I spent most of my adult life – from the age of 19 to the year 2000 – working in professional newsrooms. Not at NBC or ABC, not at the NYT or the WaPo, but in far more proletarian surroundings: the kind of workingman’s newsrooms populated by overworked, underpaid grunts with a soft core of idealism buried beneath many inches of crispy crust, accumulated over many years of near-constant exposure to political and corporate lies – lies propagated by official sources, and their own employers.
I hear and read a lot of criticism of Traditional Media journalists, here and in many other places – on the Web, in print, in person. I won’t deny that some of it is valid; when applied to the ego-besotted careerists preening in New York and inside the Beltway, very valid indeed.
But neither will I deny the essential truth that I wrote to my colleagues as I walked out of the newsroom of The Kansas City Star for the last time as a professional journalist, eight years ago. I said I was leaving behind a room full of heroes. And I was.
And today, that species of hero is facing extinction. That’s my fucking problem tonight.
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The economic crisis facing newspapers and other forms of the Traditional Media is well-known, if not always well understood. That some of the wounds are self-inflected is undeniable. Anti Fanatic made a compelling case for that in this diary last week.
What is also undeniable, but far less clearly understood, is that this crisis is not just a crisis for an industry, but for our society and our political process. Newspapers are dying, and if you think you’re not going to miss them when they’re gone, you are very sadly mistaken.
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, newspapers were like magic ATMs for their owners. Monopolies in their local markets for at least a generation, they produced profit margins that manufacturers would have killed for; percentages in the high teens were routine.
They could have – and should have – reinvested some of that cash into the product, adding talent and delivering more and better content so that their customer base would view them as irresistible and indispensable. It could have been done.
But the sickness of that era was that stockholders demanded not profits, but growth. If you made a $20 million profit in 1987, you better make at least $22 million in 1988, or you were slacker. A $19 million profit? You failed. So management started cutting corners even then, and unwittingly planted the seeds of their own demise.
But they weren’t the only, or even the worst, villains. Before there was Rove, before there was Atwater, there was Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
H.R. Haldeman was a 20-year veteran of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency; John D. Ehrlichman– who I interviewed in Philadelphia once, while he was on a post-prison book tour – was a Seattle lawyer. Together, as architects of the Nixon campaign and presidency, they set the standard for evil brilliance in public relations that later generations of Republicans would emulate. Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, was the mouthpiece, but Haldeman and Ehrlichman were the strategists.
Before Nixon’s election in 1968, the press may not have been loved, but it was respected. It had come a very long way from the yellow journalism days when William Randolph Hearst plunged the nation into war with Spain as a device to sell papers. In the post-WWII era, a journalistic ethic had taken hold firmly within the profession. Known as the Theory of Social Responsibility, it held that the special protection that the First Amendment afforded to journalists carried with it a corresponding responsibility: to act in the public interest. Fairness and objectivity weren’t just goals, they were an almost religious calling.
The press was widely viewed as the public umpire then, a disinterested, reliable information source that could be trusted to cut through competing claims and deliver the truth.
It was Haldeman and Ehrlichman who figured out that the existence of a trusted umpire simply wasn’t in their best interest. They had lots more money than the left; they could hire the best spinners and the biggest loudspeakers to make their points. A trusted umpire leveled the playing field and weakened that advantage. So they set out to destroy it. They launched a vast propaganda campaign, with Agnew at the point, to discredit the news media as biased in favor of liberals. The underlying message: Whenever the media pointed out that the Nixonites were lying or that liberal criticism of their policies was valid, those reports couldn’t be trusted; it was all just liberal bias.
It worked. Spectacularly. A generation grew up believing that the news media carried a liberal bias, a canard that still holds sway today. Even some journalists were convinced, enough that much of the media became convinced that a 50-50 "balance" was the goal, even if it was a balance between facts and lies, a balance that effectively hid the truth rather than reveal it in the public interest.
So today, we have a public that sees a real decline in the quality and quantity of what newspapers and other journalistic organizations deliver, caused by rampant, desperate cost cutting; and that also believes that the product is slanted and unreliable anyway. Surprise: they’re not lining up around the block to buy it.
And many of those who still do understand the value of the product, and use it on a daily basis? They expect to get it online for free, usually via aggregators that bypass the newspapers’ own web sites, denying them critical advertising revenue. The print editions are largely read by people age 40 and up, a demographic advertisers don’t value highly.
The bottom line: these one-time cash cows are now starved for revenue. Flailing in desperation to survive, they are throwing talented, experienced, dedicated journalists out into the street like empty beer cans – literally by the thousands. These acts of short-term survival are, of course, devaluing their content event more, and hastening their long-term demise.
So what, you say? They’re dinosaurs, let ’em die. Who needs them?
You do.
As I wrote in a comment to Anti Fanatic’s diary, I’m not worried about the media’s watchdog function with regard to the federal government. Washington is the seat of power and money and glamour and influence and there will always be people watching what goes on there and commenting on it. While the quality of that journalism is declining dramatically, at least it still exists. And new media such as TPM and Huffington Post are rising to challenge the Traditional Media and raise the overall standard back up.
The danger is that nothing is rising to take the place of the Traditional Media in terms of its essential watchdog function on state and local government.
State legislatures, state agency bureaucracies, local city and county governments have at least as much impact on people's daily lives as the feds, maybe more so. The print media that kept a watchful eye on those institutions is dying, and nothing is rising to take its place.
The reasons why they are dying are really beside the point. The point is the journalistic counterweight to the power of these state and local institutions is going away, and when it is gone, petty powerbrokers will have virtually free reign to do as they please.
Are you thinking that amateur citizen journalists with day jobs can step into that void and fill it in their spare time? Forget it. Real journalism is dreary, time-consuming grunt work, requiring a certain level of expertise and – even more importantly – time. The great, irreplaceable value that newspapers have long provided, above all else, has been the resources to pay a full-time staff of professionals who make their living doing journalism.
Journalists routinely spend hours and hours digging through piles of documents to uncover nuggets of information in the public interest. They sit through long, dull meetings and hearings that drone on forever, just to be there as the eyes and ears of the public, and to let government officials know that if they step over the line, someone will be there to call them on it.
A few weeks ago, the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City announced that he was reopening an investigation into a 1988 arson fire that killed six Kansas City firefighters. A sensational trial in 1997 sent five people to prison for life for setting that fire – five neighborhood ne’er-do-wells with long histories of petty crimes, five losers that nobody would miss, five human beings whose imprisonment allowed police, politicians and prosecutors to claim that they had finally, after nine years, solved the biggest murder case the city had seen in a century.
Mike McGraw, a Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative reporter for The Star, spent years investigating what he believed was a flawed prosecution of scapegoats. He conducted
hundreds of interviews, and reviewed 30,000 pages of court and investigative files and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. His stories revealed that prosecutors pressured witnesses to lie in order to obtain the convictions.
Nobody but a full-time experienced professional, doing that work for a living and being paid a living wage to do it, can accomplish those kids of results.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that what McGraw did was special or unusual. Newspaper journalists do this kind of work every day. Check out this diary by Shocko from Seattle for another example.
This is the kind of everyday heroism that journalists perform every day, journalists who have never been on national TV, never been fawned over by presidential candidates on a bus or a plane, who invariably make some of the lowest salaries that college-educated professionals are paid in their communities.
What makes them heroes, as I said in my farewell to my friends at The Star, was that they were staying to perform their professional duty, not leaving for better pay and cushier working conditions like I was. Not because they can’t. But because they won’t.
A hero, to me, is someone who willingly makes sacrifices for the betterment of others. Most journalists who work outside the New York-Washington spotlight fit the definition. They’re smart enough and hard-working enough to make a lot more money doing something else. They choose not to, because they know they do work that needs doing.
But are their days numbered? The Romensko blog blog, the online hub for journalism insiders, has taken to using the phrase "today’s bad news" to list the layoffs, buyouts and other management actions that are diminishing the ranks of professional journalism on what is literally a daily basis. Here are a few snippets:
Today's bad news:
• Dozens to get "involuntary separation" notices at the Palm Beach Post
• "I have no plans to tell me wife" about taking a buyout, jokes Zucco
• San Mateo County Times newsroom has gone from 48 staffers to 10
• Arkansas D-G eliminates salary increases for the remainder of this year
• Journal Register has assets of $76.8 million; liabilities: $719.8 million
Will there be anyone left to cover scandals in New Jersey?
New York Observer
John Koblin notes that the New York Times has emptied out its two New Jersey bureaus and the Star Ledger is cutting about a third of its newsroom. The Record of Bergen County editor Frank Scandale tells him: "Can you cover the big stories that really mean something to people -- how taxes are spent, projections for jobs, stuff you just need to know if you live here -- if you have too few journalists? That's a concern I have now as a journalist and as a citizen of New Jersey."
A warning to conservatives wishing for newspapers' demise
San Francisco Chronicle
It comes from conservative columnist Debra Saunders: "Yes, fewer reporters mean fewer biased stories about lesbian immigrants fighting an unsympathetic establishment. But there also won't be as many stories about sanctuary city policies gone bad, the latest zany law out of San Francisco City Hall, or the growing bite that public employee pension systems are taking out of city and county services. [Those hoping for the death of newspapers] don't understand that Fox News and talk radio aren't going to report on stories that require local beat reporting and time-consuming and expensive investigation."
Where will AP get its news if newspapers keep shrinking?
Reflections of a Newsosaur
"It seems fair to hypothesize that AP, as structured today, won't be in the position to pick up the slack as newspaper staffs are thinned," writes Alan Mutter. "Many of the kinds of stories covered by individual newspapers today simply won't see the light of day in the future."
Providence TV investigative reporter quits over station's direction
Providence Journal
Veteran ABC6 News reporter Jim Hummel says the Providence station's new owners have pushed reporters to sensationalize the news and use slang –– such as "lowlife" and "thug" to describe defendants –– in an effort to increase ratings. "For 13 years I've been a cheerleader and ambassador for the station despite our struggling in the ratings, because I believed in the product," says Hummel. "And I can't say that anymore."
And finally:
New Hampshire weekly The Argus Champion, a weekly newspaper that has covered the greater Lake Sunapee area since 1823, will stop publication at the end of this month, according to this morning's edition.
In a letter to readers, Publisher Harvey Hill said the newspaper has been losing money each month.
"We are truly sorry to have to make this announcement," Hill wrote. "We feel a heavy burden, shutting down a newspaper that has been in existence for 185 years."
We’re losing something more than a convenience, more than a good read. We are losing an essential piece of the fabric of our communities and our political system – something I truly believe is essential to our freedom and our way of life.
I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to save it.
What’s your fucking problem?