daily for the local news and has given up on the weekly newspaper.