“Saving The Globe”
Reveals Larger Issues
“Save The Globe!” It sounds like an
environmental battle cry, but in New England it is more of a plea, perhaps a
collective hope that the great, progressive regional paper, The Boston Globe,
with its consistent editorial progressiveness and sometimes open-mindedness will
not simply be cast aside, lost in the economic tides like a grand battleship of
old run aground in a hurricane of events.
But why should the average man or woman care?
The Globe is, after all, a huge enterprise that for more than a century gained
in power, influence and revenue to such a degree that it did more than dwarf all
other New England media, it became something of a power unto itself, enriching
its historic owners, the Taylor family, empowering its business and advertising
executives through the dynamic reach of its editorial content, and ironically
even gracing its editors, and sometimes also its columnists and reporters, with
defacto power based on their own collective work.
For a reporter calling a news source to announce
he or she was ‘from The Globe’ was often enough to assure a response, or perhaps
an indication of fear or subterfuge. For an ad rep, to call a prospect and
declare he or she represents The Globe, doors opened; this was, after all, the
premier vehicle by which New England markets could be most powerfully reached,
and it of course was possible for the advertiser to tailor the buy to the
markets most desired; a businessperson could buy metro Boston, the suburbs, or
various other segments, such as Cape Cod or New Hampshire, etc.
And for the newspaper’s hierarchy, it was a
rarified atmosphere, even if it was New England provincial.
Hobnobbing with the Boston elite, the so-called
‘movers and shakers’ at the long-proclaimed hub of New England was guaranteed by
the status afforded Globe executives, and while the power touchstones were
regional, they often had national influence and sometimes clout. To be a power
within such power circles was the norm for those who held true authority in The
Globe; the only trick was not to be seen or understood as solely a member of the
‘club.’
The dynamics are the same in other regions. On
the west coast, for many decades, such was the scenario for those associated
with the Los Angeles Times. And such is the case in the Rocky Mountain region
for those who run the Denver Post, or in the south for those involved with the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and of course the same is true of many other major
papers that serve their areas and regions well and powerfully, especially those
who serve the U.S. capital, Washington, D.C.
But why should anyone have sympathy for the
current plight of such high-flying, powerful media entities, especially now that
so many of them are suddenly weakened by lost circulation and advertising
dollars? Perhaps, if for no other reason, because the very best of these
publishing corporations, often the ones that rose to the top of readership and
influence under the direction of the people who owned and ran them, never forgot
to care about everyone else!
With very few exceptions such publishing
entities were almost always examples of consistency by old newspaper families,
men and women who still adhered to the principals of their founders, even if
they no longer ran their papers directly and instead hired publishers who met
their criteria and shared their vision. A prime example of such history is The
Boston Globe, which when owned and operated by the Taylor family was honored as
one of the nation’s leading newspapers and certainly the dominant paper of
record for New England.
In 1873, Charles H. Taylor, a former Union Army
general, was brought into the newly formed Globe by Eben Jordan, of the long
famous Jordan Marsh Co. Taylor, not too much later, acquired full control of The
Globe and he and his heirs ran the paper as a closely held family enterprise
until 1973, when the family developed Affiliated Publications as a corporate
entity to oversee various media enterprises. Even so, the Taylor’s continued to
produce a line of publishers until 1999, and then the family hired outside
publisher’s until a few years later when the paper, along with Affiliated
Publications, was sold to the New York Times, long recognized as the dominant
paper in New York City, and usually considered the ‘paper of record’ for the
United States.
It sounded like a perfect fit; the New York
Times, owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust, surely would support and
continue the great record of The Globe, perhaps even improve it, so said the
pundits and almost everyone else. The Taylor family was applauded for passing
the local journalistic torch to a credible recipient. But it didn’t work out in
any recognizable manner.
Under the Sulzberger’s New York stewardship, the
Globe has deflated. Good Boston reporters and writers were curtailed and many
ultimately disappeared from the employment roster, and the editorial direction
softened, as though the new owners couldn’t decide what was needed or required
in this region. Too often a New York world-view was applied to Boston and its
New England environs. As a result, Boston daily news waned, along with its
state-wide and regional coverage.
Now The Times looks to sell The Globe, and it
seems clear that anyone who wants to acquire New England’s ‘paper of record’
will be facing a major rebuilding to bring the newspaper back into even a
semblance of its former prominence, prestige and power. The required
improvements will not merely involve re-establishing the old intensive coverage
that afforded media dominance, but it will mean a fundamental turn toward
smarter Internet involvement, and that means breaking the current approach to
the net to set new, precedent setting ground rules, including a ‘pay per view’
process for Globe derived stories, and a reasonable ‘internet circulation’ fee
for those who want to subscribe once and have access to everything available.
The Globe has set standards before, and so has
the New York Times, but The Times, the oft-called American ‘paper of record,’
faltered in handling The Globe by arrogantly asserting a metropolis world view
on its acquired regional powerhouse. Ironically, what The Times seemed to reveal
was its own sort of provincialism, through which Globe readers began to discern
a New York based standpoint expressed through New England’s premier newspaper
voice, effectively stultifying it.
And so a shaky stage was set where once a firm
foundation stood, and then came the George W. Bush years! The print media, which
has been so severely damaged by the looting of the economy that took place when
G.W. Bush made it clear his administration would not police Wall Street, or the
banking and lending industries, has only itself to blame for what followed; when
Bush and Cheney purposefully looked the other way, it was left to newspapers to
reveal the advent of wholesale stock market and housing robberies to the public.
That is the role that newspapers historically were designed to fulfill, and
during the eight years of the Bush/Cheney Administration was when adherence to
those obligations were most needed.
But, by and large, newspapers were either AWOL
or asleep on duty. For eight long years the owners and stockholders of the great
daily newspapers were mesmerized by the Bush/Cheney propaganda machine. They
barely questioned the absolute test of right-wing, Reaganesque ‘voodoo
economics’ that was taking place directly in front of them. Many suppositions
can be put forth to try to explain the lethargy of the major press, ranging from
the nature of corporate greed to the political leanings of the great majority of
owners, yet in practical terms the failure may relate to an editorial malaise
that began decades ago, when it started to seem so much safer to report scandal
and tragedy than to dig into issues and discuss them with the American public
the same way the reporters, editors and the owners would within their own
families.
In some ways, newspapers are victims of their
own shallowness in losing touch with and, worse, no longer trusting the wisdom
and judgment of the average American.
Now, with the economy reeling on the edge of the
first true Depression since the 1930’s, thanks to the many of the same GOP
policies from the 1920’s that have long been documented and could have been used
as a current comparison, big newspapers are in jeopardy, and many are in
critical condition. Smaller newspapers are also in trouble. It’s unfortunately
possible that in another 10 years, newspapers will be an oddity, with everyone
getting their news on the computer. But on the internet it will be a pale
version of what was once available in print, if for no other reason than the
hard fact that if there are, for example, 100 reporters on a daily paper’s staff
and that paper is shut down and moved to an internet presence, the edit staff
will likely comprise 10 reporters; it’s not hard to understand how a 90%
reduction in news generation will affect what is available to the public.
And in terms of the
primary electronic media – television – it is realistic to assume that such news
would be bits and pieces culled for entertainment, but if there was a political
aspect to the story being covered, without newspapers in the background it seems
reasonable to assume that what is shown will be both stilted and biased. Without
fear of being contradicted by the print press, those who own and operate the
networks and the TV stations will have no incentive to dig into the news and
risk the wrath of the federal government agencies that provide their broadcast
licenses.
That is really the
point. Only newspapers have Constitutional protection under the First Amendment.
All other, modern media – with the exception of the yet to be regulated internet
– have no such protection; radio and TV require licenses. It’s not hard to
imagine the owners of such licenses wanting to appease those who grant them
their franchises, and if in the end the internet is also regulated, the result
will be the same.
There was a time when TV news
aggressively mirrored what was available in the newspapers, but that time period
was when television was in its infancy. To get people to switch to TV for their
news, the TV news was straight and often direct. David Brinkley, Chet Huntley,
Walter Cronkite and, more recently, Dan Rather, Morley Safer,
Bob Schieffer, and
Bill Moyers, among others, are all examples of
news people who when reporting try to find the facts. But they no longer
dominate.
Somewhere along the
line, television owners started rating news with their other programs, turning
it into a ratings game that naturally became more important than the excellence
of the news product. News ‘product’ devolved into entertainment value subjects;
that is, finding what would be flashy rather than edifying. Television started
selling news. News became a show.
Yes, television
still transmits information. But whose? Certainly one cannot expect a national
television network to cover what is truly local, but neither can the local
television stations, since to do so would require having news teams developing
news. Instead the TV news is reactive; that is, it is alert for whatever is
dramatic and easily shown by camera. Therefore, and not surprisingly, accidents,
fires, tragedies of every sort are the grist of the TV news, and in the end they
become entertainment; nothing is learned regarding what may or may not be
happening in, or affecting the community, but colorful ‘incidents’ are
illustrated.
This is the
definition of building audience. And unsurprisingly, the advent of entertainment
news has morphed into special “news” shows; these have hosts and news-sounding
topics and at first seem to be simple news programs, but really are thinly
veiled opinion pieces, which often point the viewer toward a given perspective;
in short, such shows change public ideas of news and the value of news. This is
the definition of propaganda, because propaganda does not have to express an
overt point of view, it only has to develop a perspective, such as cynicism,
that can later be converted to political capital. Fox News is the most active in
this regard, and offers the best example, although other TV networks follow many
of the same precepts.
The hard fact is,
without newspapers everyone is made more vulnerable to the devaluation of news
and the advent of subtle propaganda.
Newspapers, in this
nation, are the Constitutionally protected printed form of public free speech,
disseminated for all to read and understand who wish to do so by plunking down
the cost of a paper or a subscription.
The current economic
crisis revealed the shaky stage that The Globe and so may other daily papers
were standing upon, a stage created largely by their own failure to police the
policemen. When George Bush and Richard Cheney purposefully decided to abrogate
their duty to regulate Wall Street and the lending institutions, newspapers
failed to fill the void, which was the very reason that the Founding Fathers
gave newspaper owners and publishers protection in the first place.
Now the economy is
in shambles and The Globe, apparently losing millions and under threat of
closure by the New York Times Company, is but a prime example of a gross failure
in newspaper stewardship. Somehow, the ownership families and the corporate
boards lost sight of the fact that their business can only exist if it lives up
to the public trust. When it doesn’t, and the public begins to turn away, all it
would take to bring the entire industry down would be a depressed economy, and
now the Bush policies have provided that reality.
It’s easy to hope
that the Internet will fill the void, become the modern newspaper, but that is
wishful thinking. The Internet is simply the passage, the conduit, for any and
all data from everywhere to the reader’s lap, which will mean that the
individual must learn to edit, or wither in paradise. Such is the reason that
newspapers must somehow be returned to their original values, which would once
again make them needed and necessary, and worth the cost of the subscription.
An investor, whether
individual or corporate, imbued with such a philosophy, might yet ‘save The
Globe.’
May, 2009
MB/WF
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