Media Matters
Authors of Their Own Doom
When did newspapering seal its fate?
Just what I needed: more bad news about the news business. My business, one way or another since 1964, when I labored not only as general assignments reporter and feature writer for a small-town newspaper but also took photos and, yes, converted same to plastic engravings via that technological wonder, the Fairchild Scan-A-Graver.
I have been around. How I sympathize now with James Warren’s morose reflections on the Atlantic’s Internet site concerning the acute need for newspapering even as the customers for our grand old product drift away. He writes: “Newspaper penetration — the number of households looking at a paper — now amounts to less than 18 percent of the population, compared with 33 percent back in 1946.…Papers are throwing out employees almost weekly, cutting national and foreign bureaus if they have them.…In some cases, entire newspapers are shutting down.”
Yes, it’s awful, and Warren, a former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune (before getting the boot from new owners), is well positioned to talk about the consequences. He wants to know who’s going to cover the news if newspapers can’t and won’t. Not the websites, surely, with their communal/generational approach to the news and their dependence on bloggers and columnists. What about all the respect and friendship that newspapers built up over eons? (I’ll come back to that one.) Who’s going to write the stories in which newspapers specialize — the deep stories that win Pulitzers and sometimes result in new laws, as did — Warren reminds us — the Tribune’s exposures of lead-painted Chinese-made toys and of dangerous baby cribs.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again: awful. If only because we tactile folk want to hold in our hot hands something arranged and prioritized by people paid to arrange and prioritize.
Nor have I have solutions to offer. The market (when, as in the present case, allowed by statists actually to work) is cold and unforgiving , like a vulture in the Serengeti. Whatever the marketplace repudiates or depreciates isn’t long for this world. But I think it useful to talk. I am far from convinced the newspapers aren’t to some degree the authors of their own soap opera. No trend ever has a precise starting point, but I think a strong case can be made for dating the newspapers’ plight from 1974. Does that ring a bell? We were then just winding down a political cataclysm, one known colloquially as Watergate.
It didn’t look much like a moment of decline, rather one of triumph. A pair of newspapermen , as Americans were regularly invited to acknowledge, had contributed significantly to the downfall of a president who, as public officials sometimes will, thought he could do what he wanted to. Well, no… he couldn’t.
My point is not that newspapers began some time in the aftermath of Watergate to pursue a confrontational, finger-pointing approach to news coverage, especially with Republicans and conservatives as the targets. Many papers did so; nevertheless, my main point is an auxiliary, and less noisy, one. It is that, due in large measure to Watergate, and the go-get-‘em, spirit Watergate inspired in the liberal breast, the relationship of the business to the customers began to change. There appeared in newsrooms, from the '70s on, larger and larger numbers of people largely unlike those who had populated that workplace earlier.
If I am wrong about this, at least I have been telling the story the same way for quite a while, based on first-hand observation. The story is of a profession invaded and subjugated by a type of journalist far less like the average reader than like, well, the members of a political science seminar at an upscale Eastern or West Coast university. That’s irrespective of whether such journalists ever caught sight of a college seminar room. They tended to see journalism as a platform for identifying, investigating, exposing, and addressing social and political grievances: such grievances as often enough the customers didn’t see for themselves, but here was a new breed of newsmen to show them what they had missed.
The old-style newspaperman whom I came to know face to face in the '60s was a differently colored nag. He — he usually was that — had far likelier attended a state school than Yale or Harvard or Berkeley, assuming he went to college at all. He was jocular and irreverent in a newspaperly sort of way. Never slugged down a drink of whiskey he didn’t like. Dressed with minimal attention to fashion.
Our old-style guy, over a draft Bud at the bar in the next block, liked to rhapsodize about how much better, given the chance, he and his comperes could run the city desk than did the poor dumb city editor. He generally lacked a sense of social importance or professional entitlement. Liked cops and kids and soldiers. Tended to job-jump. Sometimes made up a quote or a name and put it in a story just to see if he could get it past the copy desk. Drove a Ford or a Chevy, rarely brand-new. Sported nicotine stains on bony fingers. Didn’t like hippies. Voted — here’s what you were really wondering about — conservative, or something approaching it.
A couple of decades after I got to know him, his like was gone. People of his sort didn’t go into newspapering anymore. People with master’s degrees in English literature from Columbia did; people inherently suspicious of the mores and institutions and personalities dominant in America before the tumultuous Sixties. The newsroom became an unlikely place to search for affirmation of middle-American norms.
I wouldn’t for a minute posit that my old friends of the pre-1974 newsroom were a superior class of news-gatherers and communicators. They were different. In some sense they were of the readers, by the readers, for the readers. The categories overlapped — readers and writers and reporters. They knew one another. The reporters knew what readers liked and tried to deliver it to them. It was a good commercial marriage.
After Watergate the paradigmatic reporter was a man — or, now, a woman — with a high-minded mission; namely to instruct society concerning its tastes and habits; to improve things. No problem there — a little improvement never hurt anyone. Problems arose only when the bearer of news arrived at the home of the recipient of news with the look of a doctor preparing a rabies injection.
The politics of the breed of reporter who entered the business after Watergate was, most of the time, liberal. That was part of the problem but not the essential part. The essential part was the tendency of this breed of reporter to misunderstand what readers wanted, meaning a combination of information and entertainment, with some political philosophy thrown in, as long as the philosophy in question didn’t grate or offend deep instincts.
The readership of the American newspaper was middle-class, patriotic, churchgoing, optimistic. Along came these guys (and, subsequently gals) from Columbia U. and Berkeley to tell readers just how morally burdened and ripe for reform their country was. It wasn’t precisely what the customers wanted to hear. In fact, it was the opposite of what they wanted to hear.
About the Author
William Murchison, a Dallas-based columnist for Creators Syndicate and author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books), is completing a biography of John Dickinson..
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Rocco| 2.2.09 @ 6:52AM
I shed no tears over the demise of newpapers in this country. I agree with Murchison, the old-line journalists were true pros; today's idiots are shills for the Democrats. PERIOD. I have no use for them. I have been getting my news from non-US sources for years of the Internet - no preaching and a better quality of reporting the facts even here in the US.
Kitty| 2.2.09 @ 7:02AM
And it's not just newspapers:
http://radiopatriot.blogspot.com/2009/02/were-as-mad-as-hell-and-were-not-going.html
...
BD57| 2.2.09 @ 8:29AM
Mr. Murchison:
You've hit the nail on the head - why would people pay money to be lectured? To be told their country is racist/sexist/homophobe/belligerent/etc.?
Journalism died when "journalists" decided they were priests & prophets, not scribes & messengers.
Alice Moore| 2.2.09 @ 8:34AM
Today's newspapers are more akin to Pravda. Insert Obama for Lenin. People don't want to pay for propaganda.
I just hope the Feds don't try to bail them out.
frost| 2.2.09 @ 8:54AM
Curious - - didn't a lot of this start with the advent of Rod McKuen? Perhaps it was Richard Bach...? The era of Pabulum Puke attitudes coincided with the fungus of Political Correctness, and the watering-down of educational excellence. Slipping standards and Kahil Gibran seemed to go together a little like eggs'n'bacon -- or, was that flavored tofu with yokeless eggs...
And finally, Alice Moore -- AMEN !!
Ark Ashamed of Bill| 2.2.09 @ 9:10AM
Back in the Seventies the media never told us that Carl Bernstein had grown up in a Stalinist household and that while Watergate was ostensibly about correcting abuses of power by the White House, it was actually about deposing a conservative president and promoting the Communist victory in Indochina.
Gill O’Teen| 2.2.09 @ 9:50AM
I first started reading the newspaper back in the 50s. Back then I went for the funnies and the sports first thing, whichever my Dad wasn’t reading. The family moved to St. Louis in the 60s when it was still a 2-paper town: The Globe-Democrat and The Post-Dispatch. During the Vietnam era, the Globe-Democrat took a conservative bent, Pat Buchanan was one of its editorial writers. The Post-Dispatch had a more left leaning philosophy which was quite popular with the baby boomer hippie crowd. This was actually good for St. Louis, because those of us who read both papers were rewarded with two points of view. I don’t know the circumstances, but eventually the Globe-Democrat went under leaving St. Louis with just The Post-Dispatch. At first, this was not too bad because that paper’s owners sought to preserve a fair and balanced approach and their op-ed page published the thoughts of such as Thomas Sowell and Jonah Goldberg. Plus the Post-Dispatch began to publish many of the strips that had been available only in the Globe-Democrat. But unfettered by the restraints of competition, the Post-Dispatch slowly became a parody of itself. This point was underscored some time back, I no longer recall exactly when but it was prior to a national election, the editorial writer at the Post-Dispatch wrote a column in praise of Senator Kit Bond but concluded that since Senator Bond had been around for so long it was time for a change and so endorsed his opponent. In that same editorial set writing about a different election the Post-Dispatch endorsed a different candidate because his potential constituents would be better served by his many years of experience. The common denominator of both candidates the paper endorsed was that they were Dumbocrats. Back when Global Warming Guru Gore was a threat to impose his boredom on us from the White House, Missouri featured a Senatorial clash between a dead Dumbocrat and a live Republi-con. That particular deceased Dumbocrat was Mel Carnahan who at the time of his death in a plane crash that October, as I recall, was the incumbent governor of the Show-Me State and was threatened with unemployment due to term limits. Of course, anytime a sitting governor dies that is big news and deserves full coverage by the news media. This explains why the huge photo of Carnahan’s funeral was of Al Gore. Yes, to the editors of the Post-Dispatch the most important news of that day was that Gore attended the funeral. Gradually, the paper quit printing Conservative voices and even worse dropped my favorite comic “Prince Valiant”. They hired a Marxist television reporter to head their editorial staff. My children asked me why I kept reading anything that so obviously was bad for my blood pressure as hardly a day went by that something the Post-Dispatch published did not send me into a fit of rage. Finally, I realized that I did not need our local paper to tell me it was endorsing either Hillary or Barry for President and canceled my 30 year old subscription.
There were plenty of other warning signs that this newspaper is in trouble. The Pulitzer family sold its holdings and the Post-Dispatch was eventually purchased by out-of-town interests with no St. Louis connection, and all the old timers took early retirement leaving only baby boomers to run things.
A year or so ago, my wife and I were traveling in northeastern Arkansas. The motel where we stayed had a newspaper vending machine that had copies of a local small town paper. On a whim, I put two quarters in the slot and over that motel’s continental breakfast quickly deduced that I was reading an actual newspaper and not some big city Communist rag. There is a reason, old fogies such as myself call them “the good ol’ days”.
Since I have no pet birds nor am I currently training any puppies, I have no need for what my Mother once called the Post-Disgrace.
1Freeman| 2.2.09 @ 10:16AM
I haven't bought a newspaper in a decade. I remember putting quarters in the machine as a child for the Sunday paper... TV guide, funnies and all. Later I would read the paper a little. As I got older I wrote editors occasionally but, as a conservative, I was never published. Shills and all... Wasn't this free America? I asked my mother. Not really like they taught in school, it would seem.
I have read papers recently; free ones I find in airports or on the floor of a barber shop. Still won't sullen my hands by holding the NY Times. It has all gone to hell. So little fact, so much opinion and lies. Good riddance. Better to end the era of newsprint than continue to suffer the harm and hate of the current breed of journalist/political shill. Kind of like amputation of an infected limb. The newspapers of old will be missed but they have been absent for a long time now and we just didn't know it. Better all the way around to just see the doors closed. Tisk-tisk.
Nyfarmer| 2.2.09 @ 10:37AM
Oh come on!! The local paper costs $25 per month DSL costs $12.50 and have access to any paper, blog, or whatever tweaks my interest. This is simple Econ 101!
Alan Brooks| 2.2.09 @ 10:41AM
Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford would make first class journalists, I'd purchase their paper any day of the week.
Vern Crisler | 2.2.09 @ 11:00AM
I loved Mr. Murchison's essay. However, I personally rejoice every time I hear a newspaper going out of business. The fact that most of them are liberal is reason enough. But there is also the problem of large concentrations of power. Americans shouldn't like big government, big business, or big journalism. Power needs to be decentralized even when it comes to sources of information. We don't need these big liberal organizations filtering the news anymore. So along with others I say good riddance.
By the way, in 1872 Mark Twain wrote a delightful critique of the press in his own day. See "Sins of the Press," reprinted in Charles Neider, ed., *Mark Twin: Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims and Other Speeches*, 1984, Chapter 7.
No one has every said it quite the way Twain did, but WM and those who've commented on his article have got it just right.
Doy Gorton| 2.2.09 @ 11:11AM
The problem with this article is that it shifts from the values of the mid American newspaper to the trendy venues of the east and west coasts. Let me tell you about our newspaper.
A remarkable event occurred this week as the Paducah Kentucky Sun, shuttered by an ice storm, printed its editions in Carbondale at the Southern Illisnoisan. But it was not, on reflection, a remarkable event at all. The New Orleans Times Picyune continued to publish both on the web and in print during the Katrina disaster. Its not remarkable because we have become used to the idea that somehow the newspaper will always be there. The fact that the staffers of the Sun moved to an apartment that had one of the few electrical connections in the town to power their computers and then found myriad ways of overcoming the challenges of gathering the news, editing, laying out and printing a paper, is something that we as readers simply expect.
But there is another story as well. The Sun has never missed an edition except when the 1937 Ohio River Flood swept the town under dozens of feet of water. And that was for only one day.
Think of any other American institution, other than the military, that can make the same claim to delivering its product. Its something that we should all keep in mind as we watch the pressures placed upon the American newspaper by the changes in delivering information. There is simply no substitute for the grit and determination of newspapermen and women. If we ever lose them we have lost something that is precious and fundamental to the American soul.
erp| 2.2.09 @ 11:14AM
The politics of the breed of reporter who entered the business after Watergate was, most of the time, liberal. That was part of the problem but not the essential part. The essential part was the tendency of this breed of reporter to misunderstand what readers wanted, meaning a combination of information and entertainment, with some political philosophy thrown in, as long as the philosophy in question didn't grate or offend deep instincts.
Sorry no. The essential part wasn't that practically everyone in the media was liberal, the essential part is that they are allm with few exceptions, liars and propagandists.
If newspapers tell the unvarnished truth, readers won't know what their politics are.
Alan Brooks| 2.2.09 @ 11:28AM
Time and Newsweek are now like People and Us.
they ought to pay us to read the rags, not charge us $3.95
rdavis| 2.2.09 @ 11:36AM
Good article. One further point is needed. After journalism shifted its raison d'etre to social work, it fell prey to identity politics and political correctness (just as did the education system). That move was sancitified and then mandated by the new corporate bureaucrats who took over the industry. Hiring, reporting, editing, thinking, etc., all have become subject to their PC worldview. Now it's not so much what journalists think as who they are, which makes the decline pretty much irreversible. You can't even discuss it.
Tenn Slim| 2.2.09 @ 11:37AM
All
Excellent, just outstanding. As an oldster spanning all of these events, trends and results, I find the post historically correct, accurate to a crossed t and dotted i.
Sad to say though, the demise is also the demise of information flow to the hinterlands. W/O a printed paper, there are a host of folks that live in the far reaches getting thier information late, and or not at all. The net only reaches those with the comm setups to accept the data transfers.
W/O a hinterland population knowledgeable, the Left will have less problems getting into place thier goals and agendas.
A serious problem.
end
Howard| 2.2.09 @ 11:52AM
Well written piece. I first starting reading The New York Times in the early Seventies. The editorials were garden variety liberal, but not "in your face". I stopped reading the paper over the last eight years. The papers anti-Bush philosophy was so vile that I wouldn't want to insult my canary by putting the paper at the bottom of the cage. I live near Boston. The Globe is a boring pedantic left wing piece of shite. Totally dedicated to the Kennedy's, totally a shill of the Democrats. I realize Massachusetts is a very deep blue state, but, I think Pravda was more balanced. Newspapers- RIP.
JP| 2.2.09 @ 11:58AM
Murchison, as usual, hit the nail on the head. I would also add that there has been a great deal of spin concerning the history of newspapers. There really never was a "Golden Age" of reporting. Until the 50s, most major cities had at least 4 dalies -some had as many as 6. All practiced muckracking reporting to a large degree. All had slanted news; the slant was largely dependent upon the owner or publisher. You truely had a diverse set of newspapers, and everyone knew thier political affiliations. Add in the politcal pamphetleers and literary digests, and one could say there was a cornucupia of the printed word.
It was only after Morrow and his set of professional do-gooders began to make reporting a profession (ie journalism) did the rot begin to set in. Add in the decy of the urban areas, and the number of the newspapers and thier quality begin to drop. Gone were the reporters like Mike Royko, who knew every gin-joint, ward heeler, precinct captain, and shylock in town. Morrow created fantasy of the "Journalistic Golden Era", where reporters buried thier prejudices and only reported the news. Tell that to RM Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. The press hatred for all things Nixon started in 1948 in California.
There was never a Golden Age. Reporters always slanted thier news.
Thomas| 2.2.09 @ 12:03PM
Actually, I think that the decline of the newspaper is largely a factor of two things.
First, the decline of functional literacy in our society. Fewer people actually read news nowadays. They watch the video feeds.
Second, of those that do read news, they have the internet. A much vaster universe of news is available at their finger tips than on the printed page. This universe includes the local newspaper.
The type of people inhabiting the newsroom may, indeed, have changed in the last forty years, but the fact that people are no longer held captive by a printed newspaper for their news is the ultimate reason for the demise of the local newspaper.
OleJoe| 2.2.09 @ 12:06PM
I couldn’t agree more. As a kid growing up in the Columbia, SC area, I looked forward the receiving the State paper every day. Later I relocated to the New Orleans area. Being close to a major metropolitan area was a real treat because now I had a major daily to read, The Times Picayune. Sadly, over the last 32 years I watched this paper deteriorate to nothing more than a leftist rag with much of the editorial page being lifted from the NY Times. I finally had enough and cancelled my subscription about six years ago. I hated to have to do it but a paper has to reflect its readers. The T-P no longer does so.
clashseeker| 2.2.09 @ 12:21PM
Lets see, the newspapers that so totally support libs and democrats, thus guarantees libs and dems run public schools, which guarantees fewer and fewer of the citizens will know how to read are now going broke. These people are called " elites ".
PolishKnight| 2.2.09 @ 12:34PM
One of the most hilarious signs of falling newspaper signs was an NYT ad featuring a yuppie family with a mother, father, and daughter cracking open the NYT. The father read the sports section, the wife the style, and the daughter: the internet. They looked like a real-life version of the comic strip Sally Forth.
The authors of the ad, and their customers, didn't realize that their TV family image came across as quaint and simplistic as The Leave It to Beaver 1950's family they had long mocked. I was unsurprised when they folded up shop. Good riddence.
frost| 2.2.09 @ 12:40PM
Can't help but smile when the ghastly New York Times has to borrow $250-mil from Carlos Slim at an alleged FOURTEEN-PERCENT INTEREST. Now, that's news!
J David| 2.2.09 @ 1:09PM
There will be a gov't-subsidized press. You are wishful thinking...
Vast numbers of people still listen to the lies(witness new Marxist president, and the acceptance of the Gore hoax)of MSM, and select what they read according to declining educational pre-programing, and sharply declining moral standards in the culture.
The RINO Party is NOT making a difference as they have accepted a default moral position sympathetic to false premises of commie-libs.
This country voted for Der Schlictmeister TWICE, and have given the Marxists entire control of the levers of power this time, again. It does not take Nostradamus to see what is about to happen.
The newspapers are largely irrelevant now because they have ACCOMPLISHED THEIR PURPOSE in the overthrow of America. They are just one component, along with TV, movies, culturally-reflective glossy magazines, and the one-world religion of the New Age(self-worship) in the end of Western civilization.
Gerard E.| 2.2.09 @ 1:10PM
Murchison's piece reminds me why I applied for j-school in the first place- the glow eminating from Woodward and Bernstein. It also reminded me that by senior year, I had become a hard-edged conservative. Therefore dooming me from entry in many newsrooms. Oh dear. The article also triggered the reason why I abandoned daily delivery of the Philadelphia Inquirer almost two months ago- the celebration of the LGBT community by faculty at a downtown charter high school. The activities of consenting adults do not interest me a whit, so long as the horses transporting tourists around Independence Mall are not alarmed. But to sponsor this kind of social engineering with my taxpayer's nickel is a waste. To promote it in the Metro section as something noble and true is bad business. Hence, the loss of mine.
kiwikit| 2.2.09 @ 1:11PM
As a child in Philadelphia we had two papers: the Inquirer in the morning with cereal and the Bulletin in the evening with cocktails. Everyone read both.
Now the only one any of us reads is theeveningbulletin.com. The Inquirer is paper but publishes nothing but liberal mishmash. Their touchyfeely web name says it all: philynews! We used to eschew anyone who didn't give our city its full name and we expected more than one sentence / paragraph. How we can only find good grammar and interesting style on the Web; everything is AP rules: writing for the least educated and bright. To normally intelligent people, it's a repetitve, predictable bore!
Kevin Killion | 2.2.09 @ 1:41PM
Reading a newspaper -- a REAL newspaper -- makes demands on readers: First, they have to be able to read well. Second, they have to possess a background of factual knowledge to make sense of the new information. And third, they have to be able to comprehend and digest the new information. Unfortunately, none of those three skills are of much interest in modern public education.
And who is to blame for the collapse of public education? Certainly, newspapers themselves can take a big chunk of the blame. The vast majority of urban newspapers cover very little about schools with the exception of stories about raising union salaries. Seldom does a newspaper cover in depth the crises in reading methods, in substantive content, in the overwhelming emphasis devoted to fluffy projects and faddish theories. For decades have trusted to educrat establishment and took them at their word that everything was just fine, or would be if only they had more money. Well, the chickens have roosted: now newspapers can survey their communities and find them filled with public school products who barely read more than People magazine, and who think that the Daily Show provides all the news they need. Nice goin', editors -- you've reaped what you have sown.
Pat| 2.2.09 @ 1:47PM
Interesting funeral oration, but for every action there is a reaction and the big city dailies are trying to find a way out of their self-generated bed of nails. First, the denials of course. Abandoning factual reporting for stories that support political causes wasn't the source of their problems, they claim. It was their old fashioned business model and the internet that created the financial losses, they were always fair and objective in their reporting.
And what's their new business model? Online editions and cutting back on publishing days for the traditional paper based news delivered to your doorstep by some underpaid kid. Problem is that online ad revenue only replaces 20% of the revenue formerly earned from full-page newspaper ads featuring shiny cars, groceries or furniture. So, the dailies may have to resort to charging their readers for access to their websites in the hopes they will want local news as well as international and national news.
The problem with that model is whether their readers will actually pay to read their website when so many free alternatives are available. And Conservatives may resent paying to be insulted and demeaned just to find out what the Mayor and City Council are doing today. Liberals may believe their big city dailies are only reporting the truth after all, but won't pay to have their philosphy echoed as in the past when their constant stroking was free of charge.
Papers like the Detroit Free Press have realized a little late that online adverstisers want Conservative readers, folks who actually buy their products. So, a softening of attitudes is in the works. Conservative opinion is getting more sympathetic play lately, although the typical reader can determine their editorial hearts aren't really into it. Covering the neighborhood garage sales or writing puff pieces for the Weekly Shopper aren't the career ambitions of your typical journalism grad so a new consciousness will shortly ensue. Gradually, and without fanfare, the editors will attempt to lure back their Conservative customers while retaining their loyal Liberal readers. The question is whether Conservatives are dumb enough to be taken in - the media is betting they are.
Lancer| 2.2.09 @ 1:56PM
Murchison rings true for this Watergate-era J-school alum. Our best profs were the veterans of America's formerly common-sense newspapers. When Woodward and Bernstein began racking up their reports on Watergate, the coercive utopian liberal aspiring journalists in our midst became intoxicated with their greatness and moral superiority, shouting in class "Impeach Nixon!" It will be a great day when the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel comes crashing down along with so many other newspapers that have failed to be consistent in giving us fair and accurate coverage of the day's events. Pride goeth before the fall...
Charles Perry| 2.2.09 @ 2:24PM
The problem in a nutshell: In the old days, reporters prided themselves on scooping each other. Now they pride themselves on being on the same page as the New York Times.
Victor Erimita| 2.2.09 @ 2:58PM
We haven't put down newspapers because we are lazy or illiterate. We've put them down because we don't like being lied to, preached to, manipulated and condescended to. But it doesn't matter, because the entire entertainment/"news"/fashion- taste- and image-building industries have been taken over by people with Marxist, America-hating agendas. And they have won. They own the universities, the schools and virtually all media. You can't check out at the supermarket or drug store without being asasaulted from the mag racks by their propaganda, slickly, sexiliy packaged to instruct you on Right Thinking. And Americans have bought, have they not? They obeyed their betters and thought Bush/Cheney were the antichgrist and now accept their instruction on The Messiah, "progressivism," global warming, the inherent evil of business, the inherent righteousness of government (as long as it is controlled by the Democrats) and that America is the root of the entire world's problems. They have won. Those of us who stopped buying papers have been silenced, shut out of the public voice. The newspapers going belly up is slim comfort.
ruth| 2.2.09 @ 3:18PM
All they had to do was tell the truth; always too much to ask of liberals. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Jeremiah| 2.2.09 @ 3:31PM
The response of reactionaries to journalism and newspapers has always been one of outrage, a sense that newspaper writers long for nothing so much as to "stab their country in the back" (a favorite trope of totalitarian states).
It's a pretty unsophisticated way to look at the issue.
Watergate was big news, and it was because a handful of newspapermen refused to believe the incredible wall of lies constructed by the Nixon administration that we know the full extent of it.
Actually, we know that the issue went far beyond a simple burglary of a hotel room and involved dozens of federal officials -- and the president himself -- abusing power. It involved the illegal bombing of two foreign nations (Laos and Cambodia) and dozens of other extreme infractions.
What we need now are journalists who will STOP listening to the cynical and demonic choruses of reactionaries who accuse them of betraying their country every time they ask a question about foreign policy.
We need journalists who will ignore Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the clowns who, without having any knowledge or experience in actual journalism, presume to tell newspapers what is and what is not news.
Finally, we need journalists who defy those in their own profession who seek to make news more entertaining.
We also need a fuller inquiry into the abuses of the Bush administration with respect to its dealings with the news media, particularly charges that it planted fake journalists and stories. Propaganda is intolerable to a free society.
Jeremiah| 2.2.09 @ 3:34PM
By the way, this whole thread is so much cackling of crows.
One word can sum up the major economic problem facing most dailies: craigslist.
But to acknowledge that, we'd have to have our wits about us and not be itching for yet another cause to thrash the "liberal elite."
Fact Checker| 2.2.09 @ 3:46PM
I was just sort of wondering, do you guys think Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford get the credit they deserve for exposing Watergate in a series of well-researched articles for the Washington Post.
Who are these guys, Woodward and Bernstein, that people are always talking about, anyway?
Anthony| 2.2.09 @ 3:51PM
Hell, even when that propaganda love song to the MSM came out, I couldn't stop laughing myself silly. Even in the '70s, "All the President's Men" was a howler of a fantasy, dedicated to those intrepid defenders of the 1st Amendment. Yep, there's Woodstein ( as the Kennedy butt kissing Ben Bradlee called them) hitting the pavement, working 23 hrs a day, triple sourcing all info before going to print. It was a joke then, and most certainly, a joke now. Today they would take a page from the Dan Rather school of journalism and just make up "Deep Throat" if he didn't exist. Or, as the New Republic's Scott Beauchamp did, just create a composit to fit the templete. But Woodstein had the real deal in another sellout that couldn't wait to bring down a Republican administration. Where oh where was Deep Throat when Clinton was committing all those felonies?? Probably hiding in Sandy Berger's shorts. What remains of the vaunted MSM isn't enough to give a decent burial, so let the wind scatter what's left of it.
Vern Crisler| 2.2.09 @ 3:52PM
Jeremiah's attitude is shared by most of the media, and is another good reason for celebrating the end of metro newspapers. Now if the same thing could happen to the major TV news networks....
Jeremiah| 2.2.09 @ 4:00PM
Vern --
Rather than speculate about my "attitude" (a variety of ad hominem attack so well perfected on right wing radio), why not address the points I make and try to explain your reasoning?
Anthony| 2.2.09 @ 4:07PM
Frost: Well put. It's now called the Mexican Times. Perhaps ole Carlos Slim will make a movie of the Mexican takeover of the NYT. Maybe Clint Eastwood can star in: "For a few pesos more".
Everly Waverly| 2.2.09 @ 4:12PM
I was spending approx. $17.00 a month for a newspaper I could no longer read--The Sacramento Bee. The front page was dominated by woe-is-me nonsense, all the latest injustices done to illegal immigrants and literally front to back criticism of anything of traditional values. Of course I do miss is sitting in my chair with a cup of coffee and spending that hour or so relaxing and reading the news but that slowly drifted from relaxing to exclaiming "what kind of cr-p is this".
The only newspaper in this town managed to alienate half it's audience, genius marketing, huh. Liberal ideology trumps enhanced revenue. I suppose they're in line for a bailout.
californiaisadream| 2.2.09 @ 4:28PM
The day I cancelled the San Francisco Chronicle, never to return, was the day (shortly after 9/11) they ran a cartoon showing John Ashcroft as a Nazi, destroying people's rights and liberties. All newpapers do today is play gotcha with Republicans, slant so-called "news" articles to get across their agenda and withold any real news regarding their party of choice or it's candidates. Flubs or mistakes are blown thru the roof if it's a Republican, hundreds of thousands of dollars unreported on their income tax returns are simply "oversights" or "errors". The only papers worth reading now are either the Investors Business Daily or the Wall Street Journal. And that's for the real news, not just business. The sooner the so-called print and tv news goes away the better. They made their beds, they can lie in them.
californiaisadream| 2.2.09 @ 4:30PM
The hundreds of thousands of dollars unreported as income apply to the new Obama cabinet appointees claiming they were shocked! shocked! to learn that they had failed to declare income that should have been taxed.
Todd| 2.2.09 @ 6:13PM
This paragraph has to go down as one of the all-time Jeremiah howler's "We also need a fuller inquiry into the abuses of the Bush administration with respect to its dealings with the news media, particularly charges that it planted fake journalists and stories. Propaganda is intolerable to a free society.
You really are a deluded moron liberal Jeremiah. The only planted stories regarding Bush I can recall is Dan Rather's and CBS's pathetic attempt in 04 to win the election for a liar like John Kerry. Obama doesn't need to plant fake journalists or false stories because he already has a multitude of phony journalists (NY Times, Newsweek, MSNBC, etc) that will do his dirty work for him.
Pat Boyle| 2.2.09 @ 6:36PM
I tend to agree with the anger over liberal editorial policy but I wonder if that's the real cause. I think a lot of it has to do with Craig's List and similar web based technologies.
Craig's List has cut the heart out of the newspaper employment classified ads. Similarly specialty newspaper articles on business, technology, and even sports have been superceded by specialty web sites. Once you had to read the paper everyday to keep up. Today's newspaper only seem to have unique stories about local crime. All other potential issues seem better covered by web sources.
Clearly today's mainstream newspaper's serve up a lot of propoganda but maybe that's just a symtom of a dying medium not the cause of te decline - maggots in the carcass.
Steve Kindred| 2.2.09 @ 7:20PM
Thanks for a well written, absolutely "on the mark" piece. Having just left the newspaper industry myself - the business side, not the writing side - I can only agree with Mr. Murchison.
Bryan St. James | 2.2.09 @ 7:22PM
Maybe the decline of the newspaper business could be correlated with the decline of the concept of an objective journalistic standard vs. a politicized one.
Our biggest, local newspaper in MN recently declared bankruptcy. Locally, we call it the Red Star Tribune. The ‘red’ addition is an indication of its overall bias- including outside of its editorial pages. As an anecdotal factoid, I canceled my weekly subscription because of that bias.
It’s a wonderful thing watching the free-market market (yes, it still works!) render its collective judgment on an undesired product. Too bad, just like with Socialism, the leftist journalists, editors, and owners can’t understand or adjust to the concept that their values and politics are out of step with reality, and therefore, most of the American public.
JP| 2.2.09 @ 7:24PM
Jerimiah.
"Watergate was big news, and it was because a handful of newspapermen refused to believe the incredible wall of lies constructed by the Nixon administration that we know the full extent of it"
Yes, I guess they decided to grow a pair after covering up for JFK and LBJ. They hated Nixon since 1948.
"...and the president himself -- abusing power. It involved the illegal bombing of two foreign nations (Laos and Cambodia) and dozens of other extreme infractions."
Nixon already was withdrawing 100,000 men from Indo-China a year. He was within his rights as commander-in-chief to protect military forces by conducting operation Linebacker in Cambodia and Laos. BTW, the press didn't "scoop" this operation. Nixon and Abrams briefed the press from day one.
"...We need journalists who will ignore Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the clowns ..."
Ah,.... we already have that with NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the DailyKoz, the AP, Reuters, NYT, Wa Post, LA Times,.....
"We also need a fuller inquiry into the abuses of the Bush administration with respect to its dealings with the news media, particularly charges that it planted fake journalists and stories"
Mmmm. like they did for Clinton, JFK, and now Obama. They MSM is in full adoration mode now. They missed scoops with Emanual, Giethner, now Daschle...
Jerimaiah, you are either a MoveOn type or a fool.
Anthony| 2.2.09 @ 8:10PM
What gives??? In addition to a completely corrupt leftist media, the Democrats are now proudly and unabashedly amoral and systemicly corrupt. We have Charlie Rangle, head of the House Ways and Means Committee, who can't figure out to pay his taxes, or rather, should I say, is a complete and outright tax cheat, yet manages, when caught, to pay only back taxes, no penalties or interest. Thank you Madam Pelosi. And Charlie is in charge of what we plebes must pay in taxes, or else!! Then we have Chris Dodd, Chariman of the Senate Banking Committee, who got a sweetheart deal from Countrywide, saved around $70,000, promised to disclose these documents months ago, didn't, but is now refinancing. Oh, and Mr. Brave sends his wife out to discuss this with the timid CT media. Wow! what a stand up guy. Next of course, we have Gerthner and Daschle, who, according to their apologists, are the only people in America that can run these agencies, but can't seem to remember to pay taxes, yet they have the best tax accountants money can buy. And of course, our Senate Republicans make excuses for these guy. If these reprehensible elitists haven't made the case for term limits or revolution, I don't know what will. But Jeremiah wants to investigate Bush. The inmates not only run the aslyum, they own it, and a majority of Americans are just fine with it. Hey Jeremiah, let's empty GITMO and replace them with the entire Democrat congress, waterboarding is optional, and you can be social and activities director. Better yet, J, you need to follow my previous advise, get a girl friend, shut off your computer and get a damn life.
sam | 2.2.09 @ 8:53PM
It all went south when reporters started calling themselves journalists. They went from reporting the events of the day to arguing an ideology.
clashseeker| 2.2.09 @ 9:32PM
Gee Jeremmiah , how about a media that asks Obama, Pelosi, Gore, Reid, any democrat some really detailed questions about their energy plan. Like just what kind of cars do they envision us driving in 2020 ? Are they gonna try and force us all into those silly little smart cars ? How come we and we alone as a nation can't do nuclear power ? Why are we so unqualified to do this ? We invented the freaking thing. The Limbaugh media has some curiosity about these matters. Your media ? In on the hoax, I'd say. I am not a reactionary, nor most on this page. They seek some honesty in media, and only a fool thinks we get that from today's papers. Even worse is their complete cover up of the downside of our current immigration situation, and calling racists anyone who questions this onslaught of negative immigration. You are riding high now, but I hope I live long enough to see the day when good men and women rise up and jerk the reins of the high horses you kind ride now. You'll bite the dust, all of your smug, weasel word, facile crew. We are taking down your print division. Now please let's just dump the cable payments. That is just more tribute to the chattering class, image making propagandists. Bring them down. How many of you went to a movie or rented a dvd. Well give it up and do to tv and hollywood what we did to the newspapers. Kick them dead on in the nuts, cancel your cable. Blow up their revenue stream .Or, is it too much to ask ? Compared to serving at Valley Forge with rags on your feet and tattered outwear it is a picnic. C'mon, sacrifice your stupid 500 channels of crap. Learn how these media conglomerates are ripping you off for garbage to fill their coffers and feed the media beast that is helping destroy our nation.
JPL17| 2.2.09 @ 9:43PM
I think the beginning of journalism's death spiral can be dated even more precisely than simply "1974." I think historians will date it as of President Nixon's Watergate-era press conference, when that a-hole pseudo-journalist, Dan Rather, asked Nixon some extremely long-winded hostile question, to which Nixon responded with an attempted joke, "Are you running for something?", and that smug a-hole Rather answered, "No, Mr. President, are you?" That was the precise moment journalism began to die.
Jeremiah| 2.2.09 @ 10:03PM
Re: Bush's planted news stories and fake journalists
Have any of you guys ever heard of Jeff Gannon.
Gannon was the gay pornographer / male escort the Bush White House incredibly chose to sit in on press conferences. The idea was that he would ask the president easy or favorable questions.
Over the years of Bush's two terms, several agencies were caught feeding pre-made "news" stories to local news organizations all over the country until the practice was discovered.
stmichrick| 2.2.09 @ 10:03PM
Jeremiah;
Rather than refute each of your liberal points; I would like to point out that by lumping Rush, Hannity and right-wing talk all together as 'reactionary' you make my point. You won't deal with what they SAY. ..just that they have the audacity to say it.
Sean Hannity's style of argument gives even ME a headache but his programs feature something that is lost on defenders of the old style 'big' media: he confronts opposing points of view. True, sometimes it is too much a foodfight; however 'omission' is NOT one of the sins of the Fox News Channel.
Rush does it differently; no guests, but he 'airs' the foibles of the left and as such is a lightning rod for the OPPOSITION.
My complaint about the 'big' media (the dying newspapers and broadcast network news organizations) is just that; the opposition either isn't heard or it is given such a dismissive description as to be irrelevant.
Remember when all there was was Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America? 30 years ago, I looked forward to the 2 minutes a week of James Kilpatrick vs Shana Alexander on '60 Minutes' or WF Buckley on PBS where issues were discussed in an adversarial setting. They were the only places for discussion (OK , argument) about issues in the mass media.
Bottom line, if you are truly interested in sorting out an issue, you cannot be serious about pining for the bad old days of liberal media monopoly.
Jeremiah| 2.2.09 @ 10:04PM
What is it with so many "conservatives" who turn out to be gay, anyway?
It's just weird.
Gannon, Haggard, Foley, Craig -- just to name a few off the top of my head.
stmichrick| 2.2.09 @ 10:13PM
Methinks your perception of relative gayness has no frame of reference.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Ill-Literate| 2.2.09 @ 10:32PM
The difference between a reporter and a journalist is that a reporter only owns one suit.
ruth| 2.2.09 @ 10:38PM
Does this one smart, Jeremiah? Left a mark did it? Well put some ice on it. Viva the marketplace, let free markets reign! LOL!!
Robert Clitherow| 2.3.09 @ 2:34AM
I wish this well written piece was true for just the newspapers. When TV started down the same path, I stopped watching three hours of news each night.
Now I only read news from websites I trust to give me news I trust, from writers I trust. And if the news is from the AP I won't waste my time reading it in the newspaper or online! I can't trust them.
Deborah | 2.3.09 @ 5:33AM
I think Mr. Murchison hits many nails on many heads. I e-mailed a link to this story to my former journalism professor (who is now the Dean at a major J-school university). Between Mr. Murchison's excellent article and the always-excellent comments from Spectator readers (yes, even yours, always-angry Jeremiah)-- I think the Dean can get a good idea of what the future holds for his students.
clashseeker| 2.3.09 @ 5:51AM
jeremiah., who said a conservaitve can't be gay ? Who believes that ?
who does not understand conservatives and republicans come from all walks of life ? Why just some narrow minded, improperly informed liberal who gets his info from the MSM, and thus buys into every silly stereotype about people out there in the real world. Sarah Pallin is somebody you can learn from. She explained she had a broad cross section of friends, family, and acquaintances that informed her of the diversity of thought and attitudes of people. She was not stuck in the straight jacket mentality of you and your lords and ladies of the MSM. You really need to break out of the box Jer. Start by canceling those newspapers that have brainwashed you into becoming a cement headed fool.
walleye| 2.3.09 @ 9:22AM
Mostly agree. Started losing interest in the Post and News about 10 years ago. Stopped subscribing four years ago when I noticed the Post had become cheerleaders for homosexuals.
But to your larger point, the papers were once interesting! The guys (and they were all guys) who wrote for the Post in the 70's and 80's were interesting...they had done things drunk and sober...man I miss Red, Tomas, and the guy with the eye patch ,all dead and I can't stand the wimps who replaced them.
Funniest thing ever in the Post were the articles about the former employee who left to start a business. She was surprised by the regulations and how hard it was!
Michael Gewin| 2.3.09 @ 10:17AM
Gil O'Teen is right on point. I , too, grew up in a two newspaper town, though not St. Louis. My father got up early in the morning to read one paper and then came home to the evening paper. For many years I could hardly start the day without a paper in front of me. Then I moved to St. Louis and, like O'Teen, enjoyed reading the Post and the Globe every day. Then the Globe died and the decline of the Post began. So, about four years ago as I read yet another numbskull article in the Post I realized that I'd had it. Why should I continue to pay for a paper that opposed practically everything I believed in? And it wasn't sufficient for the Post to keep it's left wing thoughts confined to the its editorial pages. Like most big city dailies it spread its editorializng throughout the entire paper; every article infected with the left wing virus. So I stopped it and haven't had one regret for doing so. Sadly the Past-Disgrace hasn't gotten the message yet. It continues to ratchet up its left wing screeching while watching its subscription and ad base crumble. The PD is in its death spiral.
1Freeman| 2.3.09 @ 1:52PM
Hey, Jeremiah,
Glad to see you come back to read. Try this:
Newspapers, magazines and many other "liberal" papers rushed to publish liberal tripe and propaganda, culpable in their role as a political shill about Governor Palin and the Republican ticket as a whole. So much so that they have found themselves in legal trouble. Damn the truth: there was an election to win! No way to spin the liberal press when independent research reluctantly concluded that over 80% of the press for the Republican ticket was negative and over 90% of the press for the Democratic ticket was positive. This is FACT sir, not a baseless accusation of an angry coot.
Just a friendly reminder: this is not a newspaper printing your lies with a last page rebuttal printed weeks later, Jeremiah. This is the replacement for the liberal press you so lament where we get to call you a "shill" and a "plant" and a " slanderer " in direct reply to your post, just a few inches away from your "contribution to our free society." How do you miss your papers of old now sir?.
Newsprint is dead.
Alan Brooks| 2.3.09 @ 2:20PM
Jer, "reactionary" just means conservative.
Jeremiah hates ad hominem attacks because he thinks only HE can employ 'em, the weasel-losel (not lozel).
but what i dont get is why is the possibly bisexual Larry Craig so embarrassing but the repeat molester Michael Jackson not embarrassing?
Alan Brooks| 2.3.09 @ 2:22PM
in todays gay world a celebruty can molest a boy or two and get away with it, but not a girl?
clashseeker| 2.3.09 @ 2:43PM
Robert Clitherow, it is the money. tv is a money machine, and IT is deviously funded. We need to be able to pick and choose the cable stations we want and pay for nothing else. And, what company with any brains really thinks tv advertising helps them much. The remote control has made this advertising medium a mere shadow of itself.Yet, companies pay gazilllions to be on tv. And, we pay for it through everything we buy. But, the swank set takes care of one another in places like NY and LA. Madison Ave, the big media conglomerates, the law firms, Wall Street. These people are all tight, all on the same page. Is anybody moaning about the monster rents Wall Street pays in the Big Apple ? Who owns the buildings ? Big media companies in many cases. Move Wall Street to Main I say. You'll get a better class of executive grounded in common sense, more connected to reality,and all of us will get better returns due to lower overhead. The anointed best and brightest are not the best and brightest. Is that much not clear? Let"s fight them. Let's SHAKE IT UP FOR DARN SAKES. TIME TO BITCH SLAP THESE FRAUDS AND PHONIES. But, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Rush feels bad about the guy Thain for getting heat about his remodeling in a time of economic woe. How dare we criticize a rich guy. I guess that makes you a RINO. We are not the party of the Mink Coat. Nixon won three times for President talking about our parties women wearing good republican cloth coats. laugh all you want. He won against the odds, against as media that hated him. He knew something about getting votes. He won on main street. Not anymore the GOP. Not anymore. We've caved in for movement conservatism. Just shoot ourselves in the feet why don't we and then try to win a race. Alan, do not forget Polanski. He's being elevated to hero status of late as well. Odds are Obama will give him a medal of freedom sooner or later. yes, brave new world it is.
Alan Brooks| 2.3.09 @ 3:19PM
roman polanski is a hero now, clashseeker?
geesh.
the Church got fined megamillions, but polanski is a hero.
go figure.
we'd better date women before it's becomes a felony to date females over the age of 14!
Mary| 2.3.09 @ 3:24PM
I regularly write four columns and/or articles for a weekly newspaper in the Mid-South. In one column, I review books from Regnery and other conservative sources whenever I can get them. The paper is doing fairly well, although some subscribers have gone; advertising is keeping us afloat. I hope we don't go under, because our conservative voice means that we are a gadfly pecking at the hide of the far larger, daily newspaper in town. That one is extremely liberal, right down to the haloed photo of Obama they ran recently. So please, say a prayer for little papers like mine. We do our best to speak out in a voice that is all to seldom available in print these days.
Alan Brooks| 2.3.09 @ 3:43PM
a topsy turvy world.
it is even stranger than fiction, stranger than brave new world.
ruth| 2.3.09 @ 4:17PM
Jeremiah wrote, "propaganda is intolerable to a free society." I couldn't have said it better myself, and that is precisely why the NYTimes and so many more liberal ragsheets are dead
ruth| 2.3.09 @ 4:19PM
Mary, I wish you and your paper well. I'd subscribe if I lived in your state. God bless you and your work.
Mary| 2.3.09 @ 4:41PM
Thanks, Ruth! We're hanging in there.
clashseeker| 2.3.09 @ 5:51PM
The first step in Roman's Restoration might have been some kind of special academy award, or some such award. Then I caught 5 minutes of a PBS whitewash of a show. He was a victim of the repressive 50's you see, poor cinematic genius , done in by Ozzie and Harriet mania and all of that. As Sonny and
cher would say, " the beat goes on ".
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El Wayne| 2.3.09 @ 8:24PM
Goodbye world!!!
Richard Houston | 2.3.09 @ 9:32PM
Nobody needs the newsreaders on tv...waste of time! Nobody needs a newspaper...except to light a fire in the wood stove! Everybody needs the truth...and believe it or not, religion and conservatism provide it.
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I agree with the feelings of the article , but the fact is that the only traditionalist large-city newspaper I know - The Washington Times , which I buy regularly - has only a fraction of the readership of the fairly liberal Washington Post, survives only because of a subsidy , and is now published only six days a week.
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Kathe| 2.4.09 @ 3:46PM
This is a long overdue answer for me and makes perfect sense. Back in the 1980s I began to notice a significant increase in grammatical and spelling errors. I often found myself wondering where the reporter went to school and what the editor was doing instead of editing. Now I understand.
Slowtrot| 2.4.09 @ 4:11PM
Why can't these "newspapers" be sued as unconstitutional?
They were originally constituted in the First Amendment as watchdogs on the government not lapdogs.
Larry Cannon| 2.4.09 @ 5:01PM
The newspaper is going the way of the town crier.
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