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Creating a future for journalism

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By Richard Becker/UWire | New Mexico Daily Lobo
Last updated: 08/31/09 11:59pm

The history of the newspaper stretches back to the turn of the 17th century, but now Americans are watching that proud tradition disintegrate. Across America, newspapers large and small, independent and corporate, liberal and conservative are collapsing at an alarming rate.

The results have been rampant consolidation, the laying off of entire wings of reporters and other staff, and the complete elimination of a print edition, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has done.

The so-called “death of print,” or, more specifically, the “death of newspapers,” has become a topic de rigueur among journalists, intellectuals and bloggers. The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a piece fittingly titled “The Death of Print,” wrote in the spring of this year that “the online cacophony that would follow the demise of newspapers would be fast, furious and fun, insightful and opinionated.”

But, he worries, who would pay for the bureaus, the reporters, the concrete and significant expenses of the journalistic craft?

Rather than bemoan the newspaper’s demise, we must instead proactively consider the possibilities for its replacement. If we are to maintain our democratic state in any sort of working form, it will be necessary to maintain some form of journalism.

I needn’t rehash here all the reasons why it would be a disaster for our nation if newspapers continued to crumble without a similar institution to take up their charge; these reasons have already been fully enumerated elsewhere by greater experts than me. Our generation faces a fork in the road: continue down the path of the traditional newspaper, which has devolved into a crass enterprise in which advertising revenue dictates content, or forge a new path governed by public interest, mutual cooperation, citizen participation and small-“d” democracy.

Let me emphasize at the outset that in no way do I mean to suggest that profit is an inherently bad thing — it is obvious that our economy could not rightly function without the incentive of profit — but so long as journalistic decisions are in the hands of corporate lions whose only language is the dollar sign, journalism, and thus democracy, will suffer.

Fortunately for those of us engaged in the exercise of dreaming up the future face of journalism, the path before us has already been tread. Writer Clay Shirky has considered the situation at great length. “No one experiment,” Shirky writes on his blog www.shirky.com, “is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

The point is that there will almost certainly not be an overnight solution to the dire crisis journalism is facing. This much should be abundantly clear. As scary as it may seem, what is required of us is daring and experimentation; we must be willing to jump out of the plane without knowing for sure whether the parachute works.

Perhaps the greatest example so far of a successful and profitable post-newspaper news-gathering and muckraking operation is the popular Web site TalkingPointsMemo.com.
More than a mere blog, TPM, under the leadership of founder Josh Marshall has, over the years, evolved into a massive multimedia operation with a staff of nearly a dozen, complete with a full-time Washington bureau and a daily readership in the millions. It maintains its staff through savvy use of Web ads, giving the site a revenue stream that apparently pays the bills. So, how has Marshall done it?

To begin with, TPM places an emphasis on original, hard reporting. TPM broke the story of the U.S.-attorney–firing scandal during the latter years of the Bush administration, extensively covered congressional Democrats’ efforts to quash the 2005 “overhaul” (read: demolition) of Social Security and have been indefatigable in keeping the mainstream media honest. Part of the secret to the site’s success is that TPM uses a model of community journalism, something old media seems not to have quite figured out yet. This type of journalism, in which the readers take an active role in ensuring that minor details of a story get the attention and exposure they deserve, must be a part of whatever institution takes the place of old media in the years to come. Will TPM serve as a viable model for the future of journalism?

We will have to wait and see. But in the meantime, rather than whine about the natural and inevitable decline and collapse of print media, what if we instead considered the myriad possibilities for the future? The survival of our republic depends on innovation and original thought in journalism, and we are doing a disservice to our country as citizens if we do not engage with this topic. As Helen Thomas said, “Our democracy can endure and prevail only if the American people are informed.”

Amen, Helen. Now let’s get to work.

Richard Becker is a columnist for the Kentucky Kernel, serving the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Published August 31, 2009 in Columns, Opinion

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1 comment

william

September 3, 2009 at 8:57 AM
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The print media has lost the trust of the people; plain and simple. The fourth estate of our nation no longer provides impartial, balanced and objective information. If journalists were to do that our country would not have to endure incompetent, arrogant and corrupt elected officials, and certainly the current former community aggitator become resident-in-training-pants would have been throughly vetted and would be back in Chicago aggitating communities again.

In July 2008 the New York Times’ refused to publish John McCain’s rebuttal to Barack Obama’s Iraq Op-Ed. This may be the most glaring example of liberal media bias ever seen, but true proof of widespread media bias requires one to follow an old journalism maxim: Follow the money.

Read more …

Even the Associated Press—no bastion of conservatism — considered, at least superficially, the media’s favoritism for Barack Obama. It’s time to re-visit media bias. True to form, journalists are defending their bias by saying that one candidate, Obama, was more newsworthy’ than the other. In other words, there is no media bias. It is we, the hoi polloi, who reveal our bias by questioning the neutrality of these learned professionals in their ivory-towered newsrooms.

Big Media applies this rationalization to every argument used to point out bias. ‘It’s not a result of bias’, they say. ‘It’s a matter of news judgment.’ And, like the man who knows his wallet was pick-pocketed but can’t prove it, the public is left to futilely rage against the injustice of it all.

The ‘newsworthy’ argument can be applied to every metric: one-sided imbalances in airtime, story placement, column inches, number of stories, etc. Every metric, save one.

An analysis of federal election records shows that the amount of money journalists contributed last election cycle favored Democrats by a 15:1 margin over Republicans, with $225,563 going to Democrats, only $16,298 to Republicans .

235 journalists donated to Democrats, just 20 gave to Republicans — a margin greater than 10:1. An even greater disparity, 20:1, occured between the number of journalists who donated to Barack Obama and John McCain.

Searches for other newsroom categories (reporters, correspondents, news editors, anchors, newspaper editors and publishers) produced 311 donors to Democrats to 30 donors to Republicans, a ratio of just over 10:1. In terms of money, $279,266 went to Dems, $20,709 to Republicans, a 14:1 ratio.

And while the money totals pale in comparison to the $9 million that just one union’s PACs spent to get Barack Obama elected, they are more substantial than the amount that Obama criticized John McCain for receiving from lobbyists: 96 lobbyists contributed $95,850 to McCain, while Obama — who said he wouldn’t take money from PACs or federal lobbyists — received $16,223 from 29 lobbyists.

Few journalists list their employer as an organization like MSNBC, MSNBC.com, or ABC News, or report that they’re a freelancer for the New York Times, or are journalists for Al Jazeera, CNN Turkey, Deutsche Welle Radio, or La Republica of Rome (all contributors to Obama). Most reported no employer. They’re mainly free-lancers. That’s because most major news organization have policies that forbid newsroom employees from making political donations.

As if to warn their colleagues in the media, MSNBC, in the summer of 2007, ran a story on journalists’ contributions to political candidates which drew a similar conclusion: “Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left”

The timing of that article was rather curious. Dated June 25, 2007, it appeared during the middle of the summer news doldrums in a non-election year — timing that was sure to minimize its impact among the general public, while still warning newsrooms across the country that such political donations can be checked. In case that was too subtle, MSNBC ran a sidebar story detailing cautionary tales of reporters who lost their jobs or were otherwise negatively impacted because their donations became public.

As if to warn their comrades-in-news against putting their money where their mouths are, the report also cautioned that, with the internet, “it became easier for the blogging public to look up the donors.”

It went on to detail the ban that most major media organizations have against newsroom employees donating to political campaigns, a ban that raises some obvious First Amendment issues. Whether it’s intentional or not, the ban makes it difficult to verify the political leanings of Big Media reporters, editors and producers. There are two logical ways to extrapolate what those leanings are, though.

One is the overwhelming nature of the above statistics. Given the pack mentality among journalists and, just like any pack, the tendency to follow the leader — in this case, Big Media — and since Big Media is centered in some of the bluest of blue parts of the country, it is highly likely that the media elite reflects the same, or an even greater, liberal bias.

A second is to analyze contributions from folks in the same corporate cultures.

That analysis provides some surprising results. Individuals who reported being employed by major media organizations made the following contributions:

NBC, NBC Universal: $104,184 to Democrats / $3,150 to Republicans

CBS: $45,508 to Dems / $966 to Republicans

ABC: $17,320 / $4,717

Turner Broadcasting, TBS: $30,161 / $3,950

Fox: $40,573 / $0

Fox News/Fox News Channel: $1,280 / $0

MSNBC: $210 / $282

CNN: $2,286 / $1,250

Associated Press: $2,550 / $545

Reuters: $10,745 / $3,450

Washington Post, Newsweek: $4,268 / $0

New York Times, NYT Co: $8,143 / $0

Time, Inc: $40,988 / $4,850 ($2,300 to Republicans was from someone identified as a jeweler, so the total may actually be $2,550)

Time Magazine: $1,250 / $0

USA Today: $6,067 / $0

Totals for the above:

$315,533 to Democrats ; $22,656 to Republicans — most of that to Ron Paul, who was supported by many liberals as a stalking horse to John McCain, a la Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos with Hillary and Obama.

What is truly remarkable about the above list is that, discounting contributions to Paul and Rudy Giuliani, who was a favorite son for many folks in the media, the totals look like this:

$315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans (4 individuals who donated to McCain.)

Let me repeat that: $315,533 to Democrats, $3,150 to Republicans.

A ratio of 100 : 1.

No bias there.

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