MSM Deathwatch Cont. (Status Anxiety)

Dr. Elissa Clouthier

The Mainstream Media, it be troubled. As in, there are photographers like this Twitter guy who did on-the-spot citizen journalism (Was his picture less newsworthy because he wasn’t a reporter by trade? At this writing over 56,000 people have viewed it.) and there are commentators like me, who report and interpret real-time events like the debates or President Bush’s last speech to the nation. I can read the transcript and watch the President speak tonight and then comment on it (the President has aged and looks weary despite his optimistic talk). How is that different than the paid commentators?

Her comments are worth reading in full.

But in the "Replies" section is a commentary that is so full of wisdom that I need to reprint in full:

I agree that newspapers are dead men walking, and it seems the vast majority of reporters, editors and columnists are willfully blind to the irreversible descent into oblivion. It is primarily because of this denial, and the failure to admit the reasons for the death of the newspaper, that the demise is now unavoidable. Because now the public wants them to die.

Until the last 18 months or so I think newspapers could have turned it around. If they could have summoned the intellectual honesty and moral courage to have recognized and admitted their many years of bias and partisanship, and taken credible steps to correct those gross errors, I suspect there are enough core newspaper readers who would have forgiven them so that the industry could have survived.

It would not have been easy, because a majority of reporters and editors, particularly at major metropolitan papers, would have had to have completely changed the way they did their jobs. They would have been required, for the first time in the careers of many but the longest tenured, to have reported fact as opposed to opinion. They would have been forced to learn how to write objectively and without any motive or goal other than to write clearly, concisely, informatively and accurately. I think if they could have shown that moral courage and a genuine desire to change, most of the reading public would have stuck with them.

But that’s moot now. The newspapers can’t even admit what is happening to them, much less why. In a way, much like papers did for public figures for generations, they are preparing their own obituary before hand. The difference is, the newspapers can’t bring themselves to tell the story straight. Anyone who is paying attention can see the narrative they’re already trying out and polishing up: it was that damned internet, and “Bush’s Depression”, which killed the newspaper industry. Even with death staring them in the face they can’t admit what happened,

And that was that they drove away their readers. They didn’t lose them; they actively drove them away, offended them, insulted them, kicked them down the stairs. They ignored, hell they scoffed at, decades of complaints from their readers, their customers, about reporting that was editorializing, and editorials which were partisan handouts. The newspapers treated the dissenters from orthodox modern American leftism as non-persons. The funny thing is, those non-persons happened to make up a huge chunk of that newspaper readership which might be described as “heavy-duty news consumers”. So when those non-persons saw that the internet and podcasting and citizen journalism provided much more of what they wanted (transparency of bias, objective reporting of facts) they left the newspapers in droves. And they’re still leaving. Very soon now the advertisers will catch on that the newspapers’ subscriber numbers have been grossly inflated for years, and that will be the fall of the pillar which is holding up the portico. The collapse of the industry will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, and it’s possible that within a two-year span we could see a loss of perhaps 2/3 of newspapers currently published. The magazines will be neck-and-neck with them to destruction, and the television news industry will fail shortly after.

The sad thing is, it didn’t have to happen. Readers begged the papers for years to hear their cries. Readers weren’t even necessarily asking for a change in perspective or particular editorial polices as much as they were asking for an end to the practice of advocacy journalism, and editorials passed off as straight news stories.

All we wanted was transparency and a modicum of fairness. But what we got instead was even more spin. We had inflicted upon us the outrage of Election 2008. When the news media as an institution, as an industry, completely abandoned any pretense of disinterest, and actively and openly campaigned for a presidential candidate. Even as newsrooms are on the verge of being packed up, we former newspaper readers are treated to stories of entire newsrooms breaking into applause as “their candidate” gets encouraging results. In 2008 the news media as a whole showed that it was a party to national politics, not its chronicler.

And that is why today, former readers will not only sit on their hands when the industry begs for help; will not only turn away or turn a channel when another story about forlorn freshly unemployed newstaffers pops up - no, instead we former readers will take a kind of sad pleasure in seeing the industry die. Because that’s how destroyed the relationship between the papers and their readers is. Former readers will have a sense of reckoning, of a settling of accounts, in witnessing the death of the newspaper, because the newspaper industry as a whole finally declared what had been seen for years but had never been admitted: that the papers had picked a side. And the majority of the news industry picked a side other than the one their former readers were on.

So we’re not on the threshold of watching the demise of the news industry; we’re just seeing a political adversary fold its tent and disappear into the night. There’s not a lot of regret when that happens. And that’s a shame, because it didn’t have to be. But arrogance and contempt for a huge chunk of your customers is a guaranteed formula for failure.

I cannot understand, and never will, why the people who run newspapers think that hiring a columnist who makes it his job to insult the paper's customers is a good investment. It's as if I hired a receptionist whose role is to tell people who call me to go f**k themselves.


Here, from the Virginian Pilot, is an example.
Donald Luzatto is actually paid by this paper to write stuff like:

The Republican Party of Virginia owes me money and an apology because, like everyone these days, I'm outraged. Outraged! By everything!

Last week, the leader of the Grand Old Party implicated journalists in "shameful" and "vicious" attacks against his candidates. Ordinarily, it takes meeting me to reach that conclusion. He also called the media "elite," which sounds OK, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean it in a nice way.

Picking on Jeff Frederick, the 14-year-old head of the RPV, is - I know - poor form. But he started it.

The party's boy wonder, who also happens to be a state delegate (a fact that explains so much in Virginia), last week spammed the planet with an electronic fundraising missive ... etc.

For those who don't know, the Pilot is currently run as a charity by the immensely wealthy Batten family who tried to sell the thing but got no takers. Pat Robertson considered buying it and turning it into a student newspaper for his university, but decided against it, apparently figuring that it would take too much upgrading to bring it up to college newspaper standards.

In the last year the Pilot's been hemorrhaging writers and editors including some of the top people (rats leaving a sinking ship is the image that comes to mind) and even the paper it's printed on will shrink to save money. But like the patient on life support, we know it's only a matter of time. This patient I won't mourn after it's passing.