"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
The Predicament
of the PressPosted 8:15 p.m., Feb. 3, 2005
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For my money, James Fallows, is the greatest journalist America has got, Bob Woodward be damned. Fallows, a regular contributor to The Atlantic magazine and author of such seminal books as "National Defense" and "Breaking the News," appeared in Minneapolis on Nov. 10, a speech I caught with three of my journo buddies.
It was a wide-ranging talk that hit on a laundry list of bullet points, from his post-election analysis to the state situation in Iraq and the threat posed by Iran's nuclear ambitions.
But it was Fallows' assessment of the news business that left the biggest impression.
In the Fallows view, the news business--a cornerstone of American democracy--is in a downward spiral, with no chance of course correction unless some monumental crisis forces it to reform.
News suffers from two simultaneous changes that work together to damage its capacity to function properly in an American democracy, Fallows charges.
For journalism, the first problem is that there has been a vast proliferation of sources, from competing 24-hour news stations on TV overshadowing the network news broadcasts, to bloggers--including this one--that have overcome the barriers to publishing.
Obviously, there are many upsides to this. I wouldn't have this platform, but for the Internet, to use just the most ready example. And I truly do believe that more media voices can be a good thing. I'm personally not convinced that even a openly partisan press, if one were to reemerge in the cat-fighting colonial American tradition, would necessarily be a bad thing--assuming citizens took it upon themselves to suss out more than one viewpoint. This is actually how most of the world's press, and its audiences, now operate.
But there is downside, as Fallows points, in that no longer in America are there any central, credible sources for information that serve to focus the national conversation, roles in recent history played by the major newspapers (The Washington Post, the New York Times) and the three major broadcast networks.
This lack of a of central national information kiosk, while leading to a proliferation of various novel news sources and new points of insight, also has made it possible for information to become over-personalized. This has helped lead to the situation of "red truth" and "blue truth," named for the so-called red Republican and blue Democratic states.
Beginning with the election just passed, we have stopped arguing over philosophies about what the facts mean. Now we argue about what the facts are--whether there were WMDs in Iraq, whether Saddam perpetrated 9/11, whether Kerry was a good or a bad soldier, whether Bush served honorably. This has happened before over minor issues, like whether Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. But never was the schism over the actual facts at the center of the debate so wide.
As I mentioned, I didn't take notes or record Fallows' speech. Instead, I followed up with him by email, with a request to simply restate the case he was making so I could quote use a few of his thoughts in the form of verbatim quotes for a column to be published here.
Like the good writer that he is, he produced the equivalent of an essay, offering it to me to quote at will.
That being the case, it really makes no sense for me not to reproduce the great reporter's thoughts here in full. The remaining text consists entirely of James Fallows' thoughts and words, shared with me by email on Jan. 27.
-- Kevin Featherly
Just Another Business
The main thing that has happened in the last generation is the transformation of the press from being a particular kind of business to being "just another business." Most of the media has of course always had a commercial base. Newspapers could be highly profitable. Broadcast news was part of profitable broadcast companies. Magazines and books were published in hopes of making money.
But through, say, the late 1960s, much of the media had motives more complicated that simply maximizing profits. The newspaper-baron families often had their own motives, both high-road and low. (Think of Hearst, Pulitzer, Chandler, and so on.) They cared about their reputation. They looked for political impulse. Think of Ted Turner as a modern example.
The point is not that the motives were always good; it is that they were more complicated than simply making money.
Meanwhile, the main broadcast networks were obliged to run "public service" news divisions, and at certain times viewed them as loss leaders for the prestige of the organization. Book publishing was often run in a genteel/snobbish fashion.
A collection of forces over the last generation has reduced the factors that insulated news operations from pure market forces. The rise of newspaper chains and consequent dilution of family control; de-regulation of both the content and the ownership structure of broadcast operations; the coming of much more variegated competition, through cable TV, satellite and the Internet.
The overall effect is that the news "product" is now delivered more or less the same way as other purely corporate products.
In the United States, that means that the high level of news is very high indeed--and the mass level is very "massy." The national-level New York Times is stronger, in terms of its content and coverage, than the mainly local NYT of a generation ago was--and the nationwide Diaspora of educated readers is better off to be able to get it every day. Meanwhile, network TV is more trendy and scandal-minded, and local newspapers in general are in trouble.
The good of this situation is that the motivated news-seeker can find more, better, news than ever before in history, largely thanks to the Internet.
But "general" news--the shared info on which people make decisions about policies, politicians, and the general business of self-government--is weaker than before. The most striking symptom was the "separate fact universes" of the 2004 elections. It's not just that half the public disagreed with the other half about opinions or policies. It's that they disagreed on basic facts -- e.g., whether Saddam Hussein had launched the 9/11 attacks.
So that's basically the pitch: Judged strictly as a business, the media business is doing fine. But judged by the non-business "externalities" that it provided to the workings of democracy, its increasing conversion into a niche-ized product creates difficulties.
-- James Fallows is a
national correspondent
for The Atlantic magazine.
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Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly
