by Penny, Laura
This is also part of a broader social trend. Things that used to be considered jobs or skills have become choices we can make, evidence of market freedom on the march. We are free to scan our own groceries at the self-service checkout, free to be our own bank tellers, free to pump our own gas. We are free to assemble our own furniture and execute our own stock trades. So too are we free to make our own wee bit of the news, be that in the form of a text or message-board post, a cellphone pic of a disaster, a hit YouTube video, or a particularly piquant blog, tweet, or status update.
Even though virtually everyone with access to a computer has unprecedented access to the media and opportunities to opine, the press is still considered part of the hated nerd elite. The media get lumped in with the brains who control everything, slotted somewhere between the diabolical professoriate (smarter and uglier than the media) and well-heeled Hollywood degenerates (stupider and prettier than the media).
At the same time, many nerds think the media are part of the problem. Cultural critics are often quick to blame the media for the decline of this or that venerable noun, to argue that what passes for news dumbs us all down. The right has produced a barge-load of books about liberal media bias, the left has long held that the media are corporate shills, and many retired journalists have written tomes a lot like those university-decline books I mentioned in Chapter Four. Apparently everything was better and truer when reporters typed their own copy piss-drunk while sporting a snazzy hat.
This is simply to say that the media occupy a strange position, insofar as the money-minded think the media are in league with the brains, and vice versa. This is partly the media’s own damn fault. The mainstream media’s equivocal coverage – stories that ping back and forth between the two sides that every issue is reduced to – provides all the camps with examples of their preferred bias. Moreover, the expanding mediaverse includes more explicitly partisan media organizations, ranging from Fox to MSNBC to the online mags and bloggers on the right and the left.
Media is a small collective noun for a very big part of our landscape, a word that has been stretched as thin and see-through as a wet T-shirt. We demand a lot of a term when we ask it to cover everything from the online chatter on Facebook and Twitter to dead-tree news organs such as the New York Times and the Globe and Mail to infotainment like TMZ.com, Glenn Beck, and Stephen Colbert.
The sprawl of new blogs, news aggregators, and channels means that audiences have access to news 24-7, and there are sites and shows for nearly every niche interest. Never have people had so many opportunities to learn about the latest developments in weather, the stock market, sports scores, home renovation, or celebrity overdoses. Just as we enjoy unprecedented levels of educational participation, so too do we enjoy more media than ever before. This proliferation, however, does not necessarily produce more news.
Instead, aggregators like Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post hork up multiple versions of the same couple of dozen current events every day. Many of these stories are just your local paper’s truncation or elaboration of wire copy from one of the big news services such as Reuters, AP, and the Canadian Press; others are barely warmed-over PR releases from one lobby or another. And then those stories drive the cable coverage and become blog fodder. As the nice people from the Project for Excellence in Journalism note, “While the news is always on, there is not a constant flow of new events. The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news.”1
Print may still serve as a primary source of stories that appear on TV and the Web, but that certainly does not help its financial situation. Miasmatic media spread means that more people see snippets of stories floating in the mist of cable channels, late-night comedy shows, talk radio, and Facebook feeds, and thus feel no need to buy the paper. The old media are having a hard time competing with, or adapting to, the speed and low-to-no cost of online content. The top-ranked American newspaper website is the New York Times site, according to Internet traffic monitor Alexa.com. Web traffic fluctuates constantly, but the New York Times site generally places well behind other info sites such as ESPN and CNN. Canoe.ca, a portal for all the dunderheaded Sun papers, is the top Canadian print-affiliated site, and it usually lags well behind CBC.ca, which trails CNN.com.
The top sites in North America – Google and Facebook – are both good examples of the way the media have gotten huge and global and granular and local at the same time. Google offers access to a goodly chunk of the world’s news. It is a ghost library of positively Borgesian proportions, but it is also a librarian that fetches texts based on your preferences. Googling “Obama + awesome” and “Obama + Anti-Christ” produces two different heaps of information from different sources with different spins. Facebook is even more preferential, providing the latest micro-news according to you and your friends: Katie finally pooped in the potty, Jon is tired, Kelly misses Michael Jackson, and Bob reckons he’s just as worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize as Obambi.
Google and Facebook are practically infinite. Ditto for Wikipedia, another top-ranked user-generated site. In 2009 an artist named Rob Matthews printed and bound a selection of Wikipedia articles, producing a knee-high five-thousand-page monster. And that volume included only 437 articles plucked from the twenty-five hundred or so “feature” articles that Wikipedia editors deemed the most worthy, the crème de la crowd-sourcing floating atop millions of pages of wildly varying quality.
The spread and the specificity of online information have been hell on general-interest organs such as newspapers, Reader’s Digest, and Time, and on niche-ier magazines as well. Plenty of publications died during the economic downturn of 2008–09. Dozens of magazines, ranging from Cosmo Girl to ManDate to Gourmet to Vibe, ceased production. Papers that have been in business for over a century, such as the Rocky Mountain Times, also closed down.
Others slashed their print runs to survive, such as Canada’s National Post, which no longer appears on the east coast or on summer Mondays. Some outfits now exist as online-only versions of their former selves, such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times had to mortgage its posh new digs and scrounge a loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. Hell, even USA Today, the paper for the massiest of masses, has suffered a dip in its circulation rates.
All that bad news meant that newspaper stocks tanked too. A graph of print-media company share prices throughout the recession shows a steep drop-off, a plunge down a sheer rocky slope. (If you fell down it, your injuries would definitely net you a few lines of concerned local coverage.) In 2009 Democratic congressman Benjamin Cardin proposed that imperilled American newspapers get some federal assistance. He did not propose anything so radical as a pile of bailout cash or free subscriptions for eighteen-year-olds like that commie frog Sarkozy’s 600-million-euro press rescue package (roughly 890 to 930 billion U.S. or Canadian dollars, depending on exchange rates). Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act proposes reclassifying ailing newspapers as non-profits; then they could reap the resulting tax breaks and the papers would be more like PBS than TMZ.
Obama said he was open to this proposal in an interview in September 2009, but he was speaking to a newspaper, the Toledo Blade. The right promptly and loudly denounced the proposal as yet more federal meddling in the free market, another costly nationalization of a failed business model that was too liberal to live. Moreover, the right also alleged that any government assistance for print media would represent the total propagandization of an already grossly over-Obamafied nation. Bad enough that he’s the star of the news; he sure as shit shouldn’t be the boss of it too.
Youngish pundits and tech junkies also scoffed at the prospect of a print media bailout. They said this move made about as much sense as giving GM money to keep on cranking out gas-guzzling dinomobiles nobody wants. Whatever happened to the cleansing powers of creative destruction? Those big, dumb, lumbering papers should
have seen the Internet coming and erected pay walls around their content sometime in the 1990s. Or newspapers could have adopted some kind of micropayment structure to monetize their sites. They could have, should have done something – anything really – but play dodo and deny the inevitable.
Cheerleaders for online news claim it can do the same work as print media, and do it quicker and slicker, cleaner and greener, leaner and meaner. Bemoaning the fate of bloated old institutions like the Gray Lady is a waste of time, they say, a wallow in nostalgia that mistakes the paper for the news and ignores the way new media might revitalize journalism. The real challenge is finding new ways to fund old-fangled journalistic endeavours such as investigative reporting, local beats, and political coverage, which are not as ad-friendly or lucrative, on or offline, as lifestyle fluff, gossip, and sports. Who will furnish those who watch the watchmen with coffee, doughnuts, and broadband? Noble philanthropic foundations? Righteous indie collectives? Members-only subscriptions? Or will they be lone wolves, living off their wits and clicks?
Nobody knows yet. Consequently, the death-of-journalism meme is getting even more play than the end of the Enlightenment. It too is a bipartisan declinism. In 2009, in his capacity as a commentator for Fox News, Mike Huckabee delivered an obituary for “a good friend to all of us” – journalism. He alleged that the profession had died of acute head injuries incurred by tripping all over itself to serve the beloved Obama.2 The notion that the media are part of the necrotic, tottering elite has long been a favourite Fox News theme, one that allows the channel to present itself not as part of the media, but as the voice of the people, the brave new populist alternative to rotten old reportage. Jigging on journalism’s grave is Huckabee, Hannity, and Beck’s job.
However, lefty news sites such as Alternet, Daily Kos, and Rabble.ca make the same case, arguing that they represent a genuinely populist alternative to the corrupt and compromised lapdog press. These sites allege that Fox is just the most enthusiastic and egregious gang of media whores turning tricks for military and corporate power. Their rhetoric also displays contempt for the stooges in the mainstream media. A truly liberal or lefty media would neither have corroborated nor complaisantly communicated the Bush administration’s secrets and lies about Iraq’s putative WMDS, domestic surveillance, or torture. Stories like Abu Ghraib broke online first because old journalism was too cowed and compliant, too worried about losing its access to power, to handle the ugly truth.
Partisan media outlets sell themselves as the anti-media and the actual media. Like an anti-government pol on the campaign trail, they see the problem and are the solution. It’s the same pitch – this is the real real – regardless of their size or their side. Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are part of the lucrative Murdoch empire, while their lefty equivalents customarily rely on the kindness of strangers and Kashi ads. Meanwhile, the traditional media encourage and exploit both camps, plucking provocative material from them and mashing up their positions, creating a muddle that is supposed to represent the sensible middle.
This attempted bipartisanship does not seem to be working. A majority of Americans still think the media are liberal, and a vocal minority of them want them to die for that very reason. Then there are the up-with-tech types who want newspapers to die because they are old. Whether they skew liberal or libertarian, hippyish or addled by Ayn Rand, these techies treat the death of newspapers as a renaissance of journalism and democracy. If the old media must die to make way for the thousands of infoblossoms blooming online, so be it. The grandpa media missed the biggest Extra! Extra! of all, the one about their own impending superfluity and obsolescence: most people under thirty-five ambled over to The Daily Show and the Web to meet their news needs years ago. Newspapers are like unto typewriters and rotary phones to them.
Losing the youth is an obvious sign that old news media are getting smaller. But the news is also shrinking because it is growing. More news outlets means a smaller audience share for any single paper, network, or website. While all three might dog-pile on similar stories and parrot a lot of wire copy, they also put a particular spin on their delivery and selection of that material. In the same way that the buffet of charter schools undermines the notion of schools as social glue, media proliferation undermines the idea of the press as a public institution or source of common knowledge. Instead, the veracity of any media outlet becomes a matter of private taste. There is news for you and people like you; then there are the channels and blogs that you and yours will never patronize, unless you are trawling for yuks and wrongness.
Some have argued that this is part of the reason why political discourse remains so polarized, in spite of all the polls claiming that people want their representatives to quit bickering, in spite of Obama’s many “there are no red states, no blue states, only the United States” speeches. As Texan journalist Bill Bishop explains in his 2008 book, The Big Sort, Americans live in increasingly ideologically homogeneous communities, landslide districts of either Republicans or Democrats. They also consume media that cater to their particular political world view. Bishop sums it up succinctly in his Big Sort blog on Slate.com: “We read apart, live apart, watch apart, blog apart, and drive apart; we are one country that lacks any shared experiences or, it seems, common purpose.”3
Bishop argues that there is an echo-chamber effect at work here too. When like minds flock together in a specific burb or on a particular corporate, editorial, or web board, people distinguish themselves by adopting increasingly extreme versions of the group’s consensus opinions. This is one of the reasons why the anti-war and anti-trade side and the anti-gub’mint side both compare the president to Hitler, even though they paint their little moustaches on different presidents. This helps explain why a recent poll, conducted by Sacred Heart University, found that Fox News was simultaneously the most and least trusted news source: 30 per cent of the respondents said it was the most reliable network and 26 per cent ranked it dead last.4
Newspapers have always run partisan, sensational, or scandalous material. That’s not new. What has changed is that the media have broken down the barrier that formerly separated entertainment and news, so we consume facts and events the same way we consume fun: according to our personal preferences. It is pointless to pine for a simpler time like the three-channels-and-two-local-papers age, when almost every one trusted Walter Cronkite.
When Cronkite shuffled off this mortal coil in 2009, many journalists and media critics covered his death as another obituary for journalism. He had been retired since the early eighties, but his former colleagues turned his death into a symbol of the end of serious news, the kind that used to inspire trust and sway public opinion and politics.
The fragmentation and multiplication of the media mean that participants in public policy arguments, such as the debate about health care, bring very different sets of facts and interpretations to the table, ones that are often incommensurable. Talking heads are unlikely to find any sort of sensible middle or reasonable compromise between “We need a public option” and “This is socialist tyranny.”
It is disingenuous for news organizations to claim that they seek balance or neutrality when they get some blogger who hates Obama to go head-to-head with a Democratic operative. What they really want, what their questions provoke, is a fight – the drama, emotion, and snaps of clashing camps skirmishing. The news is just a wonkier version of the same stuff that sells in other branches of the entertainment industry: conflict between characters. The difference between a UFC bout, Kanye West vs. the world, and a spat between opposing members of Congress or Parliament is increasingly one of degree rather than kind.
News organizations, like other branches of the entertainment industry, pimp themselves with promotional merch. Coffee mugs and tote bags are as old as Pledge Week, but the Fox News store also offers fifteen different ties, golf paraphernalia, books by a number of its on-air personalities, and a branded watch. The CNN store sells T-shirts emblazoned with your favourite infota
ining headline. Popular choices include “Obama Beats McCain” and “1 in 3 Workers Hungover at Office.” Under the banner of “offbeat,” one can purchase “Poop Power Saves City Money” and “Pole Dance Ends with Face Plant.”
Journalism even has its own combination theme park and mausoleum. In 2008 the Newseum, a $450 million facility years in the making, finally opened. Previously housed in much more modest digs in Rosslyn, Virginia, the Newseum now occupies a massive, splashy building in Washington, D.C., down the road from the Capitol. It hosts a collection of journalism artifacts, interactive displays, multiple movie theatres playing video clips, a working production studio, tributes to journalists who have died in the line of duty, a gift shop, a food court, and a more upscale Wolfgang Puck eatery.
The millions of bucks that built the Newseum came from people who own newspapers, like the Gannetts (USA Today) and the Sulzbergers (the New York Times). The news industry is trying to burnish its image by presenting its own infotaining version of journalism’s history and future. Like the Creation Museum, the Newseum borrows some gravitas from museology and history to make its case, then wraps all that serious info and old jive in fun for the whole family, in entertaining flicks and interactive displays.