The Crisis in Journalism

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Digested First Pages:.

Introduction by Richard Farson Welcome to our conference on The Crisis in Journalism. As we will explore more fully in the comments that follow, journalism is all but lost in broadcasting, the medium that most people go to for their news. It has become increasingly tabloid-like, market oriented, and dominated by giant corporations generally occupied in unrelated fields. Instead of being cost centers, broadcast news organizations are now profit centers, so must serve wants rather than needs. Jay Leno ridiculed his own NBC company for its MSNBC 24/7 helicopter coverage of Paris Hilton, breaking for only 12 seconds to report that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired, then returning to full-time coverage of Ms. Hilton. The situation is also worsening in print journalism. Newspapers are losing profitability as they find their advertising revenue moving to the web. So they are closing their foreign bureaus and making massive cuts in their investigative staffs. Many of us fear what our founding fathers feared, that losing intensive, investigative journalism will make us vulnerable to tyranny and other threats to our society. Something must be done to restore the traditional mission of journalism, and if possible, design ways for it to serve us even better.

We tentatively plan a residential conference here in La Jolla on this subject next winter or spring, and the online discussion we are starting here is meant to explore ways to make that conference and a possible program in this area meet those goals.

I'm so pleased to welcome author and journalist James Goldsborough as the leader of this discussion. Jim spent 15 years of his distinguished career headquartered in Paris reporting, from forty countries no less, for The International Herald Tribune and Newsweek magazine. He has also worked for several other newspapers, first as a reporter and then as a columnist. He currently writes a column for The Voice of San Diego, first experiment in regional investigative online reporting. Welcome to all, and especially to you, Jim.

1:1 James O. Goldsborough We've been known as the "fourth estate" for as long as anyone can remember, more important to the nation, said Jefferson, than government itself. Good government—democracy itself—depends on us, and lest anyone think of reining us in, we have the First Amendment to protect us—freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Our business is different from others, more mission than business really, one requiring us to be skeptical, to look under rocks and behind closed doors to get at the truth, to defend the public interest at all costs. One of us, Joseph Pulitzer, endowed a prize by which we measure ourselves each year, acclaim those who meet our high standards.

But the real jury is not the Pulitzer: It is the millions of people who open their newspapers each morning or turn on their televisions each evening for the news. When we meet their standards, we make enough money to stay in business. It is a delicate balance: the mission is not to make money; but we have to make money to fulfill the mission.

Just enough money, that is, no excess profits.

Journalism was always first the mission, then the money.

But recently the balance began to tip. Families owning newspapers grew larger, with heirs demanding more money. Publicly-owned daily newspapers attracted powerful shareholders, who demanded higher returns. In an attempt to keep families and shareholders happy, newspapers brought in outside executives to cut staffs and increase profit margins, people who didn't know or care about the mission. Something similar happened at the networks, whose news programs once had been legendary. The networks were sold off to business and entertainment conglomerates, whose obeisance was to Wall Street, not to the mission. It was the substitution of professional values for those of corporate America.

At the same time, new competition—the new media—was coming along. Cable television, with its round-the-clock news coverage, proved successful, and then came the Internet with its countless blogs. This was not news as the profession had known it: Neither cable TV nor the Internet had any historic sense of journalistic mission or public trust. Cable TV was bent toward infotainment, obsessed by ratings and uninterested in local news; the gabby Internet had millions of opinions but no reporters.

But with the sense of mission in the mainstream media already fading into blurred nostalgia, what did it matter?

Ask yourselves this: How could it be that not one of the nation's top 50 newspapers opposed the war in Iraq? The politicians say they were duped, and many no doubt were afraid to oppose a presidential war. But how could our top newspapers, with their institutional memories of Vietnam, all be duped as well? Where was the skepticism, the investigative reporting, the questioning of motives, the collective sense of national interest? "All these newspapers are on notice," wrote defense intelligence guru Thomas Powers in The Columbia Journalism Review. "They were hustled."

The answer was depressingly clear: editorial pages, which represent publishers and owners—that is, families and shareholders—were afraid. They were afraid war opposition would cost them readers, advertisers and money. They chucked the mission.

The lack of skepticism about Bush's war is the best example of the decline of the traditional media, but not the only one. Each day brings new examples: the sale of another newspaper, protest resignation of another editor, closing of an overseas or state capital bureau, elimination of a drama, book or music critic, cutback on local coverage, trivialization of the front page, drop in students applying for journalism fellowships, drop in teenage interest in the news. The journalistic pass given to Bush's war fit the pattern.

Since war is the most deadly of human activities, the media's war mission has historically been its most important. The media learned something during World War I when "the whole apparatus of the state went into action to suppress the truth," wrote Phillip Knightley in his history of war coverage. Reporters and photographers were kept far from the fronts. "To enable war to go on," wrote Knightley, "people had to be steeled for further sacrifices, and this could not be done if the full story of what was happening was known. More deliberate lies were told than in any other period of history."

That was not going to happen again. In World II, Korea and Vietnam, we covered the fronts and told the full story. Government lies and deceptions--famous in Vietnam--were exposed. With Iraq we have come full circle.

What does it matter than the mainstream media is being replaced by cable television and the blogs? What does it matter that newspaper circulation continues to fall and network news is mostly watched by grandparents? What does it matter than regional newspapers around the nation are failing, that The Chicago Tribune is under siege, The Los Angeles Times gutted, Knight-Ridder sold off, CBS News turned into infotainment, The Wall Street Journal ready to sell out to Rupert Murdoch, the champion of substituting ideology for truth and mission for money? What does it matter that publishers like Jay Harris and Jeffrey Johnson speak out against the loss of public trust? "I fear we no longer sense the same level of moral obligation to excel in all we do," said Harris in resigning from The San Jose Mercury News rather than accept more cuts in news coverage. Johnson at The Los Angeles Times, was fired for the same crime.

Not to worry, one hears, it is evolution at work, creative destruction. The proliferation of alternative news sources is said to be leading us into a new and better era, wrenching the news from a handful of specialists and elitists and bringing the "democratization" of news to America. Newspapers and network news are dinosaurs. The future of journalism is cable television and the blogs.

But what about the mission? What cable television program could have made Bush question his war as Walter Cronkite's CBS commentary on February 27, 1968, made Lyndon Johnson conclude he had "lost middle America?" What cable program could do what Ed Murrow did to Joseph McCarthy? What blog could do what The Washington Post did during Watergate and The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers? What blog could do what Knight-Ridder reporters did in exposing the Bush lies and deceptions over Iraq—the only newspaper reporters to do so? The public trust that once existed won't be replicated in cable TV, talk radio and the blogs. If we lose the mainstream media—whether it is assassinated or commits suicide doesn't really matter—we are in trouble.

In October, 2003, a research group at the University of Maryland tabulated three public "misperceptions" about the Iraq war. They showed large portions of the public believing that (1) weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, (2) Iraq was linked to September 11, and (3) a majority of nations supported the war. The research group, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, then traced the misperceptions to the primary news source of the people holding them. The results showed that 45% of people whose primary source was Fox News held all three misperceptions, compared to 12-15% for the other networks, 9% for the press and 4% for PBS-NPR.

"We were stunned at the differentials," said Clay Ramsay, the research director. "It is a cautionary tale."

The cautionary tale demonstrated that reporting in the mainstream media, whatever its decline and the pusillanimity of its editorial pages, had done a better job of informing the public about the truth of Bush's war. If the future of journalism is cable television and the blogs, there is going to be a cost.

1:2 Raymond Alden What a marvelous essay with which to open this conference! Congratulations!

I've no hint in my mind whatsoever about where the solution might lie, but am worried about the vast breadth of the problem. I can't help but wonder if we have defined it well enough to attack it.

There is one statement I'd like to hear more about: "Families owning newspapers grew larger with heirs demanding more money. Publicly-owned daily newspapers attracted powerful shareholders, who demanded higher returns."

This is known to the point of being almost "conventional wisdom", which makes me (knee-jerker that I am) wonder if it is literally true beyond the one or two well-known examples. I remember reading somewhere that from an investor's point of view, newspapers are a "cash cow" even when unprofitable. A connection perhaps? I just don't know.

Anyway, thanks for being here!

1:3 Richard Farson I think you're right, Ray, about cash cows. Newspapers are still profitable in many cases. As I understand it, The Los Angeles Times was returning 19% but that wasn't enough to suit the stockholders. Jim probably has better understanding of this than I. But they're all in a trimming mode, or, like The New York Times, starting new sections on style, sport, escapes, dining out, etc...in other words going to a sort of popular magazine format to attract new readers and advertisers...what is referred to as commoditizing, a dangerous path for a profession to follow.

1:4 James O. Goldsborough There are more than "one or two examples" of the statement about families and shareholders putting the squeeze on. I could name a dozen newspapers facing the problem. The Washington Post's Don Graham's wrote in The Wall Street Journal few months ago that shareholders pressing The New York Times for larger profits represented a trend that would have newspapers sold off to the highest bidder "like sides of beef." There is simply so much money out there in the hands of mutual funds, hedge funds, investment mgrs, etc., all looking for big alpha profits that newspapers with their mission and 20% returns are like lambs at the slaughterhouse. The New York Times and The Washington Post are protected for now by class B stock, but for how long? Why won't the heirs of the Sulzbergers and Grahams become as greedy as the Chandlers? And if Adolf Ochs, Eugene Meyer and Harry and Otis Chandler had their hearts in the news and newspapers, who's to say their great grandchildren will give a fig?

1:5 Richard Farson On the day we opened this conference I received my copy of The New York Review of Books featuring a headline "Goodbye to Newspapers?" and a Russell Baker review of two books on the crisis in journalism. He touches on a number of the subjects we will be dealing with, but for this comment I will quote only from his discussion of the question as to whether the new electronic media will assume the investigative responsibility still carried by newspapers. He quotes sociologist Herbert Gans sounding downbeat on that question:

"The history of technological innovation does suggest that the cultural, social, and economic innovations expected from new technologies do not often materialize. Consequently, technology alone will do little to create a bright future for journalism."

Baker goes on: "How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will. At present about 80% of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers ...and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily. Moreover, corporations like Google and Yahoo apparently have no interest in going into serious journalism. (Google has an automated news site, Google News, which sifts through hundreds of online newspapers and news agency reports; and Yahoo includes news agency reports on its Yahoo News site. But neither fields its own reporting staff or provides its own news coverage.)"

1:6 Jane Poynter Thanks for this marvelous topic. One of the issues I deal with day in and day out is credibility of information in the new media, or, for that matter, in many news papers. Sadly, while the 'mission' should be to provide the truth, or some portion of it, this can be in conflict with a corporation's fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders. An answer perhaps lies in the corporate structure used to present information to the public. Non-profits like NPR--who captivate the ears of over 40 million Americans--are not beyond bias, but they can at least maintain the integrity of their mission with less temptation to sell out. There is also a third corporate structure in the making--something between the classic for-profit and non-profit. This has been spear headed by a growing group of entrepreneurs and business owners who feel social responsibility more than they feel the need to compromise for mega-profits.

This conference is available in its entirety as a downloadable MS Word document. Click here to transfer the entire transcript to your own system.

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