Dollarocracy (36 page)

Everywhere the situation is the same: far fewer journalists attempting to cover more and more news on tighter schedules. As the FCC observed, reporters and editors “are spending more time on reactive stories and less on labor-intensive ‘enterprise' pieces.” Television reporters “who once just reported the news now have many other tasks, and more newscasts to feed, so they have less time to research their stories.” The situation is especially disastrous at the local level, where smaller news media and newsrooms have been wiped out in a manner reminiscent of a plague. The
Los Angeles Times
is now the primary news medium for eighty-eight municipalities and 10 million people, but its metro staff has been cut in half since 2000. The staff “is spread thinner and there are fewer people on any given area,” Metro editor David Lauter lamented. “We're not there every day, or even every week or every month. Unfortunately, nobody else is either.”
¹²

At least the Los Angeles region still has a daily newspaper that tries to cover some of the area's diversity. A growing number of American cities that were once served by one or more daily newspapers now have none. In some cases, newspapers have shuttered altogether, but the far more serious trend is one of sweeping consolidation so that a part of the country that once had multiple dailies serving individual communities—such as California's East Bay—now has one paper with dramatically fewer reporters overall.
¹³
Serious local coverage is disappearing, and often the void is being filled by advertising dressed up as “news.” For instance, the venerable
Boston Globe
began allowing advertisers to write their own blog posts on its
boston.com
Web site, thereby further blurring the distinction between news and advertising with so-called branded content.
¹⁴

Cutbacks in print are the most notable, especially when they occur at the national level—as when
Newsweek
announced in 2012 that after seventy-nine
years, it would no longer produce a weekly magazine.
¹⁵
Like quality regional dailies that once felt a sense of responsibility to sort through all the news from all the communities under their watch,
Newsweek
and other national publications once performed a similar task for the whole of the United States, producing weekly roundups of the news from cities and states across the country in a form that was, limitations notwithstanding, relatively thorough and accessible. No more. The information is still there, but it comes now in a constant pattern of flash floods that leaves little insight in its wake.

The erstwhile first responders of the media system—radio stations—were the canaries in the commercial news media coal mines. By the end of the 1990s, they had already cut back and consolidated news departments so rapidly that many communities that once got hourly broadcast updates now get nothing but Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity ranting from afar. And, as we've noted, local television stations are “shaving” newscasts in order to create more space for political ads.

There may not be much journalism, but there still is plenty of “news.” On the surface, at least on cable and satellite television, we seem to be deluged in endless news. Increasingly, though, it is unfiltered public relations generated surreptitiously by corporations and governments. In 1960, there was less than one PR agent for every working journalist, a ratio of 0.75 to 1. By 1990, the ratio was just over 2 to 1. In 2012, the ratio stood at 4 PR people for every 1 working journalist. At the current rates of change, the ratio may well be 6 to 1 within a few years.
¹⁶
There are far fewer reporters to interrogate the spin and the press releases, so the likelihood that they get presented as legitimate “news” has become much greater. The Pew Center conducted a comprehensive analysis of what the sources were for original news stories in Baltimore in 2009; it determined that fully 86 percent originated with official sources and press releases. These stories were presented as news based on the labor and judgment of professional journalists, but, as Pew noted, they generally presented the PR position without any alteration.
¹⁷

For the already powerful, this is an ideal circumstance: they can guide the discussion via press releases, press conferences, and manufactured messaging. There's only a one in seven chance that a story not to their liking gets told, and if it does, their PR firm can send out six more press releases. That's not the outline of a functional and democratic media system. It's better understood as a petri dish in which propaganda is nurtured.

But won't the Internet save us?

For a good decade, pundits have argued that digital developments will provide a new system of commercially viable journalism. In fact, as traditional journalism disintegrates, no models for making web journalism—even bad journalism—profitable at anywhere near the level necessary for a credible popular news media to be developed, and there is no reason to expect any in the visible future.
¹⁸
Today we have a few thousand paid online news workers, interpreted liberally to include many aggregators who do little or no news gathering or reporting or even writing. As often as not, the best-known bloggers and online journalists are supported by some old medium that provides the resources. When these old media go down, the number of paid digital journalists is likely to shrink, not grow.

That has certainly been the case in cities such as Seattle, where the
Post-Intelligencer
newspaper ceased print publication in 2009 with this announcement: “The thing that should not be missed here is that the P-I is not going away. The P-I is going online.” It fell to Washington's governor, Chris Gregoire, to note that with the move, “most of the newspaper's dedicated staff lost their jobs.” At the time of its closing, the
P-I
had 150 employees, who maintained a fierce competition in local news with the
Seattle Times
. Just about everyone in town recognized the competition as good not just for journalism but also for the community, for the public's right to know, and for democracy itself. Citizens had organized to try maintaining that competition, and when the
P-I
's decision was announced, local lawyer Anne Bremner, who cochaired the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, responded, “What a terribly sad day this is. Only tomorrow will be worse.” She was right. The
P-I
's newsroom full of beat reporters, columnists, editorial writers, copy editors, photographers, and even a Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist would be replaced by “about 20 news gatherers and Web producers.” Three years later when we checked, the Web site had eight “news gatherers” (apparently doing a good deal of aggregation) and two “producers” to cover a metropolitan area that was home to 3.5 million people. Most of the space on the front page of the site's “Local” section was dedicated to wire service reports, under the headline “Local News from the Associated Press.”

Research concludes that the original journalism provided by the severely underpaid or unpaid contributors to Internet news sites gravitates to what is easy and fun, tending to “focus on lifestyle topics, such as entertainment,
retail, and sports—not on hard news.”
¹⁹
This does not mean the Internet is not affecting political communication significantly (an issue we devote
Chapter 8
to examining). It just means that the Internet has not in any way solved the crisis of journalism.

In short, journalism, especially political journalism, is facing an existential crisis in the United States. There has understandably been an increase in the number of people, to nearly one in five, who state they have gone “newsless”—not even glancing at Internet headlines—for the day before the poll. Who can blame them? By 2009, nearly a third of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four were so self-described.
²⁰
Forty years ago, young Americans consumed news at the same rate that their parents and grandparents did. Similarly, Gallup determined that mistrust in news media hit an all-time high in 2012, with 60 percent of Americans saying “they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.” Gallup polling showed positive trust in media was as high as 72 percent in the 1970s.
²¹

The problem that the collapse of journalism has created for election coverage is devastating. As the Gallup report on popular antipathy toward news media concluded, “This is particularly consequential at a time when Americans need to rely on the media to learn about the platforms and perspectives of the two candidates vying to lead the country for the next four years.”
²²
Thomas Patterson's research showed “a close association between the ups and downs in the amount of coverage and the ups and downs in involvement. As coverage rises, people increasingly think and talk about the campaign.”
²³

What coverage remains, even by major news media like CBS News, is being done increasingly by inexpensive and inexperienced reporters in their twenties.
²⁴
Don't get us wrong. Young journalists have in the past contributed mightily to the coverage of American politics, and they are continuing to do so. We think, for instance, of the groundbreaking work of labor journalist Mike Elk, which revealed late in the 2012 campaign that Mitt Romney had urged his business supporters to pressure their employees to back the Republican ticket.
²⁵
That's classic good, and necessary, journalism. But even as Elk was breaking the story,
In These Times
was struggling to figure out how to
keep him on the job, as grants for independent journalism dried up.
²⁶
And even though Elk was determined to keep at it, a growing number of veteran journalists—many of whom have contacts and experience that allowed them to provide nuanced news coverage—were closing their notebooks and giving up on the frustrating work of not just covering campaigns but also trying to make ends meet.
²⁷

The most striking consequence of the exodus of journalists and journalism is that for countless races there is barely any coverage at all. By 2010, a “nearly reporter-free campaign trail” in statewide races across the nation was common.
²⁸
In Wisconsin, where Senator Russ Feingold was in a fight for his political life, he found himself traveling virtually alone during much of his campaign. In his three previous Senate campaigns, especially in the 1990s, Feingold had been trailed by a posse of reporters. In Illinois in 2010, so little attention was paid to the Democratic primary for the state's number 2 job, lieutenant governor, that a pawnbroker who spent heavily on TV ads was nominated. The ads failed to mention that he had been arrested in 2005 for domestic abuse or that he had failed to pay back taxes and child support. When those details were revealed, a scandal developed that would ultimately force Scott Lee Cohen from the ticket. So why didn't voters know about Cohen's problems
before
the election? As Mark Brown of the
Chicago Sun-Times
explained it, “We in the news media failed the voters by missing the story.” But the story wasn't really “missed.” Like so many political stories these days, it was left uncovered by news media that no longer hire enough reporters to cover all the races, leaving most voters in the dark most of the time.
²⁹

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) conducted a comprehensive study of how regional daily newspapers in St. Petersburg; Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh; Burlington, Vermont; and Madison, Wisconsin, covered campaigns for the House of Representatives in their areas in 2008 and 2010. The study found that the coverage was effectively nonexistent; that only close races or races with scandals connected to one of the candidates received any attention at all—and then not much; and that third parties were ignored. “If you want to cast an informed vote for Congress,” FAIR concluded, “local daily newspapers will likely not be much help.”
³⁰
Journalist Joe Rothstein added the only consolation for newspapers: “As thin as newspaper coverage is, local TV coverage is virtually invisible.”
³¹
In Bangor, Maine, two weeks after the
2012 election, the news anchors on the local ABC affiliate closed a Tuesday night broadcast by announcing that they were quitting. Citing mounting frustrations with management choices that made it harder to cover the news in general and elections in particular, anchor (and station news director) Cindy Michaels complained, “We were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.” What made the story of her departure notable was not the complaint, but merely that she voiced it on a live newscast.
³²

This elimination of press coverage has had devastating effects on political campaigns. “It's hard to believe,” University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato said, “that only five presidents ago, reporter Sam Donaldson and President Ronald Reagan sparred during fairly spontaneous press conferences. And [1984] vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro spent two hours answering reporters' questions about her tax returns.”
³³

In 2012, Mitt Romney's refusal to release his tax returns was only briefly a major story—a summer dalliance before the “real” campaign began. And even though Romney's refusal violated recent practice, contradicted a standard established by his father going into the 1968 campaign, contradicted broadly accepted practice in recent campaigns, and left fundamental questions about his personal and business activities unanswered, the Republican nominee for president was essentially allowed to coast through three debates and an intense fall campaign without having to face the tax issue.