The Book Not Taken

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
- Mark Twain

It is rare that I write about a book that I did not select from the library, but I am going on vacation soon, and opted for some lighter choices.

I came home with 3 new books, but not one is called The Death and Life of American Journalism. I left it behind for another day. The title intrigued me enough, though, that I stood next to the gray racks and read the liner notes. The authors, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, chronicle the demise of print media over the past 3 decades, and the imminent financial collapse of these once powerful and influential sources of local, national and world news and opinion. Advertising revenue is drying up, staffs are being cut, and subscribers are abandoning newspapers in droves. The book ends with some optimism, apparently, as the authors outline their solution for creating, encouraging and maintaining a robust and consequential 4th estate into the future. It sounds like academic fall reading, not quite whimsical summertime fare.

The thought of the death of journalism in America scares me. A strong and independent media is critical to a thriving democracy, and I have often lamented the replacement of professional print journalists, committed to exposing truths through meticulous research and validation, by individual attention seekers (aka. bloggers and talking heads on the left and right), committed to exposing their own personalities to greater limelight. Big egos and bigger breasts shouldn’t be a substitute for big intellects and even bigger ideas. When the journalists are the story, the readers (and viewers) lose, and in modern media, the journalists are now the stars of the show. They even have their own title – info-tainers.

The Internet is an easy target for blame for the death of journalism. The instantaneous access to free information of all shapes and sizes has reduced the cost of entry for the untrained, pseudo-journalist looking to enter the journalism profession, without the expense of time consuming fact-checking, the boredom of researching a topic in its totality, and the drudgery of learning to write in complete sentences. Speed trumps accuracy and discretion in a 24/7 news cycle. Information, however, should not be equated with knowledge, and information in and of itself is a poor substitute for wisdom and analysis. The Founders had the foresight to add protection of the free press to the Bill of Rights. How will we protect not just its freedom, but its very existence into the future?

The maxim that “If it bleeds, it leads” wasn’t coined during the Internet Age, however, and the human appetite for titillation and empty entertainment disguised as intellectual curiosity seems insatiable. Can I blame the infotainers for giving the people what they want? Perhaps the decline of thoughtful, fact based reporting has been creeping along for centuries, and the Internet has only hastened its descent into irrelevance.

I didn’t mean to be so pessimistic…I guess vacation is a good idea.

Last week, a harmless scam was perpetrated on the Internet by a woman who supposedly quit her job by emailing photos of herself holding the reason for resigning on a series of dry erase boards. Most people, it seems, believed that that event was real. I did. It wasn’t. It was staged, and I believed it because it was more FUN to believe it. It makes me wonder, again, how much information that I read on the Internet is truth and how much is entertainment. That is not to say that newspapers have always been the Holy Grail of truth. Even Ben Franklin, one of our country’s earliest newspaper reporters, penned a column with letters from an imaginary old woman (Polly Baker) written to highlight the negative treatment of women. No doubt he was also trying to highlight his newspaper and attract an audience for advertisers at the same time. The bombardment of doctored images and half-truths and single inflammatory words given additional gravitas by a set of quotation marks is unrelenting. By the time the validity of reporting is questioned, we have already moved on to the next disaster, crisis, war, celebrity rehab assignment, or Brett Farve exclusive.

What can save journalism? After I read the book next month, I’ll let you know. I hope it’s still on the shelf in September.

Editor’s Note: If you must know, and I must tell, I borrowed Game Change by Mark Halperin about the 2008 presidential campaign; The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty by Buster Olney about the Yankees losing the World Series in 2001 – a guilty pleasure reliving their ninth inning, Game 7 collapse; and What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, a collection of story essays.