A BAILOUT for Journalism? The New Push to Save Journalism from a Digital Death
It’s happened in the banking industry. It’s happened in the automotive industry. Even the insurance industry. So why does it sound almost absurd to pump massive amounts of federal tax dollars into journalism, to save it? The U.S., after all, has subsidized journalism before. And now two distinguished journalists are suggesting the monetary faucet be turned on again. Or else.
In a book just published (January 5, 2010) entitled "The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again," professor Bob McChesney and journalist John Nichols blame the digital revolution for what has become a rapid disappearance of American journalism. Nichols, who says he blogged before there was a blog, makes clear what’s going down the digital drain as newspaper employees are given pink slips at the rate of 1,000 a month. “There is absolutely no evidence, and I want to underline that, no evidence that what we’re losing is being replaced on the net,” he told David Brancaccio, host of PBS’s NOW television program. “The core of the problem is the papers that are staying open – they’re doing massive layoffs. You cannot maintain journalism… when you are laying-off literally dozens and hundreds of reporters. If this keeps going, we’re going to create the perfect model for a propaganda state.”
In recent months we’ve witnessed the death of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. I’d actually forgotten about the closure of all national bureaus of the Washington Post until I attempted to pitch a story recently. In an article last November Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said, "The fact is we can effectively cover the rest of the country from Washington.” Not so says book co-author Bob McChesney on PBS’s NOW.
“Journalism requires journalists,” McChesney said. “It requires editors. It requires fact checkers. It requires institutional resources to protect the news operation from interference, be it corporate or governmental, so it can be independent. And there’s no evidence that this technology, the internet, will provide that at all.”
There seems a race to repeat, reproduce or even copy content on the internet – and there is little or no effort to develop original content. Authors Nichols and McChesney cite a recent Pew Research study in Baltimore pointing to some 96% of all original content on the web as originating within “old media” and then simply spread around like butter on a slice of bored bread.
This argument is made patently clear in Ken Auletta’s new book “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta chronicles Google’s increasingly tighter grasp on information, much of it copyrighted, and the effect on traditional media including newspapers and television. And Auletta makes a strong case that Google’s non-traditional, easy advertising is driving those dollars away from traditional media.
As a journalist for 12 years, I’ve come to witness the decline of journalism in all mediums. But as a product of television journalism, I have come to respect the real power of video. And much like newspapers, television relies on advertising revenue. And now I find myself asking whether authors Nichols and McChesney might be right? Is journalism going extinct? Are we headed toward a propaganda state? And to save it all, do we really need another bailout?
“We’re a couple hundred years into this experiment,” John Nichols tells PBS’s NOW. “Maybe we ought to pull the brake and have a national discussion about ‘how do we have a real democracy?’ How do we have a country that isn’t a mirror of the colonial states that we broke away from?”
“I really do believe that Americans are hungry for news. We’ve just been starved for too long.”
Watch the PBS NOW interview with Bob McChesney and John Nichols here.
Visit the "Newspaper Death Watch" here.
