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.
