Where Have All the Newspapers (And Reporters) Gone?

I have worked in and around politics almost all of my adult life. Often when an issue of major impact was being debated in Congress or a state legislature, someone from some side of the issue might leak some information about the issue to someone in the press. That reporter would then start making calls, researching the issue, trying to back up what he or she had been told and would also go digging for more infomation. But, if things could be verified and if the reporter felt secure the story was solid, the word would indeed get out to the public. It wouldn't go out in the spoonfed form of a press release or an editorial written by a legislator, but the facts would get out there and the public would start asking questions.

When a President or a Governor or a legislator held a press conference, hard questions could be counted upon, and you always had to be careful what you said over lunch or in the corridors because you never knew who might be listening.

That was then. Newspaper sare going under at a rapid rate, and those that are still standing are shedding qualified reporters like fur in the summertime. Every time I pick up the California daily tally of what is going in the capitol, The Morning Report, I read of another seasoned reporter retiring or going to work as a public affairs operative. The newspapers that are still around have to flash headlines about their compatriots that are permanently shuttering. And, even on local television news, you see fewer and fewer 'reporters' and you are presented with more and more editorialized and infotainment presentation. Rather than follow and report the news that is actually happening, many stations resort to gimmicks and ploys, deciding on what they want to report and building a story to match that report. They give you teasers about what is coming up and then they defer it from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and then to the 11:00 report. And when you get the actual story, it isn't even a story. It's people's opinions about something that has happened and lack of official comments or someone knocking on people's door and sticking microphones in their faces.

If you tune your radio or go onto the internet or turn on a cable news channel, you can hear party lines and conservative or liberal spin delivered day in and day out on the issues of the day - telling you how to interpret what is happening and how not to be swayed by what someone else might be saying about it. We no longer have newswriters, we have inhouse speech writers at news stations.

I understand that the news may be stale by the time I read it in print in a newspaper, but it has also been edited for accuracy (and spelling!). Some of the news I read on the internet is so sloppily thrown together and tossed out there just to arrive first that it isn't even worth reading. And, there is so much that is missing, that goes unremarked upon or unquestioned. All too often now the media gets out in front of a story before it even happens (as in all of the recent press stories about an imminent arrest in the six year old Chandra Levy murder), and the media finally earns a big chastisement from no less than the Washington D.C. police chief for not waiting for confirmation or accurate details. Day after day 'new developments' (read mostly re-hashed inuendo and painful intrusions into the lives of Levy's family and the family of a former Congressman with whom she was linked but who had nothing to do with her disappearance or murder) sprang at us - telling nothing new and nothing that could be verified. Instead we heard of the ongoing pain endured by Levy's family, and of the suffering of the family of the Congressman all these years later. We now apparently want to view the ruins of human life in the aftermath of a crime or an ordeal more than we want to find out who committed a crime and to follow the path of justice. Ditto the ongoing saga of the "Miracle on the Hudson'. Kudos to the pilot and flight crew for downing the plane against all odds and getting everyone out alive - a seriously uplifting real story. In the days after the accident what we got in the print media was information about what happened, theories of the crash, and due accolades for a seasoned pilot who saved lots of lives. Radio and cable accounts, and the endless internet blurbs about miracle pilot, miracle crew - all the talk shows - gave us just too much fluff and too much saturation. I was at the gym this weekend and on the TV overhead on Larry King Live was a 'reunion' of the crew and some of the passengers. A reunion? I guess 30 days of travelling coast to coast giving interviews and getting awards is a suitable amount of time to go by before you reunite everyone again for another huzzah.

And it's no better with bad news. Look at the Nadya Suleman spectacle. All of the entertainment shows clamor to get her on air, hoping she will say something bizarre or they will reveal something horrific. Dr. Phil gets her to admit getting impregnanted with six embryos and having 8 more kids at one time when she couldn't take care of the six she already had was, in retrospect, 'a mistake'. Wow, how proud we must be as a people that we've gotten a mother to admit, for posterity, that having her children was a mistake. At least newspapers printed less, and what they printed were factual details. When you read the LA Times or the Washington Post or the San Francisco Chroncile (for as long as it survives) or the Chicago Tribune, Nadya Suleman gets a little print space here and there (after the initial press extravaganza hosted by Kaiser hospital to tout their own prowess over the successful delivery of the octuplets). When there's something new to report, they will report it.

Or maybe they won't. These newspapers are bleeding. They have cut their resources to the bone, and because of our salacious appetite for gossip and spin and rhetoric, even the print media has had to refocus away from its core strengths a bit onto what we supposedly want to read (and I suppose in some ways we have Rupert Murdoch to thank for this - he printed the Post in a sensationalist manner during the Summer of Sam and the swoon with the Yankees - but New Yorkers bought the papers). Frankly, it's some of that pressure to find something sensationalist to cover that resulted in some of the libel and plagiarism suits that hit some major newspapers in the 1990s when reporters 'created' stories.

Now, of course, in the era of Joe the Plumber, creating someone who doesn't really exist, far from being punished with a libel suit and loss of a job, resulted bizzarely, in so many Americans wanting to know what Sam the non-plumber had to say about so many things going on in this country, and eventually resulted in him being sent to report the Gaza situation on behalf of a conservative outlet. Sam first reported that he felt reporters shouldn't be allowed to report on war, because it's, you know, hellish - and it's hard to make it sound appealing. So we took a guy who pretended to be something he wasn't in order to get in one candidate's face and get onto the other candidate's visible bandwagon, and we didn't care that this all came about through a ruse, we continued to elevate the guy, ultimately into a position where he finally admitted, in his own way, that he had risen to the level of his own incompetence - to wit, he couldn't report on things as they happen if such reporting might make him question some of his own motivations for going to witness what was going on in the first place. See, Sam probably isn't reporter material. Not a huge issue. Lots of people don't have what it takes to write well and to write accurately and to be as dogged as you need to be to follow a whiff all the way to an actual fire - or to admit when the whiff was just a whiff with no real substance.

In America, where a free and working press is what separates us from socialist regimes, fascist regimes, dictatorships and military juntas, we are losing the one thing we should be valuing most - an ability to lucidly look back at ourselves and the world around us and to just write things as they happen - not as we want them to happen and not as we wish they would happen. Right now it is not that technology is eclipsing a medium ( the internet erasing newspapers), but that we are losing our desire for accuracy. We could be using the internet as a tool to get the best stories out quicker and more broadly, but instead we use it to get our 'messages' out in the manner we want them coded to the reader - and we are definitely happy to see print media go because it means no longer will we simply have to chastise the so-called irresponsible editorial pages of bastions of accurate print media - we will be able to eliminate the competition, the clear view, entirely.

I used to be able to name a dozen fine reporters who could report on politics, or energy or consumer issues or communications and technology. And each major newspaper used to have any number of respected journalists contributing solid news stories time and again. But now we are down to a precious few. Where once the spectrum of print to radio to televised media was peppered with the likes of Murrow, Royko, Rather (especially when he was 'just a reporter'), and like what they found or not, Woodward and Bernstein before they were 'celebrities - now it is peppered only with personalities. And with so many quality editorial writers gone, there are just a handful, George F. Will, William Raspberry, etc. whose analysis of issues is always seering and thorough and whose opinions are clearly developed and defended.

Many years ago two comedians introduced us to the future of American media perhaps without realizing how closely they would be paralleling the next 30+ years of 'news' in America. They were Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin on the old "Point/Counterpoint" segment of the original Saturday Night Live. Jane would open with her liberal take on some issue currently in the news and Dan would then begin his conservative counterpoint with the demeaning greeting "Jane, you ignorant slut!". Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Keith Olberman, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly - all of them use terms like that now and some of them aren't even as polite as Ackroyd. They no longer address the issue first, they deliver the demeaning insult first. And look at internet news and see how Murdochized its become. 30 years ago "Batboy!" was only a headline on the Weekly World News - but now "Octomom!" is spread far and wide.

Is this who and what we want America to be? Are we really ready to give up our free press in favor of
a 24/7 cycle of regurgitated non-news and innuendo and spin? Go out and buy a newspaper today. Read it. If you have issues with something it says, write a letter to the editor. But, as you read that paper, compare how it reports the news with how other media present the news. We may eventually read most of our 'print' news on the internet - but we still need reporters to go out and investigate and bear witness and write things down accurately. If we stop buying newspapers now or subscribing to them online - we will have no one to blame put ourselves when all we get are press releases and hatchet jobs and we lose sight of what the term 'news' means altogether.