The news media are in financial trouble and newspapers are suffering most. Every urban reporter is worried about what appears to be the death of the press.
Were the newspaper industry an ordinary business, like Montgomery Ward or American Motors, perhaps few people would care. But in the United States, the press occupies a unique status, granted by the Constitution. It has been the guardian of the democracy we have known. “If the press dies, democracy dies!” alarmists holler today.
I don’t think the press is anywhere near dying, and I believe the Chicken Littles have read the problem in reverse: if democracy dies, the press — as we like to think of it, anyway — will die. When people no longer believe an informed citizenry can take command of the nation’s life, they’ll have less reason to read what is today called “the news,” which is mainly a record of governance.
Democracy, as textbooks pictured it, is indeed ailing. A decline in voter turnout, in attendance at Parent-Teacher Association and union meetings, and even in the number of people who belong to bowling teams was documented in a 2000 best-seller, “Bowling Alone.” Nothing has reverted its conclusions. Newspaper readership has declined in tandem with participation in public life. The problem isn’t so much technological — the Net, as most press diagnosticians think — as it is political. Every day, fewer people think they can influence government.
Those who insist on keeping public debate alive are dividing into two warring camps, Fox News versus MSNBC, at the expense of CNN and the major news networks. The polarizing trend is evident in print media in the relative prosperity of two of the nation’s top three dailies, the Republican Wall Street Journal and the Democratic New York Times. Journalistic “objectivity”— a sort of one-size-fits-all version of the news — no longer passes tests of trust. The future of American “news” seems to be the present of newspapers elsewhere: tell me what newspaper you read and I’ll tell you what your political views are.
Partisanship will foster shifts in our idea of the press, but I don’t think it betokens any looming death. More words and images are published today than ever before, thanks to the accessibility of the Net. While blogs, sports, music, celebrity and special-interest pages are often carelessly written, all of them satisfy what seems to be a universal human craving — albeit for gossip — and that lust underwrites the survival of a press. Before the birth of the sensationalist “penny press” in 1835, newspapers were mostly political and not wildly profitable, but thousands of them circulated anyway. Even in dictatorships, where nobody believes the news, sports and entertainment newspapers thrive.
Nor is the future of the news the future of the news industry. Image and word production will probably continue to rise, thanks to fans and fanatics, words that have the same root. And if any principle underlies practical American life, it is that if people do something, anything, somebody will find a way to make money from it. Profits may be smaller, but livelihoods won’t disappear; newspapers, both electronic and print, may for awhile become cottage industries, but artisans — wordwrights and picturewrights in this case—will prosper as much as employees did — or will.
The rebirth of the press will not be an undertaking of aging inksters like me.
But that is not a problem for today’s students, and they have already said so: enrollment in journalism courses is booming everywhere. While we graying professors stress the fundamentals of “news as it has always been,” our students view the press as a parts car, a source for salvage to build a communications vehicle that’s still in the daydreaming stage. With the blessing of gossip and greed — the forces to which the mainstream press owed its triumph — they are likely to accomplish something that their seniors can’t foresee.
