"The duty of journalists is to tell the truth. Journalism means you go back to the actual facts, you look at the documents, you discover what the record is, and you report it that way."
Noam Chomsky
(1928- )
It is ironic, I think, that Barack Obama will be holding a primetime press conference the day after it was reported that one newspaper in Michigan will fold in July, three more will reduce their publishing operations to three days a week, the Charlotte Observer will cut its staff by nearly 15% and will reduce the pay of the staffers who remain, and other newspapers, most notably the oldest newspaper in Arizona, may go under if a buyer is not found.
Mind you, I think it is a good thing that Obama apparently intends to communicate regularly with the people in this way. It wasn't exactly habitual in the Bush White House. And presidential press conferences are one way to promote the "filter–free news" environment of which Jonathan Martin writes at Politico.com.
But the downside of "filter–free news" is the alarmingly rapid decline of daily newspapers. They have played an important role in maintaining freedom and democracy in America for more than two centuries, and their demise is not to be taken lightly, even among those who like to complain about the press.
There are many angles to this. One is the decline in advertising revenue, which is the lifeblood of a newspaper. In a weak economy, advertisers are always more reluctant to pay for the display ads that keep newspapers in business — and that problem is more pronounced today since this recession is more severe than any that most people who are alive today have ever encountered.
Some have suggested that a drop in the quality of writing has played a role, which is probably true at some newspapers but not necessarily across the board.
Newspaper readership has been declining, which makes advertisers more skittish because they don't believe they will get as much bang for their bucks. Now, that raises an interesting point for me because total readership is somewhat hard to calculate.
There have always been people who read newspapers that were purchased by others, whether you're talking about newspapers that were placed with the other periodicals for general consumption in a library or a newspaper that was discarded in an eatery and picked up by someone else. It's hard for me — or anyone, really — to tell if a lot of readers have been irretrievably lost or if just as many people are reading the paper but fewer are paying for it.
Is total readership declining that dramatically? Or is the real decline in actual sales? That doesn't seem to matter to advertisers. As far as they are concerned, paid circulation is the key — and that has been dropping in many places.
Which leads to a downward spiral.
The assumption these days seems to be that the internet, relying on "citizen journalists" who have no training as journalists and often cannot distinguish — or do not even attempt to distinguish — between news coverage and opinion, can fill the gap.
I'd like to think it is true that ordinary citizens can perform this vital role in the life of a republic. But, as I see it, turning these "citizen journalists" loose to write whatever they please and then post it directly to the internet — with no middleman to check their facts or their spelling or their grammar — is a recipe for chaos.
Not to mention libel.
The fact that it hastens the day when illiteracy reigns concerns me, although I see signs of that on the internet every day. I fully expect, one day soon, to see "news" reports at the online-only publications that are primarily internet slang (i.e., abbreviations like LOL), emoticons and smileys — and whose authors cannot be bothered to capitalize proper nouns or write grammatically correct sentences.
But what concerns me more is this — it begs the question, "Who will be held accountable?" when these citizen journalists don't take the time to dot their I's and cross their T's — or when there is no one to do it for them.
As I say, I'm glad the president will endeavor to hold these press conferences in an attempt to make the actions of his administration transparent.
But who will hold Obama — or his successors — accountable when the Fourth Estate exists no more?
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