[R-G] Hedges: Bad Days for Newsrooms—and Democracy

[Anthony Fenton]

Bad Days for Newsrooms—and Democracy
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080721_so_goes_the_newsroom_the_empire_and_the_world/

Posted on Jul 21, 2008


By Chris Hedges

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the  
antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the  
Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is  
not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of  
the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on  
the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual  
poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is  
conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print.

All these forces have combined to strangle newspapers. And the blood  
on the floor, this year alone, is disheartening. Some 6,000  
journalists nationwide have lost their jobs, news pages are being  
radically cut back and newspaper stocks have tumbled. Advertising  
revenues are dramatically falling off with many papers seeing double- 
digit drops. McClatchy Co., publisher of the Miami Herald, has seen  
its shares fall by 77 percent this year. Lee Enterprises Inc., which  
owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is down 84 percent. Gannett Co.,  
which publishes USA Today, is trading at nearly a 17-year low. The San  
Francisco Chronicle is now losing $1 million a week.

The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all major newspapers,  
and most smaller ones, have Web sites, and have had for a while,  
newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad  
revenue. Analysts say that although Net advertising amounts to $21  
billion a year, that amount is actually relatively small. So far, the  
really big advertisers have stayed away, either unsure of how to use  
the Internet or suspicious that it can’t match the viewer attention of  
older media.

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust. They provide, at their  
best, the means for citizens to examine themselves, to ferret out lies  
and the abuse of power by elected officials and corrupt businesses, to  
give a voice to those who would, without the press, have no voice, and  
to follow, in ways a private citizen cannot, the daily workings of  
local, state and federal government. Newspapers hire people to write  
about city hall, the state capital, political campaigns, sports,  
music, art and theater. They keep citizens engaged with their  
cultural, civic and political life. When I began as a foreign  
correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in  
Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow. Reporters and  
photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders  
looked, thought and believed. Most of this is vanishing or has vanished.

We live under the happy illusion that we can transfer news-gathering  
to the Internet. News-gathering will continue to exist, as it does on  
this Web site and sites such as ProPublica and Slate, but these  
traditions now have to contend with a new, widespread and  
ideologically driven partisanship that dominates the dissemination of  
views and information, from Fox News to blogger screeds. The majority  
of bloggers and Internet addicts, like the endless rows of talking  
heads on television, do not report. They are largely parasites who  
cling to traditional news outlets. They can produce stinging and  
insightful commentary, which has happily seen the monopoly on opinion  
pieces by large papers shattered, but they rarely pick up the phone,  
much less go out and find a story. Nearly all reporting—I would guess  
at least 80 percent—is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take  
that away and we have a huge black hole.

Those who rely on the Internet gravitate to sites that reinforce their  
beliefs. The filtering of information through an ideological lens,  
which is destroying television journalism, defies the purpose of  
reporting. Journalism is about transmitting information that doesn’t  
care what you think. Reporting challenges, countermands or  
destabilizes established beliefs. Reporting, which is time-consuming  
and often expensive, begins from the premise that there are things we  
need to know and understand, even if these things make us  
uncomfortable. If we lose this ethic we are left with pandering,  
packaging and partisanship. We are left awash in a sea of competing  
propaganda. Bloggers, unlike most established reporters, rarely admit  
errors. They cannot get fired. Facts, for many bloggers, are  
interchangeable with opinions. Take a look at The Drudge Report. This  
may be the new face of what we call news.

When the traditional news organizations go belly up we will lose a  
vast well of expertise and information. Our democracy will suffer a  
body blow. Not that many will notice. The average time a reader of The  
New York Times spends with the printed paper is about 45 minutes. The  
average time a viewer spends on The New York Times Web site is about  
seven minutes. There is a difference between browsing and reading. And  
the Web is built for browsing rather than for reading. When there is a  
long piece on the Internet, most of us have to print it out to get  
through it.

The rise of our corporate state has done the most, however, to  
decimate traditional news-gathering. Time Warner, Disney, Rupert  
Murdoch’s News Corp., General Electric and Viacom control nearly  
everything we read, watch, hear and ultimately think. And news that  
does not make a profit, as well as divert viewers from civic  
participation and challenging the status quo, is not worth pursuing.  
This is why the networks have shut down their foreign bureaus. This is  
why cable newscasts, with their chatty anchors, all look and sound  
like the “Today” show. This is why the FCC, in an example of how far  
our standards have fallen, defines shows like Fox’s celebrity gossip  
program “TMZ" and the Christian Broadcast Network’s “700 Club” as  
“bona fide newscasts.” This is why television news personalities,  
people like Katie Couric, have become celebrities earning, in her  
case, $15 million a year. This is why newspapers like the Los Angeles  
Times and Chicago Tribune are being ruthlessly cannibalized by  
corporate trolls like Sam Zell, turned into empty husks that focus  
increasingly on boutique journalism. Corporations are not in the  
business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not  
convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask  
questions. They prefer to close the prying eyes of reporters. They  
prefer to transform news into another form of mindless amusement and  
entertainment.

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and  
impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth.  
Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and  
entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on  
television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the  
powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of  
the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the  
traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.

We are cleverly entertained during our descent. We have our own  
version of ancient Rome’s bread and circuses with our ubiquitous and  
elaborate spectacles, sporting events, celebrity gossip and television  
reality shows. Societies in decline, as the Roman philosopher Cicero  
wrote, see their civic and political discourse contaminated by the  
excitement and emotional life of the arena. And the citizens in these  
degraded societies, he warned, always end up ruled by a despot, a Nero  
or a George W. Bush.