fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

In the past week a lot has been written about Jon Stewart’s skewering of CNBC and the faux-populist Rick Santelli. In the midst of all the praise for what was truly a deserving comedic spanking of arguably the most-watched group of financial journalists on television, others are concluding that Stewart’s eight-minute jab-fest was an example of good journalism. Something tells me Stewart – a comedian – would disagree.

While the Daily Show’s bit on CNBC was hilarious (video below), it should have prompted every working journalist to engage in some serious self reflection. The piece, instead, held up a mirror to a system that is obviously in need of a fix: journalists with all-access passes to the rich and powerful lobbing softballs at the crooks who got us into this economic mess in the first place. Sure CNBC does not represent every working reporter out there, and there are plenty of good examples of financial journalism that warned of the looming meltdown years before it happened (even though it was tragically and largely ignored by the public – but that’s another debate). The problem is we are losing credibility and fast no thanks to the massive cut in resources newspapers are enduring.

Journalism’s problem, in some respect, can be summarized by Will Bunch who observed in the Huffington Post: “The American public is mad as hell right now, so why isn’t the mainstream media?”

Journalism is no longer feared. And in many respects, it has been marginalized. We’ve gotten comfortable with a system that has resulted in many reporters going to work for the very institutions they were covering. Think about the way your local police force is covered. When was the last time you saw the name of a police officer named in a newspaper after he shot somebody? David Simon, writing for the Washington Post, has a pretty damning explanation as to what might be happening:

“To be a police reporter in such a climate was to be a prince of the city, and to be a citizen of such a city was to know that you were not residing in a police state. But no longer — not in Baltimore and, I am guessing, not in any city where print journalism spent the 1980s and ’90s taking profits and then, in the decade that followed, impaling itself on the Internet.”

Stewart appeared on the David Letterman show after airing the Santelli segment last week, expanding his criticism of financial TV journalism:  

“There are three 24-hour financial networks. All their slogans are like, ‘We know what’s going on on Wall Street.’ But then you turn it on during the crisis, and they’re like, ‘We don’t know what’s going on.’ It’d be like turning on The Weather Channel in a hurricane and they’re just doing this: [shuddering] ‘Why am I wet?! What’s happening to me? And it’s so windy!’”

Back to reality. I’m currently working for a newspaper that is owned by a certain Midwestern company that has taken a decidedly fatal blow on Wall Street in the past 12 months. Our stock was worth about $40 a year ago and today it somewhere around 40 cents. I’ve heard some disheartening things about this company since I got here, as I’m sure many young journalists hear when they first enter the business. The newsroom, at least I’m told, is sometimes referred to as the “non-revenue” side of the newspaper.  But the thing that I resent isn’t the cold, capitalistic realities of the publishing business – which, by all means, pays my rent (so, thanks) – but it’s the apathy of the business as a whole that is likely going to kill it. Simply put: the local newspaper industry is tired. Not tired like some out-of-touch geriatric (as I’m sure some of you are more than happy to illustrate it as), instead it’s more like a bruised and battered solider, fighting an old war that fewer people seem to be paying attention to anymore. (Just check out Pew’s latest polling on newspapers: 43 percent of Americans said they didn’t think civic life would suffer if their local newspaper folded.)

And that’s the heartbreaking part.

I’ll walk you through a normal day for beat reporter, in say, a state capitol. (I can speak with some authority). Most of us covering state legislatures around the nation are strained. No, strained doesn’t begin to describe our situation. We’re simply unable to do the best possible job in light of our bureaus being stripped to the bone (like having one person covering a legislature, governor, about 20 state agencies and then politics/elections on top of all of that). That essentially sums up my gig (including three of my colleagues who work for competing news organizations) here in North Dakota and probably most other reporters in Capitol bureaus across the nation. I’m told that the press room here, in the North Dakota Capitol, used to be a bustling place with more than a dozen newspaper reporters (three from my paper alone) covering the Legislature. Today, only four print reporters from competing organizations cover the session full-time.

Sure this is just one example in one of the smallest states in the union, but it’s not a fairytale in other bureaus, including Washington, D.C. This poses a serious problem for the future of our governing model because the role the press played in it is fading into extinction whether we like it or not. Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist, penned a absorbing piece for the New Republic about the potential for a new gilded age to emerge amid the nation’s shrinking press corps. His conclusion is simple: something will have to take the place of newspaper coverage of local and state governments if transparency is to thrive and corruption to stay at bay. Who or what that is, no one is quiet sure yet, (but here’s an example. Hint: The organization is Web-based, fast-paced, kicks ass and takes names).

About a week ago, a reporter from the American Journalism Review called me for a survey she was conducting about reporters covering legislatures in the country. I told her my situation as a young reporter and asked what she was finding as far as coverage of state houses go.

Her answer was disturbing in its brevity: “Not good.”

———————————————————————————————-