Pulitzer Prize-winning critic James Agee observed long ago that journalism is "complacent to its own delusion…that it is telling the truth." Indeed.
Print journalism today, and by that I mean daily newspapers, stands at a bloody crossroads. Those who practice it must come to grips with realities, such as all the whys behind the decline in readership, thus circulation, and not continue to espouse their personal agendas, or show favoritism to their ideological pals. (And by all means, they ought to stop slobbering over their Man in the White House. Enough already!)
Yes, it's a crackpot theory, I realize, that the prime function of journalism is to inform the public impartially, without fear or favor. Color me naive. Casting that delusion aside, journalism suffers today from chronic, life-threatening credibility gaps amidst plummeting daily circulations. Result: Cutbacks, suspended publication, bankruptcy for some. Some wags might say fine, good riddance, but the loss of daily newspapers plainly sucks. It leaves a hole in the ether of how and where we get our news, however mangled or tainted.
Sadly, journalists have not yet come to recognize the question raised by mid-last century novelist and critic James Agee in his landmark "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941):
Why is it that, written, facts lose so much of their force, and reality? Partly the writers' doing: as part-artist he [sic] feels the strength of need to select and then, to invent. Also, he is not aware that the truth is more important than any petty lie he may tell . . .
Agee decried journalists' "temptation to invent." Words can "be made to do or tell anything within human conceit," he wrote. Mere words were bedeviled by two "centrally important and inescapable ways:"
(1) Falsification (through inaccuracy of meaning as well as inaccuracy of emotion) and the (2) inability [of words] to communicate simultaneity [sic] with any immediacy, greatly impairs the value and integrity of their achievement. . .
For newspapers and, to a degree, network and cable TV news operations, their credibility is on the line. Believing in content of what you just read, or even saw, is a matter of faith, not a given. Is it "truth"? What's the reporter's motive? Why do they "take down" my candidate? Few of us trust news media nowadays. Surveys place news reporters somewhere between defense lawyers and used car salesman. Ouch!
Plain fact: Most young people don't read newspapers. It's not "cool." Not embracing early reading regimens leads, naturally, to non-subscribers later on. Paperless households now are the rule, not the exception, as in my kid-salad days. (Growing up, three newspapers landed on our doorstep. I fell in love with each in its own way.)
Young people today endure only brief brushes with headlines. Reading is passe. Kids and their likewise inattentive oldsters (part of the problem?) shamelessly, even proudly, display apathy about what's going on. Escapism? Intellectual laziness? Self-centeredness? All of the above?
In any event, God and parents know separating today's youth from their I-Pods and electronic gadgetry is rather hopeless. So larger issues, beyond Facebook, escape younger folks. In a world of their own, subtlety is beyond their grasp. "Dah" is the operable watchword.
They become blank slates upon which demagogues play, and other mischief-makers easily mislead. Many mischief-makers are glib politicians making suckers out of their largely ignorant targets. "Out of it," today's young people and a legion of dumbed-down elders live in an insular world, a fools' paradise, quite unaware of the Big Picture, or the consequences of inattention. (Proof: Al Franken's "win" in Minnesota?)
Elections are akin to electing homecoming kings or queens. Popularity rules. Issues matter little; perception is all. Even records of outright corruption are ignored.
Newspapers rely on credibility for their very existence. Not reporting things is NOT an excuse; it — selective omission of stories — is part of the problem.
Credibility carries with it a responsibility of lending "importance" to what is reported, as if to validate. Reporting "the other side," or sides, however, is often another matter. Newspaper editors and staffs take sides and in effect, tell the reading public to go to hell if it does not agree with them. Hubris, anyone?
One-sided stories stand as "the truth" when they could well be half-truths, or quarter-truths, depending on the stripes (attitudes) of the news provider. Slants are "in." People get suspicious. Bias is so very heavy, too obvious, too blatant to hide.
When a newspaper's credibility goes "poof," the gig is up. Even Pravda and Izvestia in the heyday of the USSR felt glowers of suspicion from skeptical readers for spouting the Party Line all the time. Even enslaved peoples get fed up with spoon-fed "news."
Political correctness won't wash. Not anymore. "PC" is sniffed out by adult, clued-in readers. We laugh at "PC," the invisible 800-pound gorilla in the news room. By pushing "PC" upon us, such as Muslims-can-do-no-wrong, the unwashed public turns off to Big Media. News junkies turn to the worldwide web for better or for worse. Alternative media fill the gap left by the mainstream's curious, self-destructing credibility lapses. (Some dare call it lying to the people for ideological reasons.)
Remarkably, a host of journalists don't give a rat's ass about their lack of credibility. They defend the indefensible. It is as if a vast, liberal-friendly agenda is in play, replaying partisan talking points, frequently cited as "facts," or put in sidebars. One-sided? Certainly. Why are we not surprised? Inbred journalism majors only reproduce themselves, same as "liberals" rule college campuses.
For us lovers of even-handed journalism, and its ex-practitioners, the outlook is bleak. William Greider popped a critical question in the very title of his little-known book years ago about the unforgiving, burgeoning national debt, Who Will Tell the People?: The Betrayal of American Democracy.
(Good question, particularly in this era of big-spending Obama. How much is a trillion, anyhow? Staggering amount, to be heaped upon our grandkids. How noble is that?)
Time was, in my days in newspapering, street-smart blue collar kids without fancy degrees entered the journalism field, if they had their wits about them, and could write intelligently. Not rocket science. Reporting was a relatively easy entry level job, low-paying, yes, maybe a stepping stone to a "real" well-paying job. Trying to raise a family on reporters' salaries then was well-neigh impossible. I know.
Many blue-collar kids worked their way up to editor slots. They were not out to "save the [post-Watergate] world," just to tell the truth, as best they could, sans agenda. They were sticklers for accuracy, for getting all sides. "Go back," I was told, "and find out what the other side thinks of this proposal," an editor once told me.
My first real boss, a city editor, was a high school grad. Started as a cub reporter after the war, the biggie, WWII, he covered dog shows, the works, well. Talent he had, and it was recognized by higher ups. Common sense and fairness ruled his apolitical world. (I had NO IDEA of his political persuasion. Not even a clue!)
As a J-school graduate I emerged from college with the quaint, and rather new notion, that "interpretative journalism," a term found in the name of our '60's textbook, was Gospel. Context was king, pathway to "acing" the public affairs reporting course. Inserting "context" into your prose was a must — in J-school, that is. Later on, my wise, untutored city editor disabused me of that notion. Leave the interpretation to the editorial page, he'd say. Do a @#$%& opinion piece if you must.
Today the field is rife with highly-degreed, some multiple degreed, from upscale colleges. And fresh from their profs' indoctrinations, they are out to save the world, or Something. Such as (subconsciously?) getting someone they like, actually elected. Not content with simply reporting what happened, they wish "to make a difference."
Sometimes they make up news. (To wit: Jason Blair at the New York Times; Dan Rather and Mary Mapes at CBS-TV.) This new breed is all post-Watergate, and the world is their oyster. Watch their dust as they try to remake the world from their catbird seats as mighty journalists. (Imperious, is that the word for it?)
Journalists now spill bias into stories like never before, slanted in favor somehow of their like-minded ideological kin who turn out to be, nearly exclusively, "progressives." (Ah, the very word hath subtle charms. Subbing for suddenly out-of-fashion "liberals," it suggests PROGRESS. It is so very, ah, egalitarian! Orwell lives.)
Reporters today do not respond well to criticism. They chafe. They lash back. They name-call those who disagree. As one reader of my columns wisely observed a while back, "Argument is beneath them, because they are the Gate Keepers!"
Their patronizing message is "Heel, reader. Shut up. I have all the answers, thank you very much." Call this hubris. And it works both ways, ideologically speaking.
Editors brush aside harsh criticism reflexively, dismissing it as the whining of the "right wing." Always, "right wing." One would think there's a vast conspiracy! Meanwhile an invisible "left wing" gets no mention, none at all. Why is curious. Well, considering most newspeople are "progressives," like birds of a feather, they do flock together.
When the goal is not to report happenings, and what newsmakers say, rather to "change the world," or say, to stop an unpopular war — a carryover from Vietnam days, reborn in reaction to Iraq — journalism has betrayed itself, its responsibility, and its purpose (?) to report the news squarely.
My guess is that more than 90% of journalists voted for Obama. That is reflected now, as it was before the election, in their slavish "coverage" of their hero. Look only to ABC-TV's Charlie Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin, and the New York Times sending a phalanx of angst-filled reporters north to Alaska to "dig the dirt" on a candidate they clearly despised. It was oh, so very very obvious. Same as the rationale for David Letterman's "joke." To take someone down. Egads! Have they no shame?
The late, great critic, novelist and film script writer Agee spoke wisdom for the ages in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men:”
Journalism is true to the same sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what conditioned and produced it . . . but that is about as far as its value goes. This is not to accuse or despise journalism for anything beyond its own complacent delusion, and its enormous power to poison the public with the same delusion, that it is telling the truth.
Simply reporting without gratuitously added “context” (which turns out, more or less, to be the writers' opinions) is a worthy, but perhaps impossible goal, but still worth striving for, honestly. Agee's words are worth framing in the nation's newsrooms:
It is probably never really wise, or even necessary, or anything better than harmful, to educate a human being toward a good end by telling him lies.
Amen.
Larson, a fan of Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee, writes more about journalism's warts in his May 31, 2006, article "Agee on Journalism: '…a broad, successful form of lying." Larson is not the cartoonist of the same name. He is a graduate of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota and a former newspaper reporter and editor.
Gary,
Newspapers will to continue to decline in readership and may phase completely out of existence within a generation. While one may argue that they've done it to themselves due to their continuing lack of credibility; there is another effect at work.
I was part of a generation that was taught to read at an early age by sitting on my Father's lap at night and reading the paper to him. I could read before I went to kindergarten.
You say yourself that "Most young people don't read newspapers." This is, in my opinion, a product of public education. Information today is 'force fed' to students by their teachers, or quickly dredged from the internet. Study papers are no longer written, they are products of "cut-&-paste" sessions the night before the essay is due. Attention spans are minimal. Reading takes both time and commitment if one is going to properly glean the information out of an article.
Most kids today aren't ready to consign this type of effort. Especially if the effort merely validates some point that a lifetime NEA member spent most of an hour ranting about in a classroom. As a result; newspapers in general and liberal newspapers specifically are being hoist on the dual petards of public education (read indoctrination) and their own bias.
The conservative view of the news media, public education, Hollywood and the liberal controlled public policy think tanks imposes a tyranny of repetitive and myopic story lines that does an injustice to many readers. The basic plot line in the "official story" is always:(1) Journalists are liberals and (2)Journalists deliberately bias their reporting to support their political ideology.
Very true of course, but the real world isn't that simple or that easily controlled by personal ideology. Among the Boomer generation, we can all wax nostalgic about the newspaper we read daily in those wonderful days of yesteryear. But we also forget that the Greatest Generation viewed television's early attempts to capture viewers with their nightly news broadcasts as slightly subversive to our national culture – the "vast wasteland of television" where information was absorbed passively while staring at the "boob tube". Change happens, we don't have to like it, but ascribing vaguely sinister motives and outcomes to simple technological change reveals a childish state of mind.
The internet/electronic communication revolution is killing print media (and to an accelerating extent network televised news), not deliberately, but with an inexorable finality. The information offspring spawned by the development of the internet is a good thing for democracy. Certainly the names are silly: twitter, MySpace, email, text messaging, etc. but one must soberly consider the fact the mainstream media can no longer control our conversations on important issues, nor can the media control which issues we discuss, can no longer control how dissenting rebuttals are framed or who is allowed to rebut and to what length. How can this be a bad thing?
Any change brings disruption to the established order and always some downside. Obviously, there are idiots who provide no value to our national conversation through their contributions on the internet but that has often been the case and precedes the internet – the English have long provided a speakers' corner in one of London's parks where any twit or half-wit can publicly espouse whatever conspiracy theory they subscribe to – and at length.
But consider the personal advantage the internet provides as opposed to television or the newspapers. Information is now "real time", stories break as they happen, there is no lag while a newspaper is printed or a talking head reviews the script. Information is readily available in a multitude of ways besides television or paper – many Americans learned of Michael Jackson's death before and through other than the mainstream media. Maybe that wasn't earth shattering news to many Americans but what about timely knowledge of a terrorist incident? Comparing a newspaper to the internet in terms of information dissemination is like comparing a horse drawn carriage to a sleek Mercedes-Benz sedan.
Best of all, there are now innumerable forums, blogs, analytical websites where citizens can exchange views outside the biased control of the mainstream media – the mainstream media's Goliath has been brought down by the internet's David. The fact that you're reading one of those excellent forums on Intellectual Conservative bodes well for our country and the robustness of free discussion. So, tell us again, what exactly do we need newspapers for?
[...] Death Knell for Mainstream Newspapers, Intellectual Conservative [...]
Okay, we’ve heard from the ‘boomers’ (of which I am a member), now I would like to hear from Gen-X, Y, and Millenials. Do you agree or disagree with the assessment your generations don’t read, are indifferent to print, and are intellectually lazy? I believe this is the condescension of my own generation speaking because we fancy ourselves uniquely and politically ‘engaged’, and the masters of self-awareness.
Like Larson, Millbrat and Skurka, I love print because that is what I grew up with. I even love the smell and look of old worn books, and find digital-media a bit cold. Like Millbrat, I have fond recollections of my father’s daily cover-to-cover ingestion of the Washington Post; and how much I mimicked this thirst for fresh knowledge. However, I also was critical of his choice of reportage as I found much in the Post that was clearly biased even when factual; a flaw that has only intensified as the bias remains bereft of facts to support it.
Also, like Larson, Millbrat and Skurka, I take love of reading as an indication of some intelligence. But, unlike Larson, I don’t posit the shift from print proves any coarsening of engagement. There are reasons to think there is such a coarsening, but not the demise of or disinterest in print. Today, I read the equivalent of three books a week, but may go 3-4 weeks between printed newspapers. How could I do that if there was no market for the digital media? Obviously, then, a whole lot of other folks besides me are taking advantage of new media.
As a kid, I’d briefly read the headlines before scrambling to get at the funnies after my elder brothers had dismembered them. Before I’d finished, it was time for school; and by the time we got home, the paper was wrapped around something frozen or serving as kitty-litter. Yet, I had an insatiable literary appetite for which the daily paper was but one source. My brothers would chide me that, if there was nothing else handy, I’d read every scrap on cereal boxes and board-game instructions (true). I read the family encyclopedia from A-T (only stopped at T because Mom dropped the subscription before we had a full set) and the dictionary including instructions for decipherment. I read the Bible; despite which I retained little from it as all those ‘begats’ got right confusing. We read classics and eclectics. My dad liked poetry, most of which I never got but found poems of my own to like. I loved science-fiction and comic-books, both of which my father regarded as ‘trash’ and became, for me, a minor cause for rebellion. So, I was a ‘futurist’ open to new modes which my parents distained; whereas, now, I am old-foggy to younger generations because I mostly read politics and engineering. But, hey, I do read them online! And, of course, I have read history to the point of amateur historian, and might have gone professional if not for a greater love of machines.
My experience with my own kid and his friends is very different, few of whom read anything and prefer TV and radio information to print. What they get from the Internet is mostly entertainment, though some news must ‘leak’ through. This is because my son is learning impaired (as are most of his pals, he has only one friend in college who is regarded the ‘egghead’), so I am not well positioned to judge the younger crowd. My sister’s boys, on the other hand, are as voracious as we were; reading and studying a great deal. The younger of the two is a computer hack (much as I once was); as much alive to the inner workings as to games. He is a wealth of information on his cherished subjects, much of which he gleans from Internet readings. On other topics he’s indifferent and an indifferent scholar, as were my brothers. Both boys are multilingual and earn good marks in school without nearly the prodding it took just to keep my boy from giving up. Their house is full of books (as is mine) few of which have not been read by everyone. This encourages me (at least generationally) and makes me think the apathy to reading may be individual and not particularly societal. Our generation had only print media to read; I-Pod and Kindle not yet having been invented.
Finally, I must disagree with Pat Skurka the assertion that print’s demise is due to bias is unfounded or exaggerated. Several studies have been conducted (at least one media sponsored) demonstrating this bias both exists and the public is reacting to it negatively; and has turned to alternative media that bypasses the old media it no longer trusts. One study found journalists to be 80% liberally-inclined based on a combination of voting habits, political-contributions, and reportage. This is out of all proportion to the general public, which is closer to 50/50. The other studies found a less pronounced leftward tilt, but leftward nonetheless. On election night 2000, one prominent News anchor unmistakably alternated between dejection, elation and finally openly wept as it was first reported Bush, then Gore, then Bush had won. The other anchors and talking-heads were less visibly partisan, yet the partisanship was palpable and mostly liberal.
Some distrust the media because it is too liberal, while others insist (against all evidence) that it is too conservative. You may not agree with that assessment of the media, but you can hardly object that is how others perceive the media given even the media realizes this bias has cost them credibility and are scrambling to distract us from it. Their reaction has been to deny it exists in the hope we’ll be convinced and, thereby, reestablish trust. I see this as a huge miscalculation that only compounds the suspicion against them. The way to reestablish trust is to return to honest reporting. Note I do not say they must return to ‘unbiased’ reporting to regain trust; just admit the bias, tone it down, and separate fact from feeling. I do agree with you that the real cause of print-media’s economic demise is the large array of alternate media (i.e., competition; especially the Internet and talk-radio), but creditability does play a role in audience fidelity too; and right now audience is fleeing the established media wholesale. More and more, people are registering this distrust of the old media in undeniable ways. We only see the tip of the iceberg, but, like the MSM, you want to believe only what can be seen above the waterline. I have to believe there is a very large mass below the waterline. Even more ominous for the media, however, is not the size of this mass either above or below, but its rate of expansion above.
I must also protest Pat’s characterization of the conservative 'view' of “… the news media, public education, Hollywood and the liberal controlled public policy think tanks…” as a “… tyranny of repetitive and myopic story lines that does an injustice to many readers.”
Is this ‘tyranny’ any greater than the liberal tyranny of a media dominance that makes it nigh impossible getting the conservative message out to a public distrustful of said media but lost as to where else to find information more to its liking? A message that says they need not fear the histrionics of the left driving them cattle-like into the maws of a micromanaging nanny-state? As shown, this view is no mere ‘plot-line’. It is the nature of our media to lean politically to a dominant view. The view that now prevails is the one nurtured on our campuses in the 1960s and 1970s, when radicalism was all the rage. The current top talking-heads and the editors of our major newspapers are all of that generation, orientation, education, and formed their opinions against that backdrop. You may argue you agree or disagree with that view of them, but can hardly dispute the media leans more one way than another. Journalists are men of letters (at least that is how they perceive themselves), and men-of-letters invariably and historically lean leftward. Newspapers have indulged in politics in this country and throughout Western Europe since the time of the American and French Revolution, reveling in the freedom to speak out against government or for causes. The news media, by its very nature, attracts those with an axe to grind and, overwhelmingly, that means those inclined to overhaul society. Does this not precisely describe our liberal nattering-nabobs? Horace Greely, the abolition crusading editor, is the model many journalists carry in their heads of who they are or aspire to become. How, then, is it a revelation the media is infested with such semi-radical reformers.
Further readings:
http://ajkeen.com/e.htm; http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2008/12/2009-the-end-of-print.html – says not democracy, but mobocracy/cacophony is the result of print’s demise; aka digital Babylon. Keen’s rage against ‘amateurism’ rings of some ‘truth’, but also reeks of an elitist Puritanism. His despair for the demise of culture is hardly new and the present corruption that he visualizes is partly an idealization of the past. The cacophony has always been with us, and brilliance has always vied with mediocrity for place; which, if anything, stimulates greater brilliance in the product. Shakespeare is recited 400-years after his death, while lesser playwrights of the era (of whom there were many) go unremembered. Thus, it is easy to believe the past more brilliant than it was if all you know or note are its luminaries, especially as we lump all past eras into a single, undifferentiated tableau. The reality is journalism has been partisan, dishonest, and sensationalist for as long as there have been journalists. Occasionally, it manages to rise above petty sensationalism and bias, to become briefly ‘professional’ in the sense of greater honesty. The ‘professionalism’ and ‘expertise’ Keen and the other apologists attribute to it is, thus, part real, but also part fantasy born of the need of ‘professionals’ to justify their special status as ‘guardians of speech’, their condescension of those they ‘educate’, and their expense accounts. The same can be said of literature, scholarship, philosophy, and art. Therefore, the pollution Keen deplores as a byproduct of print’s demise is a nonsense masking pollution that was always there. Anyone who has read Hamilton, Tocqueville, Charles Francis Adams, Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, or Dana realizes both advocacy and corruption existed in spades. Likewise, the examples of great music and writing from the past he cites as proof of an uncrowded and ‘undemocratic brilliance’ were composed against a backdrop of competing voices, spin, and mediocrity little different from today. He is right the Internet cranks up the din, but also expands the reach of whatever brilliance exists within the mix. The great thing is we have some personal control over how much we listen to the din or tune it out to hear the truly brilliant.
As for the ‘guardians of speech’ and culture, I have to ask: who are they guarding speech from – from government or outsiders like us? Free-speech is not the sole preserve of ‘professionals’, it is a birthright we all have; something the liberal’s ‘Fairness Doctrine’ supposes will make less 'raucous'. Too long, we have been drowned out by an indifferent media, often abetted by government. The Internet has given us back some small measure of that voice we once had when government and the media were relatively weak. How long this lasts before it too is tamed and ‘professionalized’ remains to be seen.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/new-york-times – End Times
http://www.geardiary.com/2008/03/06/the-email-roundtable-the-demise-of-print-media-and-a-possible-reason-for-the-amazon-kindle/ – techies discuss print’s demise
http://crosscut.com/2009/01/30/media/18815/ – “What needs saving isn't newspapers … but journalism”; to which a responder adds: “…decentralization of information gathering and reporting will prove far more democratic…”
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4037 – lays out reasons behind 2004 Knight-Ridder divestments; News Vine scolding of Sherman (http://cdawson.new.newsvine.com/_news/2006/02/21/104139-the-end-of-print-media) – with its emphasis on saving jobs – as instigator has it backwards. We know consolidation and forced restructuring means the best survive while the mediocrities and ideologues (journalistic pretenders) are forced out, leaving us with a leaner, stronger, healthier, and less biased media; whereas he argues the opposite (i.e., protecting jobs preserves integrity).