If you still read a newspaper, chances are you’ve encountered a series of laments for the death of the industry. In The Nation, John Nichols and Robert McChesney have written a comprehensive compendium of how daily journalism’s business model failed. Ultimately, the most telling line in the piece is their confession that “we do not have all the answers. Neither, we have discovered, does anyone else.”
Much more provocative is David Sirota’s new column, which pins the blame for the industry’’s collapse on the newspapers themselves:
Beltway scribes didn’t have to miss the Iraq war lies or the predictive signs of the Wall Street meltdown. Election correspondents weren’t compelled to devote four times the coverage to the tactical insignifica of campaigns than to candidates’ positions and records, as the Project for Excellence in Journalism found. Business reporters didn’t need to give corporate spokespeople twice the space in articles as they did workers and unions, as a Center for American Progress report documents. National editors weren’t obligated to focus on “elevat(ing) the most banal doings” in the White House to “breaking news,” as the New York Times recently noted.
But that’s what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper - rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere. News, in short, mimicked finance: Just as Wall Street made bets on bets with credit default swaps and then watched investors bolt, print journalism mass produced gossip about gossip, and now sees its audience flee.
