Editorial

Yet many “news” outlets today seem to work at confusing the viewer, listener or reader, usually by trying to declare that what used to be called ‘puff pieces,’ or ‘fillers,’ are in fact the news. Some news venues ironically seem to confuse themselves, believing that what they are now producing is in fact news.

What is perhaps most dangerous is that as a result of this failure on the part of commercial newsgathering operations, the journalism torch is being passed to a new group of so-called ‘newspeople’ who have no actual newsroom experience at all; the often egoistic bloggers and so-called web news-sites, where opinion often dominates facts, and many of the news stories are pickups from newspapers.

But of course in terms of the loud opinions of the so-called blogosphere, there is a great irony, since drawing a conclusion from the facts and therefore creating a well founded editorial opinion is largely a thing of the past in mainstream news.

Yet that isn’t the worst of it! Anyone who thinks they are getting the “local” news by watching the fire and police video presented for 10 to 15 minutes on area TV channels is being duped.

Filling air time with fires, car accidents and various other tragedies affecting and afflicting people is in fact entertainment news. It gives little and demands nothing. It is just an accounting of the random horrors that bedevil people, and for those receiving such “news,” it is much like driving by the scene of a bad accident; that is, it invokes empathy, sometimes sympathy if there is any direct association with the people involved, and in the end, it is watching tragedy without being hurt by it, therefore deep down, it has an element of entertainment, as much as most people sublimate it.

Such ‘reality’ serves the TV networks and station owners well, since it requires little except a mobile news crew and a couple of talking heads back at the station. There is no need to dig into why the governor and the legislature can’t come to terms on issues that affect everyone, especially since in Massachusetts, they are of the same party. There is no need to develop that useful information because the airtime is already filled.

And besides, if something truly controversial is going on, one of the newspapers will do the hard work of covering it, doing in-depth interviews and revealing the intricacies; then it can be reported on TV and radio as a reflection of the published work, with very little risk or expensive effort, since all that is being done is repeating a talking head version what has been printed. A very neat system that works wonderfully for the corporations and managers of TV and radio networks and stations.

The greatest irony of course, is that the mainstay of journalism – newspapers – now wavers like an old heavyweight champion who fought one too many fights. Yet unfortunately it’s not the number of fights that were fought that has brought this media heavyweight to its stumbling plight, but how many fights were passed up.

It used to be that the public, the readers, could legitimately assume that newspapers large and small had one basic and all encompassing driving force – the need to turn over every stone, every rock or brick that propped up the powerful – because the actions of such people affected the average citizen in ways large and small, and that meant circulation. The singular reason that this was a driving force for newspapers was because by having the Constitutional freedom to look under and over everything assured that it was necessary for the average person to put down the cost of the paper and read it!

The formula was so perfectly, so basically simple; so very American! The newspaper is unlicensed; it is Constitutionally protected in its First Amendment rights – no other medium, TV or radio, is so protected – and as a result U.S. newspapers set a world standard. Everything could be covered, beginning with government, and as the history of newspapers illustrates, there were no holds barred; the public loved it and bought the papers, often more than one to see competing viewpoints, and as a result of circulation the papers were able to sell vast amounts of advertising, delivering the increasingly creative messages of the business community.

That strange, intangible power derived from the dissemination of facts and ideas was understood by the early publishers. Such publishers were themselves, more often than not, entrepreneurial newsmen. This was their business, the development, packaging and selling of information, and they reveled in it. Concomitantly, the public responded; people understood that they were gaining insight into their world and how various systems worked. By reading the papers, they could form opinions regarding how those who had political and economic power used it, and their knowledge was itself a new form of power, which was reflected in both public opinion, which could and did color purchasing habits, and in the voting booth, where it became a force where discontent could be most directly illustrated to a dynamic end.

As the famous journalistic saying illustrated: ‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’

As the Twentieth Century moved past its mid-point, however, more and more of the old newspapermen/publishers were replaced by heirs or corporate hires, almost all of whom were from the advertising/sales side, or held MBA’s or similar academic credentials. The leadership of the press, especially the daily press, had moved from those with a primary interest in the news product as the means of assuring bottom line success, to those with a primary interest in increasing ad sales to push the bottom line.

News, instead of being seen as the heart of the product, all too often began to be viewed as a necessary evil, and as such was something that needed to be tamped down, controlled, lest its troublesome practitioners lead the corporation into costly and inconvenient controversies or, worse, lawsuits. Fear of libel suits, for example, became a cautionary catch-all that dampened all journalism, even though the law itself offered great protections; it was and is an uphill climb to prove libel. Yet more and more publishers in the latter half of the Twentieth Century feared even the idea of a libel suit.

The men and women at the helm of the nation’s daily newspapers, as well as at the publisher’s desk of many if not most weeklies, were almost all from the sales and business departments by the end of the last century. The great editor-publisher’s were gone, and so was the fire in the belly, the drive to tell the very best stories and get the reader’s attention. Instead, news was more and more homogenized, more and more ‘objective,’ more and more free of controversy, and finally, more and more boring.

Not surprisingly, the increasing dearth of real news through mainstream print outlets led to this haphazard passing of the torch to other mediums, first to the likes of talk radio and more recently to the still developing internet. But the fact remains, only print publications have Constitutional protection free from any form of licensing, and this in the end may prove to be the foundation from which the newspaper Phoenix rises.

May, 2009

WF/MB