A Brave New Media
Matthew Shortall
In almost every journalism class I’ve taken in the last three years my professors have told me
that I’m entering into an uncertain future. If I’m lucky enough to find a job, I should expect long
hours of hard work and very little money to show for it. Samuel G. Freedman articulated it well
in Letters to a Young Journalist, when he said, “I wish I could tell you that you’re entering a
world that welcomes, respects, even reveres you …We live in a time when expertise is
denigrated, when professionalism is considered suspect … I’m not trying to scare you off. I hope
you find the challenges inspiring. The one thing I can say about the present unpopularity of
journalism is that it drives out all the uncommitted. If you’re a true believer, if this is meant to be
your life’s work, then nothing and nobody can change your mind.”
As I’m entering into the field, it feels like I’ve stepped aboard the Titanic an hour after it hit the
iceberg. How we got to this point and where we’re supposed to head from here are complicated
questions that require some hashing out, but let’s first define the current situation before we go
any further. In a nutshell, the few major corporations that control most of the media in this
country have decided that news gathering and reporting are no longer profitable ventures in and
of themselves. The results have been the layoffs of thousands of journalists, the closing of
foreign news bureaus, and the bankruptcy of countless small and local newspapers. Talk radio,
network pundits, and the blogosphere have all stepped in to try to fill the information gap left
behind by fewer professional journalists, but they don’t come close to providing the type of
quality news that comes from investigative journalists reporting from the scene. Not to mention
that the talk radio hosts, pundits, and bloggers all rely on journalists to get their original news,
making them more commentators than actual “news” sources.
It seems that more and more of what passes for “news” these days is really just entertainment
or PR spin. If newspapers are still responsible for over 90% of all original news, as a recent Pew
Center study of the Baltimore news cycle suggested, then the disappearance of investigative
journalism would hand the national conversation entirely to whoever has the most money to buy
the loudest “free speech”. There were nearly 13,000 positions terminated in the field of
journalism in 2009. Networks are scaling back the resources allotted to investigative reporting
and newspapers are going bust from coast to coast. “The situation has reached meltdown
proportions … It’s now possible to contemplate a time in the near future when major towns will
no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network news operations will employ no
more than a handful of reporters,” warns Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan,
nonprofit, educational and policy studies organization in Washington, D.C. According to “The
Death and Life of Great American Newspapers,” by John Nichols and Robert McChesney,
during 2009 the L.A Times terminated 300 positions, the Miami Herald cut 205 positions, and
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut 156 positions. All these cuts took place during the same time
that Denver’s Rocky Mountain News permanently closed its doors and the San Francisco
Chronicle is reportedly losing $1 million dollars a week.
So when it’s said that journalism is an industry in crisis, we’re not making some subjective
statement about a long-term trend, we’re talking about finding ourselves in a rapid freefall as the
foundations of professional journalism are disintegrating before our eyes. For decades now,
deregulation and consolidation of media conglomerates has diluted our news with entertainment
and advertising. It’s gotten so bad that we’re at the point where the mixture consists more of the
diluent than what was the original substance. If things continue on their current path, then the
media will be completely hijacked by powerful special interests and journalism as we know it
will be a thing of the past.
So we’ve admitted our problem. They say that’s the first step toward finding a solution. But
nothing so far mentioned is the problem in and of itself. The shifting from news to entertainment,
tens of thousands of layoffs within the profession, the death of the newspaper industry; these are
only symptoms of an illness. So what’s causing it? What was the exact point when we set
ourselves on the course to where we’re at today?
It’s a dumb question, because there wasn’t one point when we just decided to sell our soul to
the devil and everything went to hell. The situation in which journalism currently finds itself was
created by the changing values of society and the unpredictable events of history as much as it
was by the influence of corporate and governmental power. There is a window of time though,
beginning in the 1970s, when the top 50 corporations began to merge with each other and
consolidate power within their industries. They grew larger and larger until they became the few
industry and mass-media titans, Like General Electric, Disney, and Fox, that we know and love
today.
The emergence of the Internet, as a global information tool, has affected journalism in ways
that we are still trying to define. The Internet is a double edged sword, acting as a free and open
forum for grass roots publication, but also as a static roar of information that can drown out
what’s actually important. We’ve begun to take our newly found wealth of information for
granted. We’re bombarded with so much information on a daily basis and almost none of it is
contextualized or prioritized. There could be a war waging in Afghanistan and the front page of
Foxnews.com could link to something about the “war on Christmas.” We’ve spread ourselves
too thin and now we’re starting to tear. “The net is chipping away at our capacity for
concentration and contemplation. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the
surface in a jet ski,” says Nicholas Carr in his article published in The Atlantic Monthly, “Is
Google Making Us Stupid?”
The Internet did not create the “crisis in journalism,” it only accelerated it. However, The
Internet does reflect the shifting values and priorities of the public. The reflection in front of us
shows that we’re all easily manipulated and entertained, in addition to having extremely short
attention spans and almost no sense of history. The Internet is almost like a drug, in a sense.
When we first started using, our minds were blown away by a sense of infinite possibility. It
broadened the vistas, opened the doors of perception, and let us to stand in a warm light of truth.
But as we’ve continued to use, without moderation or self-control, the initial sense of grandeur
has vanished and been replaced with impulsive, unhealthy, habit-forming behavior.
The primary driving force in the economy is the motivation for profit. People aren’t buying as
many newspapers as they used to, ad revenue has decreased, and the public gets most of its news
online now anyway. All of these things have contributed to the decision by media networks to
cut costs across the board for investigative journalism and news gathering. Besides, there are
many other forms of media which attract better ratings and cost less to produce. None of this
should be surprising in the Darwinian “free market” world of capitalism. This is exactly how
things should progress in the free market, toward less costs and greater profits. But should
journalism be a profit driven field like investment banking? If we decide that journalism is
necessary for the public good than we shouldn’t allow it to be carried helplessly by the ever
shifting tides of the free market. It needs to be something more concrete
So our problem has become that the market forces in which journalism exists do not always
have the same values and interests of journalists themselves. The primary purpose of the free
market is to be a profit driven enterprise. The overall purpose of journalism is to be a watchdog
for the citizens, the people. Journalism needs to look out for scandal and corruption and provide
citizens with a wide enough spectrum of information and opinions for them to be capable of selfgovernance. It’s not always profitable to be a watchdog, especially if it means barking at the
parent corporation that owns your newspaper, but without one the politicians and executives will
work increasingly without public scrutiny or accountability. “Assuring the public has access to a
multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order,” said
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.
If the state of journalism has any implications for the greater public good, and it’s not doing
well, than it is the duty of the government to step in and intervene on behalf of the public’s best
interest. This creates a problem almost immediately, because one of country’s two largest
political parties hates it when the government intervenes in anything. The government stepping
in on behalf of a failing business in order to meddle in the free market sounds horrible doesn’t it?
Well, we’ve been doing just exactly that for centuries and it’s worked out ok each time. The
government already provides the mainstream corporate media with billions of dollars in
subsidies through free monopoly broadcast licenses, cable and satellite privileges, copyright
protection, and postal subsidies, just to name a few. The proponents of strictly “hands off”
government are dismantling journalism on two fronts, throwing out regulation and ownership
laws while simultaneously instituting tax reductions for advertising. You feel like you’ve been
slapped in the face when you hear media corporations and their lobbying groups decrying the
heavy hand of government while defending their existing subsidies.
According to James Carey, a professor of the University of Illinois and of Columbia
Journalism School, “The press may have to rely upon a democratic state to create the conditions
necessary for a democratic press to flourish and for journalists to be restored to their proper role
as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture.” In other words, our only hope for
reversing the current trend of journalism is for the government to create an institutional
framework for a public media, devoid of the corporate and moneyed interests which define our
current system. Other countries have already created policies aimed at strengthening the public
media. The former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, spent $756 million to bailout French
newspapers. Canada, Germany, Japan, UK, Finland, and Denmark are just a few of the countries
that spend at least ten times more on their public media than the United States. We spend about
$450 million annually on public media subsides, a fraction of what the Pentagon pays for its PR
campaigns.
Government intervention does not mean government control. In “The Death of American
Journalism: The Media Revolution that will Begin the World Again,” John Nichols and Robert
McChesney explain how the United States actually has a rich history of government intervention
in the free market in order to establish a free and healthy press. “During the 19th and early 20th
centuries, the health of the newspaper industry was not due to the “free markets” as much as to
public policy,” says Nichols. The founding fathers of our country regarded the establishment of a
free press system, or a “fourth estate,” as the first duty of the government. The government not
only regulated the relationships media companies had with each other, by busting monopolies,
but provided newspapers with subsides in the form of postal cost deductions for distribution, as
well as printing contracts and the paid publication of government notices.
Nichols and McChesney both agree that if journalism is a public good, and the media is to
continue to exist as we know it, then it’s going to require a government subsidy like the ones that
go to educational and military institutions. Nichols also suggests that we eliminate taxes on
postal rates for periodicals that garner less than 20% of their overall revenue from advertising,
give Americans an annual $200 tax credit to spend on newspapers, and governmental allocated
funds for every public middle school and high school to publish a student newspaper and create
an FM radio station. These are not radical ideas. The US government has a long history of
providing subsidies and original research for technology that has a public good. The telegraph,
the radio, and all of the work done by the National Science Foundation to put the Internet in
nearly every home, are just a few examples of government intervention for a greater good.
Why have we been made to be afraid of government intervention? The government is not the
only societal construct with the ability to oppress. The First Amendment to the United States
Constitution reads; “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances.” What happens if freedom of speech has been abridged and the freedom of the press
curtailed, but not by the doing of the government? Are we not then obligated by the Constitution
to petition our government for a solution? The United States was founded over a deep mistrust of
governmental power, but the founders also knew that some things were so important that they’re
worth the protection that power offers. The point is that the First Amendment has been hijacked
by corporate interests to make us believe that our rights only need to be protected from the
government.
“The first amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of
information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,”
according to the late US Senator, Hugo Black. An assault on journalism would be akin to an
assault on our First Amendment rights. It’s hard to imagine how the founding fathers could have
anticipated our modern world, or prepared us for it. America is being co-opted by the
consolidation of corporate power right in front of our eyes. They’re only hoping that can do it
discretely and casually enough that we won’t notice until we wake up one morning to find that
the USA now stands for the “United States of Advertising.”
I’ll admit that I don’t know what to do, or how this whole thing is going to turn out. There’s a
mere 60,000 working journalists and responsible politicians holding out in the Alamo against an
entire system working against them, funded by billions upon billions of dollars. I doubt that
journalism will ever become completely extinct, like the Dodo bird. I think there will always be
some of us, somewhere, hopelessly swimming against an unrelenting current that pulls us farther
and farther from shore. We’re in a bad spot, but if we want to ensure our destruction then we
should have just given up a long time ago to save ourselves the trouble.
January 10, 2013