By Joe Briggs
SUWANEE, Ga. | While I grieve with Raleigh Perry on the demise of U.S. newspapers, I disagree with his analysis. He states that people who once stayed informed through daily newspapers have shifted to the convenience of the internet. But he then laments the absence of any substance in the nightly broadcasts. So have the consumers lost interest in the news, or have the news providers lost interest in the consumers?
Briggs
I suspect the newspaper’s epitaph is not “Killed by internet” but rather “Squashed by special interests.” I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for 22 years until Rupert Murdoch replaced front-page wit with bad opinions. Shifting to the New York Times, Ellen Barry and David Sanger wrote politically charged front-page narratives of the 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict that were often refuted by their own reporters deeper in the folds.
Many people have taken more multiple papers – often a national paper such as the NYT, USA Today, WSJ, a regional paper like the Boston Globe or AJC, and a local paper such as the Gwinnett Daily Post. This was up until the regional and local papers fired their reporters and started printing the same Associated Press articles, with all these newspapers showing the same stories. To most families, what really mattered was the school board, the honor roll, zoning changes, property taxes, the police blotter, and the yard sales that local newspapers ought to have. If you don’t have such news in your local paper, you might as well drop the papers and get cable. (But you have almost no local news on cable.)
There is very little in print or major media today that passes as old-school investigative news reporting. There are no Bob Woodwards anymore because there are no longer any news gathering agencies willing to pay a salary with health insurance.
There might be lots of reasons for little investigative reporting. They might include advertisers not wanting to sponsor controversial events such as the 2014 Israeli attack on Palestine where so many children were killed. Or eliminating the Fairness Doctrine (for broadcast media) which led to single-sided reporting. Or the 1991 Gulf War provided embedded journalists and those attending the daily military press briefings canned footage and quotes. Other than a few like CNN’s Peter Arnett, who strayed to cover the war’s impact from the Iraqi side — which got him dubbed “anti-patriotic,”— the media did little to distinguish itself or go beyond what the military wanted us to know.
If people are willing to tune in to accept what the government is telling them for free, then why would networks pay reporters to gather it? This occurred before the I-Phone ever hit the market.
The good news is that there are over 5,000 blogs and podcasts on the internet today featuring a range of topics and discussions. However, the recent hysteria over COVID, vaccines, Me Too, and social justice, has led to a Congressional demand for a crackdown on free speech and shuttered many of them. This created fear and censorship hasn’t been seen since the McCarthy hearings. Misinformation is the new communism.
Mr. Perry suggests that our democracy is only as strong as our free press. I think the last few election cycles have shown him to be correct, as voter ignorance, confusion, and frustration have never been greater. I wish we and he had a solution.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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