Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

Image credit: Jesse Lenz

Just after last fall’s midterm elections, Ted Koppel, for 25 years the face of Nightline on ABC, wrote in The Washington Post about journalism’s modern decline. “Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth every evening,” Koppel wrote, referring to an era that ran through roughly the 1980s,

while Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news organizations believed the public needed to know … It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn’t know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.

The column was called “The Case Against News We Can Choose,” and it said that the shift toward a more market-minded, profit-driven journalism was both irreversible and destructive. “The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been,” Koppel said. But we were less likely than before to get the fair, steady view we need, because “we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we’re now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.”

Anyone who has read, watched, or listened to the news has an idea of what Koppel is worried about. The election cycle just behind us was dominated by very bitter views and accusations, on issues likely to matter very little in the long run. Candidates denounced “the deficit” without seriously proposing to do anything about it. “The question of how the US should tackle its mounting national debt has been relegated to a bunch of Punch and Judy bumper stickers that bear as little relation to its fiscal reality as astrology does to astronomy,” a Financial Times analyst wrote on the day before the election. “The same applies to infrastructure, education, immigration—pretty much anything that touches on America’s future competitiveness.” The same as well for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran; world trends in food and energy. Elections are how we face big issues, except when we can’t.

Just before the midterm elections, Barack Obama answered questions from students at George Washington University and made a point like Koppel’s. After a young man asked Obama what had surprised him about the actual work of being president, Obama said wryly, “Where do I start?” Then he started with the dysfunction of the modern press.

I’ve been surprised by how the news cycle here in Washington is focused on what happens this minute. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep everybody focused on the long term. The things that are really going to matter in terms of America’s success 20 years from now, when we look back, are not the things that are being talked about on television on any given day.

Embedded in complaints like these is a series of related concerns: that the media are doing a worse job than they used to, that their failures make it harder for the country as a whole and for individuals trying to understand the world to do business and make sensible decisions—and that all these trends are only going to get worse.

I am an easy target for this sort of message. Fifteen years ago, I published a book, Breaking the News, which argued that a relentless focus on scandal, spectacle, and the “game” of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond. And this was in an era that in retrospect seems innocent. The big, fatherly anchor figures—Brokaw, Jennings, Rather—were still on the evening news shows. Newspapers were mildly concerned about falling circulation rather than in an all-out panic about imminent collapse. Fox News Channel had yet to begin operations, and Craigslist had just started up. To serve the public and to remain in operation, I argued, the news industry had to re-embrace its special role as a business that was not just about business. Journalists should commit themselves to the challenge of making what matters interesting, and resist the slide into the infotainment age. How quaint it all looks now!

But, as I was reminded when I recently talked to people in the news business, historians, political scientists, and others about the current predicament of the news, every previous era looks innocent. Those talks changed my mind about what the press should do next. I haven’t changed my mind about the dysfunction of American public life; as I argued a year ago in these pages (“How America Can Rise Again,” January/February 2010), most things look promising for America—except our ability to face and solve big problems through our political system. But I no longer think it’s worth arguing whether journalism is getting “worse.” The fond retrospective view offered by Koppel and others is highly selective, as Koppel himself admits in his article. I now think it’s worth facing the inevitability of the shift to infotainment and seeing how we can make the best of it. To show why, let’s visit Gawker.