[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”xufOwYj5n0XdtGNHU7t2P2ob7klfXyeT”]
THERE’s a poignant piece up on The Guardian about a photojournalist who has tracked the collapse of American newspapers, especially the once-great Philadelphia Inquirer.
Here’s the story’s opening graph:
In the past decade, as a percentage, more print journalists have lost their jobs than workers in any other significant American industry. (That bad news is felt just as keenly in Britain where a third of editorial jobs in newspapers have been lost since 2001.) The worst of the cuts, on both sides of the Atlantic, have fallen on larger local daily papers at what Americans call metro titles. A dozen historic papers have disappeared entirely in the US since 2007, and many more are ghost versions of what they used to be, weekly rather than daily, freesheets rather than broadsheets, without the resources required to hold city halls to account or give citizens a trusted vantage on their community and the world.
This story is poignant in all kinds of ways.
Don’t be so sure the Philadelphia Inquirer’s finished, Scott.
Yeah, the paper had a horrendous few years, but it has never lost money on an operating basis, and it finally has an owner who has money to spend on it and who doesn’t need to keep stock market analysts happy (and who doesn’t run a.New Jersey political machine).
The Inquirer has even started winning Pulitzers again.
Not sure I ever said it was finished. But this and other newsrooms are dying.
The Inquirer has a great tradition, but it is struggling against very serious forces.
In 1976 the Los Angeles musicians’ union had 330,000 dues-paying members. Today it has about one third that amount. The musicians were put out of work by synthesizers. It’s similar to those days when five piece rock bands killed the big band era. Shall we bring back big bands and get rid of all those male guitar players with bad voices and adolescent love troubles?
UAW membership topped 1.5 million in 1979, falling to 390,000 active members in 2010. Robots and free-market outsourcing.
With the web, news consumption has greatly increased, but the idea of reading it on thinly pressed sheets of organic matter hauled around by machines spewing poisonous gas is history. Is there any choice for journalism but to change its ways to match new technologies?
What is a journalist in the 21st century? Are we crying about the past instead of meeting the challenges of the future? How do we define the line between culture crash and Luddite-ism? I think this is where the discussion needs to begin.
Mr. Osborne, I’m not sure many people care about the delivery system when it comes to news. The problem isn’t that newspapers are going away, it’s that news organizations are collapsing. This has enormous consequences for political accountability across the board. I don’t hear many people crying about the past, and I don’t think general questions about what a journalist is are super helpful. If we want good journalism, we have to figure out a new way to pay for it. (If you know your history, you know that political journalism has always been subsidized heavily, in one way or another, since the colonial period). So I think the discussion is already well past the point where you would like to begin it.
Very well said by Peter Richardson.
Who was “crying”? I was pointing to an article that tried to document damage on institutions and human lives.
Only the smug and heartless would look at this and say, “Oh well, stop whining, you losers.”
Another way people who pay the price for this, and try to draw attention to the damage done by technological shifts and economic crash, are infantilized by those who have less at stake.
Forbes Magazine has had several editorials by Lewis D”Vorkin describing how they are trying to meet the challenge with an evolving model of employing journalists with an online presence. It will be interesting to see how well it works.
Just as with the UAW and the musicians’ union in LA, much is becoming anachronistic in the print-on-paper media. To ignore this and pretend it’s not a major problem only makes matters worse. We need good journalism, but the systems of delivery and funding are changing. With experts around the world able to comment on events to a world audience, journalism now exists in a radically different context. The fourth estate’s voice does not have the power or necessity it once did. There are often better sources of information.
The second part of the equation is the move from Bernstein and Woodward to Judith Miller. Or Fox News. Just an anomalies? Nothing to be seen? No self-examination needed by journalists themselves?
Part of my perspective comes from being an expat for 36 years and watching Miller’s bullshit in the NYT — something almost everyone in Europe found ludicrous from the outset. If only she and the NYT were the only examples. From abroad one sees how arbitrary and biased American journalism is. Hence my lack of tears.
BTW, I think it was the treatment of journalist Gary Webb by the LA Times, NYT, and WP that became the final straw for me. The biggest threat to journalists is not new technology, or the loss of standards in the field itself, but systemic problems that hinder good reporting. The editorial staff has long since been “embedded” – not just the reporters.
A key book for me is Edward S. Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s seminal “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988). They argue “that the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.
Chomsky and Herman list five major causes for this self-censorship:
1. “Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation. The dominant mass-media outlets are large firms which are run for profit. Therefore they must cater to the financial interest of their owners – often corporations or particular controlling investors. The size of the firms is a necessary consequence of the capital requirements for the technology to reach a mass audience.
2. Advertising. News media must cater to the political prejudices and economic desires of their advertisers.
3. Sourcing Mass Media News. News agencies are dependent on large organizations (such as the government, the financial industry, and the military) for sourcing the news. This is a form of subsidy, and to maintain good relations they must cater to their interests.
4. Flak and the Enforcers. Displeasing the powerful can have serious consequences such as lawsuits, legislative actions, and campaigns to discredit the offending media outlet.
5. Anti-Communism. This was still a controlling filter when the book was published in 1988, which Chomsky notes has now been replaced by the so-called war on terror.
The web is providing a means for independent journalists, informed non-journalists, and small publications to circumvent the systemic biases of the established media.
Excellent insights. But how do we know that journalists outside the U.S. are not subject to effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on statist forces instead of market forces? Are statist pre-suppositions somehow more virtuous than market pre-suppositions? It seems to me the state replaces money with power and ends up as far from the ideal as the market driven culture.
Europe is no better. Worse in some ways. China et al…forget it.
The morning paper and the evening news were a part of the daily rhythm of my middle class upbringing, as I suspect it was for many others in the latter 20th century America. New rhythms will replace old, but it seems that the younger generations are not seeking or getting the sort of “big picture of the world” combined with the local community news that the newspaper provided. It was a sort of mash up of overarching and drill down that the present electronic media lacks. That combination was very valuable.
I can well imagine that journalists find the situations I describe in my preceding comments disconcerting and annoying. They are caught between educated readers aware of the severe limitations of the media on one side, and the industry that imposes those limitations on the other. And it sometimes goes beyond being caught in the middle, to simply being thrown out of the system all together because the bottom line counts more than good and necessary work.
The journalists that survive, especially in top positions, are too often those careerist sharpies who are cynical enough to game the journalistic corporatocracy with little regard to the actual integrity of their work. This is, of course, a troubling circumstance, because without a healthy system of journalism democracies survive in name only.
Ironically, integrity seems to define exactly why some journalists find themselves on the outside. It stands like a red flag over their head that says “Don’t hire me.”
Judith Miller is despised by every journalist I know. To say she’s typical is like saying all composers hate Jews because Wagner did.
If you look forward to a world without newspapers, visit some of the countries that don’t have even the more-or-less free press we do. I look forward to hearing your report.
I write a chapter on this in my book called The End of Print.
Yes, all the journalists despise Miller after the fact. Before hand, papers like the NYT celebrated her. If you think Miller is my point instead of just one notable example of the erosion of journalism, or that I look forward to a world without newspapers, or that I appreciate countries that don’t have them (wherever that may be) you are arguing in poor faith. More useful, for example, might be a response to the arguments I list from Herman and Chomsky. The trap of blogs is evolving — the loss of substantive discussion replaced by a choir of short posts from yes-men.
Or might, for example, discuss the differences between how Daniel Ellsberg was treated after his exposes and compare them to Assange and Snowden — including the support Ellsberg received from the media while papers like the NYT attacked Snowden and Assange. Your efforts are worthwhile, and most of your thoughts are good, but you are falling into trap of resenting important questions that must be addressed to solve these problems – always a danger when on a crusade.
You make a very good argument. Mr. Osbourne. I wanted to say that you did not deserve that strawman argument Scott hurled at you. The big news organizations need to be questioned just as much as governments.
The internet is not the sole threat of news media. the truth is the real reason for the collapse of the news media is not the internet and the uninformed, because the uninformed weren’t the ones who had newspaper subscriptions, but that the news media lose credibility with the inform. The only effect the internet had was gave the inform more choices in where to look for information. The big news organizations no longer have a monopoly on information.
You are also right that it was not just Judith Miller that led the rush to the Iraq war, it was the entire news media clamoring for war. No one who was responsible for the rush to war was ever held accountable by the media. People who should have been persona no grata in regards to the Iraq war, a war that in 2015 still is a festering wound across the media are still invited to be guests on news shows and write opinion pieces for the New York Times.
“The entire news media” was “clamoring for war”? I’ve been a journalist for 25 years. I have journalists in my family and my circle of friends is heavy on editors and scribes. If ANYONE I know is in favor of the W. wars and the way they were waged, they’ve kept it to themselves.
The Iraq and Afghan wars were neither engineered nor declared by newspapers or magazines.
This is exactly what Rove and the rest — who depend on discrediting of “the reality-based community” — are hoping for. If we blame the New York Times (and I resent Judith Miller as much as everyone else) for this mess, it takes the pressure off them.
This overlooks the role the media played in spreading the government’s arguments — essentially propaganda — and without adequate critical analysis. The Internet readership of British papers like the Guardian increased massively during the build-up and beginnings of the war because Americans were trying to find sources they could trust. It was one of the few times in American history when there was such a large loss of faith in even the most reputable papers. You have a peculiar blind spot to what the corporatocracy has done to the media, which creates a significant loss for your understanding of “culture crash.”
Accuracy In Media documents what I mention above. In a 2006 article, they noted that, “The BBC and the Guardian’s online news services were the two most popular British news websites in America during the build up to the [Iraqi] war, figures have revealed. UK news websites experienced huge increases in the number of visitors from across the Atlantic as Americans sought non-US coverage of the events leading up to and including the outbreak of war on March 19.”
The article continues:
“Many Americans turned to UK websites for an alternative view, according to new figures. In the week immediately following the outbreak of war, traffic to the BBC News site from the U.S. increased by 47%, while traffic to The Guardian website soared 83%.”
AIM’s article makes several other interesting points and is well worth reading. It is here:
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-british-media-invade-the-us-april-a/
We should also note that even a conservative organization like AIM spoke about the bias in the US media leading to the Iraq War — an indication of the extremity of the problem.
Anyone who sees a newsroom collapsing and hundreds, perhaps thousands of people losing their jobs — the vast majority of who wrote not a single word on middle-Eastern politics and hated the wars as much as I did — and takes it as as opportunity to grandstand against Judith Miller is a smug ideologue.
I am the Guardian-reading son of a badly wounded Vietnam veteran; I was laid off by a paper swallowed by a corporate raider; I need no lecturing on the dangers of war or corporate ownership. To blame the rank and file in American newsrooms, writing about police corruption or small-town politicians or school funding or local classical concerts, for the horrors of the Iraq War is truly clueless.
We are not talking about the rank-and-file, as clearly noted several times above, but about the systemic problems under which they work. These systemic problems with the media are an inherent part of culture crash. Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of “Enlightenment as the deception of the masses” has lost little of its relevance, nor the problems described by Chomsky and Herman.
Actually we WERE talking about the rank and file and you pivoted to a rant about Chomsky.
I’ve long thought that empathy was dead on the political right. Now I see that there are cold hearts on the left as well. Thanks for the education.
I think you are giving your personal circumstances too large of role in the overall picture. What journalists are facing is no worse than what millions of Americans in the rust belt faced long before, and far more catastrophically. True empathy does not place an inordinate focus on its own problems. As I noted, society only made an issue of the new economy once the rather privileged, educated middle class began to be affected. The Internet is a far more effective tool for social engineering than the big print media, so we are seeing a major shift in employment practices. In reality, journalists are far more likely to adjust and find a new place in this system than the working class was able to find new employment in the rust belt.
Journalism is a particularly difficult topic, because its standards were seriously eroded long before the new economy evolved. The latest example is the Ukraine conflict where the mainstream press has once again become a propaganda organ for the government and plutocratic interests. How can we feel sorry for this field when it participates in such harm to truth, and thus harm to people?
This doesn’t mean that the vast majority of journalists participate *directly* in the deceptions and harm. The local news in Tulsa doesn’t enter the world stage. The vast majority of the material even in the major media is honest reporting and info-tainment which is also fairly harmless in itself, even if functions as a context in which propaganda can be innocuously embedded. In that sense, the rank-and-file is relatively innocent, though I am sure that many are intelligent and sophisticated enough to know what they are participating in. That’s why I have less empathy for the people in the *big* media industry than the generally more honest working class. It is the key players at the top, of course, who are most at issue, but even if the journalists working for big media have lesser positions and don’t participate directly in the deceptions, they are still a willing if minor part in a machinery of lies. Hence the limitations of my empathy.
These issues create similar problems for the arts. One can be a best-selling classical musician by moving 250 CDs in a week and with total sales of less than a few hundred, while the big pop stars of monopolistic capitalism sell them by the millions. Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” has lost little of its relevance. Standardized cultural goods, including big print media and television news, manipulate mass society into passivity. The easy pleasures of popular culture render people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. As people accustom themselves to this sort of art, they eventually develop false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of the mass media. My contempt for these kinds of artists is just as strong as my objections to the role top journalists play in creating propaganda.
Adorno and Horkheimer noted that the nation state and culture industry will attempt to crush any form of art that leads people to genuinely think or dissent. Journalists like Gary Webb are crushed if they dare cross certain boundaries. In practice, we see that the USA also suppresses the high arts by strongly limiting their funding, and by systemic measures that leave the small amount of funding available under strict, plutocratic control. Genuinely creative musicians selling their CDs are thus little more than street vendors pedaling a few hundred CDs in a country of 320 million people. Honest and aware journalists are often in a similar predicament. They can only do honest reporting and writing through the small, alternative press which means living a life of poverty. Those are the journalists I most respect, and the ones for which I have true empathy.
BTW, I view you as one of those types of alternative journalists, a person really trying to tell the truth in a society not particularly willing to hear it. And I know that your path to the realms of alternative journalism has been painful. I humbly share many of your concerns and genuinely feel for your suffering. I hope you will keep up the good work.