Sunday, September 28, 2008
The state of the media
Dan Radmacher
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From the RoundTable blog
As I'm sure would be true of any gathering of print journalists these days, the recent convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in Little Rock, Ark., had something of the feel of a wake.
This is a bad time for the newspaper industry, the worst I've seen in nearly 20 years in the profession.
Attendance was way down at the convention because many newspapers have slashed or eliminated their travel budgets. Newspapers have been shedding jobs, too, including those of editorial writers. Several who did make it to Little Rock got word of further staff cuts at their newspapers during the meeting.
More than one person I spoke to at the convention is giving serious thought to a new career outside the industry, and I've lost count of the good people our organization has already lost to layoffs, buyouts and early retirements.
Newspapers are not struggling to find readers -- with the broader access made possible by the Web, many credible readership measurements show significant increases.
The struggle has been to make the finances work -- and to come to terms with the fact that the days of 30 percent profit margins are over.
Newspapers as a whole remain quite profitable by most standards. Some chains -- like McClatchy, which employs many of my friends and colleagues from NCEW -- are struggling mainly under the load of debt service from recent acquisitions.
I know there are many out there celebrating this industry's decline. Those who deride the "MSM" and the "drive-by media" probably get giddy at every layoff announced, viewing it as the well-deserved comeuppance of a biased and out-of-touch institution.
To those people, I say be careful what you ask for. The media are not without sin, certainly, but the press is a fundamental institution and the public should have grave concerns over the gutting of that institution currently taking place.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "The only security of all is in a free press."
I know this sounds self-serving coming from a journalist, but I can't help that, and it doesn't change the truth of the sentiment: Newspapers are vital to the functioning of democracy.
On the news pages, newspapers serve a very important watchdog role, keeping an eye on everyone from city councils to the president of the United States. From mice in the Market Building to Watergate, the public is better able to hold elected officials accountable for their actions because of the work that newspaper reporters do every day.
Editorial pages can serve as clarion calls to justice, as they did during the difficult march to desegregation that we learned more about in Little Rock, home of Central High where in 1957 America saw the angry face of the segregationist and was repelled.
Some may think this nation has outgrown the need for newspapers. Bloggers, talk radio hosts and others can fill the newsgathering gap.
But not all newsgatherers are created equal. Not all opinions have the same value. Hank Klibanoff, the closing speaker at the convention and author of the new book "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," put it well when he spoke of "the problem that arises when the audience does not know how to discern conflicting sets of information, one from a traditionally reliable, professionally trained source, the other from someone who hides behind a screen name and has no loyalty to any journalistic principles."
Which leads me to, I believe, a greater danger to the institution of the press than any financial difficulty: the selling of the notion that the mainstream media no longer matter.
Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, have been repeatedly caught in out-and-out falsehoods -- lies -- by the media. Palin didn't say "thanks, but no thanks" to the Bridge to Nowhere. Sen. Barack Obama is not proposing middle class tax increases, nor did he call Palin a pig. The list goes on.
Telling whoppers during a campaign is hardly new. Once the lie has been exposed, though, most candidates have the decency to quit repeating it.
Not McCain and Palin. For weeks, she repeated the "thanks, but no thanks" line, and the McCain campaign hasn't ruled out its return -- even though it has been thoroughly discredited.
As McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, "We're running a campaign to win. And we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it."
If a presidential candidate can take that attitude -- that lies and the media exposure of them don't matter -- and win the election, this nation will be in a world of hurt.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
