Journalism's slow, sad death
By Michael Gerson
Friday, November 27, 2009
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.
But a visit to the Newseum is a
reminder that what is passing is not only a business but also a
profession -- the journalistic tradition of nonpartisan objectivity.
Journalists, God knows, didn't always live up to that tradition. But
they generally accepted it, and they felt shamed when their biases or
inaccuracies were exposed. The profession had rules about facts and
sources and editors who enforced standards. At its best, the profession
of journalism has involved a spirit of public service and adventure --
reporting from a bomber during a raid in World War II, or exposing the
suffering of Sudan or Appalachia, or rushing to the site of the World
Trade Center moments after the buildings fell.
By these standards, the changes
we see in the media are also a decline. Most cable news networks have
forsaken objectivity entirely and produce little actual news, since
makeup for guests is cheaper than reporting. Most Internet sites
display an endless hunger to comment and little appetite for
verification. Free markets, it turns out, often make poor
fact-checkers, instead feeding the fantasies of conspiracy theorists
from "birthers" to Sept. 11, 2001, "truthers." Bloggers in repressive
countries often show great courage, but few American bloggers have the
resources or inclination to report from war zones, famines and
genocides.
The democratization of the media
-- really its fragmentation -- has encouraged ideological polarization.
Princeton University professor Paul Starr traced this process
recently in the Columbia
Journalism Review. After the captive audience for network
news was released by cable, many Americans did not turn to other
sources of news. They turned to entertainment. The viewers who remained
were more political and more partisan. "As Walter Cronkite prospered in
the old environment," says Starr, "Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann
thrive in the new one. As the diminished public for journalism becomes
more partisan, journalism itself is likely to shift further in that
direction."
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.
And the whole system is based on
a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news
they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or
comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and
investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for
the entire media food chain. But newspapers are expected to provide
their content free on the Internet. A recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans
refuse to pay for Internet content. There is no economic model that
will allow newspapers to keep producing content they don't charge for,
while Internet sites repackage and sell content they don't pay to
produce.
I dislike media bias as much as
the next conservative. But I don't believe that journalistic
objectivity is a fraud. I was a journalist for a time, at a once-great,
now-diminished newsmagazine. I've seen good men and women work
according to a set of professional standards I respect -- standards
that serve the public. Professional journalism is not like the
buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but
not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not
reflected in its market value.
What is to be done? A lot of
good people are working on it. But if you currently have newsprint on
your hands, thank you.
