By Brigitte L. Nacos
There is hardly a day without another gloom and doom item about the dismal state of America’s newspapers. Just this morning, I read that the San Francisco Chronicle may not survive for long. The problem with the shrinking newspaper landscape is that we are losing rapidly journalists that provide most of the news that Americans receive. Alex Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, has estimated that about 85 percent of today’s news is generated by newspaper personnel. Bloomberg’s Albert Hunt wrote the other day, “[M]aybe when the economy rebounds, newspapers will get a bounce, too, although the structural problems predated the financial crisis. And there be costly casualties in the interim. That may not matter much for a vibrant economy. It matters a lot for a vibrant democracy.”
Indeed, strong democracy depends on a robust print press—unless others take on the role of news-gatherers and investigative reporters. Josh Marshall’s TPM blog has taken on this role. And now Arianna Huffington, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post deserves kudos for launching the Huffington Post Investigative Fund that will bankroll serious investigative reporting. While not fond of its tabloid type features, I read the Huffpost for the spectrum of opinion pieces it offers and will continue to do so with even more enthusiasm because of its announced commitment to investigative reporting.
Arianna Huffington explains the rationale for the new initiative well, when she writes:
“As the newspaper industry continues to contract, one of the most commonly voiced fears is that serious investigative journalism will be among the victims of the scaleback. And, indeed, many newspapers are drastically reducing their investigative teams. Yet, given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important. As a result, all who recognize the indispensable role good journalism plays in our democracy are looking for ways to preserve it during this transitional period for the media. For too long, whether it's coverage of the war in Iraq or the economic meltdown, we've had too many autopsies and not enough biopsies. The HuffFund is our attempt to change this.”
Mentioning the Iraq War coverage in this context is appropriate. After all, the leading old media organizations failed to scrutinize the Bush administration’s justification for going to war during the build-up period to the invasion. One wonders whether reports and opinion pieces in the leading newspapers would have reflected a much wider range of views, if today’s blogosphere’s marketplace of ideas had existed in 2002 and 2003.
After all, when the U.S. president calls on the correspondent of a blog site (Huffington Post) in his prime-time press conference, the mainstream media cannot and do not ignore the blogosphere’s critical voices.
The ongoing transformation of the media system looks a bit brighter this morning.
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