 Like the nearby Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Newseum -- Washington's museum dedicated to journalism -- displays dinosaurs. On a long wall near the entrance, the front pages of newspapers from around the country are electronically posted each morning -- the artifacts of a declining industry. Inside, the high-tech exhibits are nostalgic for a lower-tech time when banner headlines and network news summarized the emotions and exposed the scandals of the nation. Lindbergh Lands Safely. One Small Step. Nixon Resigns. Cronkite removes his glasses to announce President Kennedy's death at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.
News still happens every day. Really. Some people, probably not as many as in the days of my youth, are still interested in it.
Behind a long rack of preserved, historic front pages, there is a kind of journalistic mausoleum, displaying the departed. The Ann Arbor News, closed July 23 after 174 years in print. The Rocky Mountain News, taken at age 150. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which passed quietly into the Internet.
The New York Sun died -- for the second time -- last year. But the New York World has been dead for years, and the Mirror crashed a long time ago. The Herald and the Tribune became the Herald-Tribune, and I think it's also gone the way of the diplodocus. The Washington Star, with its interesting daily collection of shrdlus, is a fond memory, but we now have the Times and the Examiner, both of which are better papers, if not quite so original when it comes to spelling. Newspapers used to be fairly ephemeral, easy to start up, but most of them not all that robust. They were kinda like web sites are today.
What difference does this make? For many conservatives, the "mainstream media" is an epithet. Didn't the Internet expose the lies of Dan Rather? Many on the left also shed few tears, preferring to consume their partisanship raw in the new media.
 I thought we were talking about newspapers, but I guess we can discuss news in general. Rather was symptomatic of news' decline, but there are lots of less well-known examples within the print world and probably lots in the broadcast world I either can't recall or never heard about in the first place.
But a visit to the Newseum is a reminder that what is passing is not only a business but also a profession -- the journalistic tradition of nonpartisan objectivity.
I love jazz. Sometimes I like 20s jazz, which is kind of raw, almost primal. The 30s were kind of when jazz hit its pace, Crosby's youth, Al Bowlly's heyday, the early years of everybody from Benny Goodman to Vera Lynn. It reached its full flower in the 1940s, and then kind of died with Glen Miller. Post-1945 there were fewer and fewer performers and performances that I considered enjoyable: Frank Sinatra kind of hit his stride, but he didn't bring the bands with him. In place of the happy and sophisticated music of the Dorsey Brothers we saw the genre split into multiple streams, all of which I consider sterile and uninteresting. I went to a jazz concert this summer and left early. It was derivative, a pale cross between Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck, and nothing at all like Ella Fitzgerald in her Miss Otis Regrets prime, and nowhere near as much fun as Bix Beiderbecke or Paul Whiteman.
I feel much the same about news, probably because I subsconsciously bought into the Ben Hecht version of the news business. We used to have "reporters," where now we have "journalists." People used to go into the business who could write. Now it's a career path, with journalism or communications majors and I suppose to become an editor you've got to have a master's degree from a good (Columbia School of Journalism) school. There are more credentials and less talent involved -- a dozen Michael Oleskers for every Gregory Kane. The politicization comes from the liberal arts schools who crank these nonentities out. They suck up the leftism along with their freshman writing assignments. Ernie Pyle or Damon Runyon or Dickie Chappell or Walter Winchell aren't the models, but Woodward & Bernstein and, behind them, John Reed and Walter Durante.
Journalists, God knows, didn't always live up to that tradition. But they generally accepted it, and they felt shamed when their biases or inaccuracies were exposed. The profession had rules about facts and sources and editors who enforced standards.
We've seen that evaporate pretty steadily since the Woodward & Bernstein days.
At its best, the profession of journalism has involved a spirit of public service and adventure -- reporting from a bomber during a raid in World War II, or exposing the suffering of Sudan or Appalachia, or rushing to the site of the World Trade Center moments after the buildings fell.
I'm not sure about the suffering of Sudan -- I can remember the suffering of Somalia, with the images of the little kiddies eating glop with flies crawling over them. That got us signed up for a humanitarian mission, which pointed out (rather pointedly, y'might say) that Somalia's poverty was based in its exploitation by its warlords and its holy men. That led us to Blackhawk Down just as surely as the sinking of the Maine led us to San Juan Hill and "You may fire when ready, Gridley."
I can vaguely remember the Appalachia stories. I think they pointed out the existence of Appalachia and its backwoods population. Duly reminded, John Kennedy bought all the votes in West Virginia at $7 apiece. I can also remember the West Virginia Hillbilly, which has probably gone the way by now of the passenger pigeon or the New York Record, having enormous editorial fun with the mechanics of it all.
By these standards, the changes we see in the media are also a decline. Most cable news networks have forsaken objectivity entirely and produce little actual news, since makeup for guests is cheaper than reporting.
I watch Fox News. Several years ago the networks first went from the John Cameron Swayze of my youth to Huntley-Brinkley's attempt at objectivity to Walter Cronkeit's post-Tet partisanship. From there they went to "infotainment" and I quit watching entirely.
Then came CNN, which was really pretty good when it started out. Its heyday was Gulf War I, despite Peter Arnett. News has now moved entirely from the networks to cable. MSNBC's excruciating to watch. CNN and its family are pretty bad, though better than MSNBC. When I went to Costa Rica they were all that was available and it wasn't a pretty sight. I watched a lot of movies with the kids.
Fox has news through the day, until 5 pm, when Glen Beck -- an opinion show -- comes on. He's followed by news until 8 pm, when O'Reilly begins the opinon hours and I devote my time to the Burg. He's followed by Hannity's opinion, then by Greta's lurid crime tales. But Fox presents a lot of news and it blocs its opinion hours together.
Most Internet sites display an endless hunger to comment and little appetite for verification.
Kind of like what newspapers and broadcast news have become.
Free markets, it turns out, often make poor fact-checkers, instead feeding the fantasies of conspiracy theorists from "birthers" to Sept. 11, 2001, "truthers."
Also debunking them. It was free-market Charles Johnson who debunked Dan Rather, not the editorial staff of See BS. We haven't tolerated conspiracy theorists here, either, though I think we should allow Illuminati and Bilderbergers and the Legitimate Heir of France just on GPs.
Unlike the news organizations with their fact checkers, we're pretty short with the proponents of Global Warming/Climate Change/Nuclear Winter/Silent Spring/Whatever's coming next.
Online news organizations present a full lunch counter, an overloaded groaning board, with news all over the place, along with healthy doses of opinion, all intersperse with hyperlinks that will eventually lead back to the original source. When you don't find those hyperlinks you're looking at either live reporting, occasionally an emailed press release, or somebody's opinion.
Bloggers in repressive countries often show great courage, but few American bloggers have the resources or inclination to report from war zones, famines and genocides.
We don't have to take a back seat to any other country, not even the repressive ones. Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, a bunch of other guys, all do yeoman's work. I'd call the other guys lesser lights, but some of them are just as good reporters without the marketing luck. The kiddies at Iran va Jahan, on the other hands, are consistently either wrong or exaggerated, so often that I think they're actually gray propaganda and don't use them as a source anymore. You can tell a good reporter (not so much a journalist) by his product. Roggio and Yon are good, the New York Times' Dexter Filkin is good, CNN's Nic Robertson's not, Seymour Hersch is worse. Quod erat, as they say, demonstandrum, which is Latin for approximately "by their works so shall ye know them."
The democratization of the media -- really its fragmentation -- has encouraged ideological polarization.
There used to be a certain sameness to the news bidnid. It wasn't the uniformity of unfettered truth.
Princeton University professor Paul Starr traced this process recently in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Right. The Columbia Journalism Review. Brethren and Sistern, I rest my case.
After the captive audience for network news was released by cable, many Americans did not turn to other sources of news. They turned to entertainment. The viewers who remained were more political and more partisan. "As Walter Cronkite prospered in the old environment," says Starr, "Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann thrive in the new one. As the diminished public for journalism becomes more partisan, journalism itself is likely to shift further in that direction."
If O'Reilly had Olbermann's viewership and Olbermann had O'Reilly's I'll betcha there wouldn't be a problem with that. But most of the news-viewing eyeballs are watching Fox News with me. They have more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. And the viewers are watching for the same reason I am.
The nation's consistently somewhere around 50-50 when it comes to voting, but the ratio's more lop-sided when it comes to watching the news. The same people who're decrying the politicization of the news are the ones who're bitching about losing the talk radio ear war -- Limbaugh remains, Air America is either dead or on a real long IV.
Cable and the Internet now allow Americans, if they choose, to get their information entirely from sources that agree with them -- sources that reinforce and exaggerate their political predispositions.
And the numbers say that most of the people who're getting the news that agrees with them are headed toward Fox.
And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting.
Drudge aggregates his news and sends link after link to the guys who do the costly newsgathering and investigative reporting. Likewise Lucianne. Likewise AOL, Yahoo, and Google News, with varying degrees of success.
Rantburg gives the link, but we also preserve most of the text of articles, the originals of which often die after a few days. Our links are also more likley to point to a foreign news source.
The links from all of us aggregators are still getting sent back to the sources, who should really be happy for the traffic. They'd rather have paid readers, but that's not going to happen anytime soon and I hope never, so they'll have to settle for the advertising clicks.
The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.
About a third to half of it here, I'd guess. The foreign old media dinosaurs are our favored sources, which is why we're often a day or two ahead of the papers on WoT news.
But newspapers are expected to provide their content free on the Internet. A recent poll found that 80 percent of Americans refuse to pay for Internet content. There is no economic model that will allow newspapers to keep producing content they don't charge for, while Internet sites repackage and sell content they don't pay to produce.
I can think of several approaches that would produce a revenue stream. We rely on advertising here, which now sucks -- but I don't research new ad sources -- and on contributions, which have been declining for the past year or so.
But newspapers used to be connected to AP, AFP, Reuters, and UPI by teletype, from whence stories would be collected and set. Pictures were transmitted by photofax. They paid a monthly or quarterly subscription rate. Agencies could now send their stories via email to paid subscribers, photos attached, ready for dropping into templates for publication. I get press releases and opinion pieces like that now, by the way, to include most of the opinon page of the Washington Examiner.
Rather than bitching about blogs, why not produce a product tailored for blogs? Perhaps that could include edited and fact-checked stories at a subscription price. Getting the news out before everyone else used to be known, correct me if I'm wrong, as a "scoop," and was considered a good thing. And it's the lack of editing and fact-checking that guys like the writer bitch about when denigrating us news aggregators.
I dislike media bias as much as the next conservative. But I don't believe that journalistic objectivity is a fraud. I was a journalist for a time, at a once-great, now-diminished newsmagazine. I've seen good men and women work according to a set of professional standards I respect -- standards that serve the public. Professional journalism is not like the buggy-whip industry, outdated by economic progress, to be mourned but not missed. This profession has a social value that is currently not reflected in its market value.
Its social value is produced by its practitioners and that value's been declining. Witness the near unanimity of "journalists" who've lined up behind Global Warming/Climate Change/Nuclear Winter/Silent Spring/Whatever comes next. If you don't have a nose for actual news don't go sullying the profession the Elder Hearst used to pursue.
What is to be done? A lot of good people are working on it. But if you currently have newsprint on your hands, thank you.
I subscribe to the Baltimore Sun, a formerly great paper that's not afflicted by journalism. I have it delivered every day but Sunday. I spend my weekends refinishing furniture, y'see. I need that newsprint.
I get my actual news from Rantburg. |
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon's top lawyer said Friday that the Obama administration has not abandoned the possibility of transferring some prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center to a prison in the United States despite strong congressional concerns.