As the new news editor of the Pauw Wow, I set out to provide my readers with on thing: the facts. Soon after that resolution, I realized that facts are at odds with conventional news coverage.
While the morning paper is no longer served as a breakfast staple, the industry does remain influential. Reporters mold reality by deciding what events are important and then relating them to the public. That television, radio and internet news sources use the papers as a starting point for a huge amount of their own coverage is no secret. Even the rich and powerful arrange the order of the day with the news in mind, knowing that its contents shape the world their employees and citizens think they live in.
Yes the news continues to be relevant, but is it still news? After all, the stresses of survival have not been kind. The industry has had to contort into a series of uncomfortable positions to keep hold of its shrinking consumer base. Good reporting is expensive and labor and time intensive. It can take weeks to research a story, track down leads and coax information from sources. All the while, facilities, supplies, travel, and personnel have to be paid for and the internet and t.v. news are hogging all the advertisers and cribbing the print media’s research.
The newspapers try to solve these problems by cutting corners. Reporters rely on the press releases of trained public relations staffs. P.R. people trained to be journalists anyway. Why waste the cash on a plane ticket to Juneau for a “No comment,” when you can go to Sarah Palin’s website and get a 2,000 word statement written in journalistic form with an invitation to quote heavily? With the law less hospitable to whistle blowers and undercover journalist than ever before, the P.R. people act from a position of power and everyone knows it. Reputation might earn a meeting, but only heavy ingratiation and cordiality will assure access. The poor journalists are at the mercy of these P.R. doppelgangers, creatures who project the positive and conceal the flaws of anyone or thing who pays them.
Then there is the product itself. How does a reporter sell something as complicated as the foreign relations between neo-nuclear North Korea and the United States’ Byzantine bureaucracy to customers who want immediate, simple narratives? Keeping afloat requires dumbing down content, keeping it brief and repeating it, repeating it, repeating it.
So the news industry has lost its way. Depressed, exhausted and just a little confused. Business is not going well and, far from being an asset, the advances in technology and public relations sophistication have overturned the business model. Ad revenue keeps going down, costs go up and the press’ best product, the long term investigative expose, is incompatible with its market.
These issues developed recently. Language, “truth” and reality are all abstract notions. Subjective men and women with limited knowledge cannot possibly objectively relate events exactly as they happened and if they could, few would care. Life unfolds more like a baseball game, crammed with uneventful minutia and spare moments of excitement, than the cold logical progression of events most articles would have you believe.
What is news? The leftovers. Reporters wring the facts they piece together through this Goldberg machine and sell the public whatever comes out.
I accept the mortality of this profession’s current incarnation. My new motto is borrowed time. There will be no tomorrow, not until the market becomes more accommodating or someone discovers a working internet business model. In the meantime, I promise to rip through as many barriers between the facts and my audience as possible. I hope to provide a clearer picture of reality by relating stories without the pretense of formal objectivity. You will know what I know and I hope that will be enough.
~ Justin Roberts, ‘10