by William A. Collins
Read the paper
Every day?
News no longer,
Comes that way.
A professor recently informed us that the three newspapers in Nicaragua – one on the right, one on the left, and one in the mud – are all owned by the same conservative family. In Venezuela, all papers skew to the right, busily attacking Hugo Chavez. In Britain, they’re all over the place, and in the United States, they’re all no place. The only papers here that print regular serious opinions are the conservative offerings of Rupert Murdoch, Sun Myung Moon, and “The Wall Street Journal.”
Publishers, after all, have to watch what they say. They’re closely monitored by Wall Street, their own investors, big advertisers, and Alberto Gonzales, at least for the moment. And with the steep price paid for media companies nowadays, one can’t afford to alienate creditors, investors, or customers.
Television, of course, is worse. The advertisers are bigger and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is always lurking. Just allow an interviewee to suggest that the troops should come home right now and heads will roll. Even Public Broadcasting must be careful. Mr. Bush appointed a very conservative FCC chairman who controls its paltry purse strings. Thus, last month’s public TV contrived to report on several weeks’ worth of the Iraq War budget debate without ever interviewing a dove.
But PBS does at least provide television with a non-profit arm, no matter how docile. Not so newspapers. With them life is all about short-term greed. No long-range planning allowed. The quarterly dividend is what counts, which mostly looks pretty good to shareholders just now as owners quietly milk someone else’s earlier investments.
The symptoms of this eating of the seed corn are showing up more and more in the daily product. Except for crime, tragedy, and the school board, there’s not much news in papers any more. Reporters have been laid off, commentary has shrunk, and space is increasingly filled by syndicated entertainment. Even the “Washington Post” and “The New York Times” are mere shadows of their former selves. That’s the result of brutal expense slashing.
This, in turn, stems from falling revenue as armies of ungrateful young surfers now forage for their news on the Internet, with advertisers trooping along behind. But wait! Ironically, Internet news is still gleaned mostly from newspaper-reporter research. It just comes to us quicker now, plagiarized on the Web. Thus as the papers decay, the overall quality and quantity of news offered by their electronic mimickers diminishes too. It’s a mess.
The new game now is for billionaires to buy up media companies and “turn them around” through further economies of scale and cost cutting. Presumably, that’s how they came to be billionaires in the first place. More in-depth reporting never seems to cross their minds. In the process, individual papers get traded around like baseball cards, with Wall Street analysts as the only target audience. Somehow, higher journalistic standards are never on the table. Just higher profits. Even the “Los Angeles Times” may soon change uniforms again, for the same reason.
As mentioned, seemingly missing from this print world is anything comparable to public radio and television. There is no place for readers to turn each day for a summary of important world stuff, more or less untainted by super-rich influence. Sure, there are plenty of rich liberals out there who might run a paper, but the idea of newspaper ownership has never aroused the left, save for Alabama’s heroic “Anniston Star.”
Thus, we had all better repair to the Internet for the real scoop while it lasts, each of us seeking out our own slant. Unfortunately, good regular, professional news organs are disappearing like the passenger pigeon did.
