For use September 10, 2001

 Future Shoes 
"The Abdication of Journalism"

Because our minds can only get around so much, we're better at focusing on one thing than on many things. We're better at mourning a pop star's air crash death than an economy bent on disrupting all our lives. We're better at following a politics/crime soap opera than seeing how an entire society is swinging off-plumb.

We can't, for instance, simultaneously lament the demise of Silicon Valley and traditional journalism. Both are near death, but we focus on technology because it seemed so promising so recently, and because there is still a strong likelihood of a miracle recovery. Like we're going to go back to IBM Selectrics?

Journalism is sadder. Over the course of a single generation we have gone from a stable, diverse, competitive, professional, and self-policing reporting profession to an industry driven almost solely by market considerations. No one lives in a true two-newspaper city anymore. And even the single newspapers are seldom locally owned anymore. Newspapers and TV stations tend to be holdings in a portfolio of a conglomerate like AOL/Time Warner, with the sole objective of beating the 4% annual profit the owners could obtain from a savings passbook.

There are no Walter Cronkites or Douglas Edwardses any more. And Katharine Graham was the last of her kind on the print side, the local owner-operator. The streets are full today of reporters of keen mind and assiduous training, who have been let go because quarterly projections were not met.

Journalism has been subsumed into infotainment. Once-proud reporting entities are now the investment cows of Westinghouse, Disney, News Corp, Thomson International, Viacom and General Electric. The right to know has been trumped by what the market will bear. So fallen is the state of newspapers that chains like Gannett, Newhouse, McClatchey and Knight-Ridder, companies that invented the media conglomerate and the nonlocal local, are seen as keepers of the journalistic flame, despite their current orgy of newsroom downsizing.

Consider the squeeze these firms are in:

• They must make money in their traditional realms (broadcast or newsprint) while giving away their entire product for free online.

• Newspapers must do so in the face of rising newsprint costs.

• They must put up better numbers in the face of what appears to be declining print literacy and increasing apathy by broadcast viewers for anything but sex and sports.

• They must do so amid wide suspicion that these media did not behave impartially during the past presidential election. (While conservatives characterize corporate entities like Peter Jennings as red-eyed purveyors of socialism, nonconservatives suspect that Fox Network News, through Bush brother in law John Ellis, and NBC, through the intervention of GE Chairman Jack Welch, effectively threw election-night predictions to the Republican candidate.)

Meanwhile, low-cost, low-brow, market-targeted, axe-to-grind outlets ranging from Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge and even the once-proud Meet the Press are stealing the meat from the plate of their more balanced brothers.

The worst thing for us all is that smart, fair-minded people are being driven out of the news business, and are being replaced by replicants and whores. It is a return in many ways to yellow sheet journalism as practiced a century and more ago -- only these yellow sheets are run not by tight-budget competitors but by giant corporate entities whose interests may be widely disparate from yours. You want to be consciously informed and entertained; they want access to your unconscious.

What can you do? First, admit that it's happening. The emperor's new clothes are hype and misdirection -- sweeps week and Gary Condit in place of the issues, political gossip instead of real politics, pandering to the least-common denominator instead of doing the best work one can do.

Second, support your local newspaper and broadcast news with your subscriptions and patronage, up until the moment they sell out. Then never darken those doors again. This is the toughest kind of medicine, and in administering it people will call you a crank.

Third, point your money and your attention span at a deserving entity, if you can find one. I watch Jim Lehrer on PBS almost every night. The show is fair and balanced, and gives issues the time they require. And they ignore scandal. I also subscribe to my local public radio station. I buy one of the local papers, and the Sunday New York Times. None of these is perfect, and sometimes each fall short of that mark. But they all can be shamed. Your local TV news, and your chain newspapers, are likely beyond that.

Get involved in the new media, but use a strategy of offsetting. I subscribe to the premium edition of the liberal online news site Salon, which has its own tabloid moments, but is sometimes the only place you can find out what is really happening in politics. Likewise I check in on thoughtful sites like Bob Somerby's Daily Howler, which vivisects the dirty deeds of the press, and The Nation, still a reputable mag after all these years.

To get the other side's views, I look in on US News & World Report and, when I am in the mood for foaming at the mouth, The Drudge Report. And I bookmark scores of columnists, from mavericks like Mickey Kaus and Dan Kennedy to establishmentarians David Broder and William Safire. Finally, I begin each day by seeing what presshound James Romanesko has dug up on Romanesko's Media News.

Fourth, hire an ex-journalist to work in your company. They don't make the best attack-dogs, and they are unlikely to rise to positions of leadership. But good reporters have a skill that is fast disappearing from our society -- the ability to know the truth when they hear it, and to keep looking for it until they do. In a world quickly becoming accustomed to sucking on the teat of bologna, that skill will eventually return to favor.

Future Shoes
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Mike is available to write for your publication or organization right now. Call him at 651-644-4540. Or e-mail him.

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