Michael Massing has an informative but discouraging piece out about the economic and political pressures facing American journalism today. It's the first of two parts: The End of News? New York Review of Books 12/01/05 edition; accessed 11/15/05.
He describes some of the highlights of how rightwing media and various well-funded foundations created a climate that effectively bullies the press, especially but not exclusively the broadcast media, to bend over backward to avoid criticizing Republican officials and Party positions.
I especially like his descriptions of how the changing economics of the newspaper business is affecting news coverage.
Massing also reminds us in what an extreme way this administration has used governmental secrecy to restrict the public's access to knowledge about the workings of its own government:
The Bush administration has restricted access to public documents as no other before it. According to a recent report on government secrecy by OpenTheGovernment.org, a watchdog organization, the federal government classified a record 15.6 million new documents in fiscal year 2004, an increase of 81 percent over the year before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Spending on the declassification of documents dropped to a new low. What's more, 64 percent of Federal Advisory Committee meetings in 2004 were completely closed to the public. The Pentagon has banned TV cameras from recording the return of caskets from Iraq, and it prohibited the publication of photographs of those caskets, a restriction that was lifted only following a request through the Freedom of Information Act.
The restrictions have grown so tight that the normally quiescent American Society of Newspaper Editors last fall issued a "call to arms" to its members, urging them to "demand answers in print and in court" to stop this "deeply disturbing" trend. The conservative columnist William Safire, usually a supporter of Bush's policies, complained last September that "the fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before."
Massing gives an historical sketch of the rise of today's rightwing media, aka,the Republican Noise Machine, the Mighty Wurlitzer, etc.
He also takes full account of the rise of blogging. But he argues that the net effect of the blogosphere has been to strengthen the conservative pressure on the mainstream media. He explains:
At The Truth Laid Bear, a Web site that ranks political blogs according to their number of links with other sites, eight of the top ten blogs are conservative. The conservative sites include InstaPundit (University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds), Power Line (three lawyers), michellemalkin.com (a syndicated columnist whose recent book defends the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II), Free Republic (conservative activists), Captain's Quarters (run by a call-center manager), the Volokh Conspiracy (a UCLA law professor), and Little Green Footballs (commentary on foreign policy with a strong pro-Israel slant). Complementing them are a host of "milblogs," written by active-duty military personnel promoting vigorous pursuit of the GWOT (Global War on Terror). (By far the most-visited political blog is the left-of-center Daily Kos; its popularity is owing in part to its community-style approach, which allows registered readers to post their own comments as well as comment on the posts of others.)
It's possible he's correct. But political impact is more complex than just the number of hits or, in the analysis just cited, by the number of links. If a thousand dittoheads link to a Glenn Reynolds item where he accuses the Democrats of whatever, and the links all say "Great Instapundit post today and then link it or quote part of it, that definitely increases the visibility of the material. But a real measure of blogs' impact on public opinion would have to get much more data about who is using the blogs, and also come up with some measure of quality. Does a simple link like the one I just mentioned have the same effect as someone making their own comments on the idea in the linked post?
I don't think that it's a matter of political bias to say that the drivel that you find at FreeRepublic.com or the disgusting Little Green Footballs (both in Massing's list) comes close to the quality of writing and argument that Daily Kos provides. Lots of people may go to Little Green Footballs to have their uglier prejudices confirmed. Readers can actually learn something from the posts at Daily Kos.
He writes this about liberal blogs:
Liberal bloggers have had some successes of their own. Partly as a result of their commentaries, for instance, the press has paid more attention to the so-called Downing Street memo of July 2002, in which Tony Blair and his advisers discussed the Bush administration's plans for war in Iraq. In addition to Daily Kos, prominent left-leaning blogs include Talking Points Memo, Eschaton, and, for commentary on Iraq, Informed Comment. While these sites are critical of the national press, their main fire is directed at the Bush administration. What's more, these sites are not supported by an interconnected system of talk radio programs and cable television commentary, and their influence therefore tends to be much more limited.
It's true that the Republican Noise Machine provides a bigger echo chamber than liberals have. But in terms of the effectiveness of blogs as such, Juan Cole's Informed Comment (which I quote about 12 times a week here, or if I don't, I should) is providing expert commentary of the situation in Iraq on a daily basis. He also provides translations and summaries by himself and others of Arabic-only newspaper reporting in Iraq. I'm not sure it can be measured quantitatively. But Cole's impact on the discussion of the war through his blog has been much more significant than I can imagine Glenn Reynolds' ever being.
But it's Massing's discussion of the business side of newspaper publishing that is the best part of his piece:
The much-discussed fortunes of the Los Angeles Times are a case in point. For more than four generations, the paper was published by members of the Chandler family, who were controlling shareholders of the Times Mirror Company, which, in addition to the Times, owned Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, and the Hartford Courant. In 2000, however, Times Mirror was bought by the Chicago-based Tribune Company, a huge corporation that had become accustomed to 30 percent annual profit margins. (In addition to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Company owns nine other papers, twenty-six television stations, a 22 percent share in the WB television network, and the Chicago Cubs baseball team.) ...
The paper continued to be very profitable, but its margins had dipped below the 20 to 25 percent it had achieved in its most prosperous years. At the same time, the paper had come under heavy attack from southern California bloggers such as Hugh Hewitt, who portrayed it as liberal, lofty, and out of touch. According to Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, more than a thousand Los Angeles Times readers canceled their subscriptions after the paper ran a story critical of Arnold Schwarzenegger just before the 2003 recall election that brought him to office.
Between 2000 and 2004, the Tribune Company extracted some $130 million from the paper's annual billion-dollar budget. Then, weeks after the 2004 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, Tribune executives informed Carroll that further cuts were needed, and over the summer more than sixty staff members took voluntary buyouts or were laid off. The Washington bureau lost 10 percent of its staff, and those who remained were assigned to a new office along with the much-reduced Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Newsday, and other Tribune papers. The cutbacks have made it harder for reporters at these papers to meet their daily deadlines, much less undertake in-depth reporting. In July of this year, in the face of demands for more cuts, [editor John] Carroll resigned from the Times.
But, despite the nice little supply-and-demand graphs that economists use to explain how anything that happens in the market is rational, all businesses have a huge human factor. And the profit margins demanded by corporate owners from newspapers is not entirely rational. As Massing writes:
It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."
The danger this trend represents to an informed citizenry is considerable:
If the newspaper industry continues to shrink in response to the unrealistic expectations of Wall Street, the loss would be incalculable. The major metropolitan dailies, for all their faults, are the main collectors and distributors of news in America. The TV networks, to the extent they still offer serious hard news coverage, get many of their story ideas from papers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor. Even the bloggers who so hate the "mainstream media" get much of their raw material from it. If the leading newspapers lose their capacity to report and conduct inquiries, the American public will become even more susceptible to the manipulations and deceptions of those in power.
Newspapers are still a critical part of a healthy democracy. Surely Congress and the regulatory agencies could, with the right leadership, come up with ways to regulate the market in which newspapers operate to allow a healthy 10-15% profit rate. And, yes, this is one of those cases where the public interest in having a well-functioning democracy outweighs the desire for corporate shareholders for maximum profit.
Incidentally, I think he's right in the last point I quoted about the major dailies generating much of the hard news. One thing bloggers do that adds value is to call attention to important stories that those news organizations produce but which may get buried in the back pages somewhere.
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