We'll Be Like Everywhere Else

Eric Alterman has an in-depth piece in The New Yorker on the now-inevitable decline and fall of the American newspaper. I don't disagree with a thing Alterman says in the piece, but for whatever reason I can never muster the level of angst that it's apparently necessary to have to qualify as a really serious media person in America. To me, the most important thing to keep in mind about the transformation of the American media is here:

The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

The Lippmanite newspaper has always been a phenomenon that was pretty sharply bounded both in time and in place, and I just see no particular reason to think that the United States in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a transcendent ideal of incomparable awesomeness. The future will be different; more like the past, or like present-day Europe, but it's not as if modern-day Britain (or Spain or Denmark or whatever) somehow fails to function as a society or a democracy. People will probably be happier with the media product they consume, and certainly the internet makes it possible for those who are interested to become far better-informed than anyone was fifteen or twenty years ago.

But if you want more hand-wringing, rather than less, Farhad Manjoo's new book True Enough is the place to go to get it.

Comments

"will mean the loss of a single national narrative"
seems like everything's turning into some wikipedia-like thing.

i used to get worried about the fall of this top-down control, but the media's lack of fourth estate-ness in the run up to iraq convinced me otherwise. if they can't marshal their one strength - objective moral authority (and huge money resources) - to question power, then a less-powerful, political press is maybe a better option.

especially when papers are responding to falling readership by cutting investigative reporting, and the other "extras" that people actually read a newspaper for.

Posted by yellowj | March 25, 2008 11:37 AM

Actually, the larger problem is the "one sidedness" of the electronic media, such as cable news. That's because nearly all Americans get the bulk of their "information" not from newspapers but from electronic "infotainment". From what I've seen, that's the same problem in most other countries around the world, including those in Europe.

For example, consider Italy. As far as I know, the numerous and fairly-large-circulation major newspapers provide a pretty wide spectrum of political views. But since that rich crook Berlusconi bought up all the private TV stations---and also controlled the public ones while he was PM---the Italian newsmedia was/is hardly "even-handed".

Same thing happened in Russia when the Oligarchs got together and decided to reelect Yeltsin, even he'd been a totally disastrous President and his approval rating was down at something like 5% I think...

Posted by RKU | March 25, 2008 11:44 AM

I think the best model is the U.K., where there are a number of excellent news sources from across the political spectrum. You know that the Telegraph and the Guardian are both quality newspapers with good reporting, but that each processes the "facts" through explicit biases. You know the biases up front, so you can discount as appropriate. When I've spent time there, I've loved reading multiple newspapers. It is also no coincidence that people like reading newspapers in the U.K., far moreso than in the U.S.

Posted by IP Guy | March 25, 2008 11:50 AM

yellowj:
The other problem is that there really is no 'liberal" paper. We all know(much to O'Falafel's chagrin) that the NY Times isn't liberal. It's a government coddler. Where is the liberal equivalent to Faux Noise of the NY Post?

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | March 25, 2008 11:50 AM

Dead tree media worked because people didn't have the option of getting news any other way, as even decent newsstands couldn't get you a copy of a paper from over a 1000 miles away hot off the presses. With the advent of the internet, the business model of newspapers is deader than the proverbial dodo when it comes to national news, hence their increasing focus on local news no one outside the local area cares about. Unless it's sufficiently bloody and/or sexy or involves a politician and a dead girl or live boy. Or in my own locality's case, interstate bridges falling 60 feet into the Mississippi River.

Posted by David W. | March 25, 2008 11:53 AM

Alterman misses the point. The importance of newspapers is not that they create a single national narrative, they've taken a back-seat to TV on that front since probably the 1950's. The reason newspapers are critical is because they are the only folks doing actual boots on the ground investigative reporting these days. TV "reporting" is a joke. And blogs only exist to discuss facts someone else reported. Our whole news media infrastructure is dependent on newspaper reporters going out and investigating stories to generate the facts that everyone else then hashes over endlessly. The slow death of the newspapers is actually an important story...

Posted by J.B. | March 25, 2008 12:29 PM

Talk to musicians about radio today, and a lot of them will tell you that they miss the mixing and moderating effect that the AM dial in the 60's had on popular music, in which on one big station you could hear soul, rock, pop, and even a little country, and think nothing of it. There are plenty of talented musicians today, but only a tiny handful who come up with songs big enough to be heard by most people, and that includes the likes of Celine Dion. As Neil Young pointed out, it's virtually impossible now to write a song that will have a political impact. Even a huge star (such as Eddie Vedder) singing his heart out in a really great new song ("No More") won't so much as twitch the needle of popular culture. The technology of AM radio was crude by modern standards, but the mediating effect was huge.

If newspapers collapse, expect to see a similar phenomenon -- the pigeonholing of American opinion into little audiences boxes, unheard by the mass.

Posted by Kit Stolz | March 25, 2008 12:31 PM

If newspapers (dead trees or Internet delivered) were to evolve into organs that favor discrete political groups, that "might" be a good thing. I see a lot of peril from that, but it could work.

However, what I'm seeing at newspapers around the country -- excluding the biggest papers in the elite media centers, like the NYT, Post, etc. -- is that their online and print versions become more irrelevant as their resources dwindle. There's less reporting, more emphasis on short news items about items of very transient interest, such as homicides, wrecks and celebrity travails, and no commitment to in-depth journalism. Many of these sites are an invitation to waste time, not to learn anything.

My guess is most papers will become even less political than they are now.

Posted by Bat of Moon | March 25, 2008 12:32 PM

There's nothing wrong with more partisan news, and a loss of "accepted facts." People forget how destructive the "Washington consensus" has been over the years. I would actually disagree with how Alterman characterizes the change. What we are losing is not the accepted "set of facts" but instead the elite's media's consensus on what those facts mean. Partisanship does not divide the world into two or more realities, but into two or more viewpoints, two differnt ways of seeing the world. The media of the last 50 years has assumed the "objective" viewpoint, which has it's own problems. For one, it is far less critical than perhaps it should be. For another, it gives the media a veil of seeming truth that they really do not deserve. Everything deserves to be questioned, and in some ways I think a more partisan news media would question harder.

Posted by thomas | March 25, 2008 12:41 PM

J.B. is absolutely correct. For at least the last couple of decades---perhaps longer---major newspapers have functioned as the "unpaid research department" of TV and the other electronic media. Therefore, to some extent, they're really been a segment of the "meta media" rather than the media itself, or the "feedstock" that the electronic media relies upon to produce its information pipeline.

That's pretty clearly why someone like Rupert Murdoch has been willing to lose hundreds of millions (?) over the years in subsidizing the NY Post. Probably 99% of the Post readership itself isn't important, but the remaining 1% include the bulk of the TV, book-publishing, and other national media people based in NYC, whose views then reverberate throughout the country and the world.

These days, the growth of the ultra-low-cost web might gradually transform the dynamics of this traditional information-food-chain.

Posted by RKU | March 25, 2008 12:44 PM

It is also no coincidence that people like reading newspapers in the U.K., far moreso than in the U.S.

There's also a fairly solid local (evening) paper market in the UK, that doesn't have the class slicing of the tabs/middle/broadsheet nationals. The Sun and Guardian reader alike will sit down to the Leeds Evening Telegraph or the Manchester Evening News or the Liverpool Echo.

I can understand the Local City Courier-Argus-Squirrel model, in which a low cover price and the bulking up of syndicated content justifies the purchase (and gets ads to eyeballs), but I don't think it's sustainable in that form. The question will be whether the necessary paring-down towards local coverage requires giving the thing away for free.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | March 25, 2008 12:52 PM

Re Alterman's argument "The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting "
-------------
Ha ha ha ha. In my opinion, the New York Times has been a pack of lying shitheads for DECADES!!

Starting with Will Durant's coverup of Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine.

Continuing with its willful refusal in early 2001 to tell the American people that Bush was going to pay for his $1.8 Trillion tax gift to the superrich by stealing the money out of Social Security. Even after I pointed his budget extrapolations out to the Times. See this 2001 article I published on a leftist blog called SmirkingChimp.com and then posted on the right wing Free Republic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b152be33754.htm

I still remember the Times maintaining a few years ago that there was NO Second Amendment right to possess firearms.

I hope one day to piss on the smoldering ashes of the Times.

Posted by Don Williams | March 25, 2008 1:28 PM

I haven't had a chance to go through the whole piece in detail, but it's a shame he doesn't examine the British model, if that's the way he sees it going. American journalists tend to be pretty sniffy about the Brits (see Tucker Carlson and the Samantha Power incident, for example), and sometimes with cause, but US papers have a lot to learn from the broadsheets and even the tabloids in some respects. Certainly the British media does a far better job of holding the government to account, and is far more skeptical of official pronouncements. The partisan (in a political, rather than party, sense) ensures that a truly diverse range of viewpoints is heard, not just those that fit into a very narrow Overton window as in the US. They've also been far more adept at moving into the online world. The Guardian, which has a print circulation of only 400k, reaches 19m readers online, provides a huge array of web-exclusive content and strongly encourages reader participation.

Now I'm certainly not saying the US press should imitate the UK wholesale - there are some things like themed series that the US press does far better, and the UK press at its worst is truly horrendous, but its best aspects are things to be embraced, not feared.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | March 25, 2008 1:56 PM

Two Words:

Judith Miller

Posted by Don Williams | March 25, 2008 2:09 PM

The end of the "Lippmanite" era no doubt will lead to comfortable news that is better targeted to voter's prejudices.

I'm old enough to remember Walter Lippmann. I read his stuff eagerly even as a teenager. Walter would not have been fooled by the neocon crowd for even a second. And he had the 'authority' to demolish such fools.

I look at the NY Times editorial page today. Midgets who cannot even find the giant's shoulder to stand on.

Yes Matthew, a few of us like you will wander the Internet and be very well informed. But the other 98.7% will outvote us. The world becomes ever more complex. Returning to a dumbed down system from the past solves nothing.

Posted by joe mcdermott | March 25, 2008 3:13 PM

Look the idea of some sort of "objective" journalism dedicated to facts and informing the public without any kind of bias is a farce. It always has been and always will be until we become post-human.

It was a noble experiment, and it was tried for a while but by now it should be abundantly clear that the model does not work. I say embrace partisan newspapers and couple it with transparency so people can go look up the facts for themselves. Provide sourcing at the of each story, or even simply a link to someplace on the newspaper's website where a person can go to check out the sources and we'll be just fine.

Trying to shore up the idea of "non-biased media" is a bad and counter-productive idea.

Posted by MNPundit | March 25, 2008 3:18 PM

It's really gonna suck when all I have to slowly browse with my Sunday-morning latte is the Internet.

Posted by James Gary | March 25, 2008 3:45 PM

"I just see no particular reason to think that the United States in the second half of the twentieth century constituted a transcendent ideal of incomparable awesomeness"

Really? The 2nd 1/2 of the 20th Century in the United States of America seems like a pretty uniquely awesome time to be alive. I don't know how much newspapers had to do with that, but I think they played a small part.

The sad thing will be losing what newspapers provide in local news. People want to know this stuff, and if there's no good paying model, it's just not going to be there with the comprehensiveness and reliability that a newspaper once provided.

Posted by too many steves | March 25, 2008 3:50 PM

As Alterman quotes Atrios as saying, it's just incontrovertible that the self-congratulatory elitism of Lippman has dramatically failed at creating a moderating force of at least semi-independent analysis. I'm with MY in being unable to get up much sense of tragedy in the coming final collapse of any pretense of superior analysis or disinterest on the part of newspapers.

But I do wonder where, in the coming media world, where the money to do any actual investigative reporting will come from. There's huge value in online media, blogs, etc., but it's also clearly the case that bloggers and such aggregate and analyze, they don't actually get out and gather the original information, or at least only rarely.

Posted by Matt | March 25, 2008 3:54 PM

The Guardian is an entertaining paper with a lot of interesting commentary and some outstanding arts coverage. That said, it all too often goes in knowing who the heroes (and, oh, they're not beyond heroes - not at all) and villains are and then find or fudges the facts to back it up. You can argue that most newspapers do this to some extent or the other, but, frankly, you'd be pushing it. There's no comparison between, say, the New York Times and The Guardian. The NY Times at least addressed Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. It's just a much, much better paper. Not as entertaining, not as good on literature, not as in tune with my left of center sensibilities as The Guardian, but much, much better nonetheless.

I once spent a very intense forty minutes in London defending a fellow Yank who'd brought up in passing the untold millions Mao had gotten killed with his disastrous agricultural policies. The Guardian readers (well educated, upper-middle-class professionals working in the arts) didn't buy it. This was in the early 90s. We were dismissed as "right-wing." The victims of American propaganda.

It was like arguing with Sean Hannity fans in America. But these were educated Labour supporters several social and economic notches above our Fox news and Republican talk radio crowd.

What's more, the Guardian and the BBC are both the product of a society that was until recently much, much whiter and homogenous than ours. And there's a lot of catching up going on right now where journalists engage in moral posturing that can bring back excruiating memories for those of us old enough to remember assemblies at American public schools in the 1970s. It's just embarrassing. Picture NPR getting all gangsta.

Finally, they get a great deal wrong about America and don't seem terribly concerned. Their hearts are in the right place. They're not "right-wing" and that's all that matteres.

A future where "my side" in America gets its news from Comedy Central, blogs and British journalists isn't one that fills me with much happiness.

Posted by Wary Yank Progressive | March 25, 2008 4:05 PM

Every media setup has its blind spots (and I'm not convinced it's reading the Guardian per se that caused them to be so disbelieving, rather than simply being the sort of people who would read the Guardian). I'm sure you would have found a similar situation in the States with regard to a comparable (paradigmatically, not morally) atrocity by, say, Israel or the US. And I hate to use a cheap shot, but there are plenty of people in the US "several social and economic notches above our Fox News and Republican talk radio crowd" who are creationists. But that's not really the point. The point is that the way the US system is set up, those blind spots are more or less uniform across the press, whereas in Britain each paper has different ones, and they all inform the conversation, from the Guardian to the Sun. Inevitably some people are going to listen to only one side, whatever the system. At least they can hear multiple sides in Britain.

Also, and this is more important, I'm not advocating wholesale adoption of British conventions or practices. I'm saying that the US press, which is remarkably insular in its professional practices and conventions, should look to British (and other countries', absolutely) newspapers to see what aspects can help make them relevant, accountable, confrontational-to-power and competitive, while figuring out ways to make them work in a US context. One of those is reconsidering whether the ideal of objectivity, as currently practiced, is actually best way of getting at the truth.

A lot of my beef with the NYT (and other similar papers, although the Boston Globe seems to do a better job, funnily enough) is that it pays lip service to the ideal while running roughshod over it in practice. It will run a story with a headline and lead that are flatly contradicted later in the article. It will put a government official's spin in the first paragraph and relegate any dissent to the 10th paragraph, ignoring the Journalism 101 lesson that 95% of readers won't make it past the first paragraph. And don't get me started on campaign journalism, which is orders of magnitude worse than anything in the British press, even the tabloids.

The internet question is a good example of what I'm talking about. US newspapers, and media companies in general, have been painfully slow and reactive in addressing the internet revolution. They haven't seen it as a fantastic way to reach more readers, to open up dialogue, or to give more space to stories that wouldn't fit in the print edition. They've viewed it for the most part as a threat to their livelihoods.

As another example, one reason that the British system works pretty well, for all its faults, is that the TV news still operates under a sort of Fairness Doctrine. It's almost the opposite of the US, where (cable and to a certain extent network) TV news is biased and punchy, while the press is staid and "objective". In Britain, the TV news has a similar pseudo-objectivity and staidness to the US press, but the press is more directly comparable to US TV news. I don't think it would be a good idea to move to a fully partisan press without some counterbalance elsewhere in the mass media, or else the risk of balkanisation is very real.

Posted by Ginger Yellow | March 25, 2008 6:16 PM

"Look the idea of some sort of "objective" journalism dedicated to facts and informing the public without any kind of bias is a farce. It always has been and always will be until we become post-human."

Got that right.

Aleister Crowley pointed this out back in the late 1800's, and so did Hitler in "Mein Kampf" (although he blamed it on "the Jews".)

And once we're post-human, human history is a farce and a joke quickly and cleanly forgotten.

"The NY Times at least addressed Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. It's just a much, much better paper."

Yeah, right. The Guardian opposed, criticized and exposed the war in Iraq. The New York Times supported, lied about and covered up the war in Iraq - and they STILL DO!

You can't even begin to compare those two.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 26, 2008 4:02 AM

Where is the evidence for partisan media producing higher levels of political "engagement"?

In representative democracies there is little incentive for people to acquire political information.

The strange thing is that so much is provided is anyway.

Posted by Adrian Monck | March 28, 2008 10:18 AM