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**If any industry has been reduced to a cemetery plot in the popular imagination, it is journalism today. On National Milk Day, a day I’m sure you have been looking forward to celebrating, once the inspiration for cinematic Heroes, journalists have increasingly become the source of skepticism, mockery, and hate. America has always prided itself on the power of its fourth estate, but increasingly it kinda feels like it’s being sold off for scraps instead of go-go boots.
The seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers from slumping profits, to promiscuous click bait, to potent misinformation, the industry is under attack and to many the internet seems like the obvious culprit, but is it? Maybe it’s more complicated. According to Reporters Without Borders, America only has the 45th most Free Press in the world and many seasoned journalists fear their industry is already dead. So, how did we go from this to this? In short, who killed journalism? Trick question, because while we usually assume the internet is the Grim Reaper of the industry, there’s no one culprit responsible for journalism’s demise.
So where did this existential crisis come from? Let’s start with government, because while we might think of the press as independent, the history tree is way more complex. A scholar Robert W MC Chesney and journalist John Nichols explain the government in fact created the Free Press throughout American history with aggressive and often enlightened policies and subsidies. Without this massive government role, it is unlikely that U.S democracy would have survived, let alone blossomed.
See, in the country’s early days, the government supported its nascent media ecosystem through tax exemptions, government contracts, and most notably subsidies on Postal Service which meant newspapers could be delivered at a tiny fraction of the market rate or even free. While newspapers were generally funded by political parties or special interest groups, there was plenty of room for and dissemination of competing views. Mc Chesney and Nichols argue that as a result, the growing population of the United States stayed informed and literate and that in turn helped to drive economics and the engine of democracy.
Commercial interest took over American Media in the late 19th century, as advertisements became the main financial support for newspaper. This commercialization was followed by the creation of the newspaper chain in which Publishers like William Randolph Hearst owned massive networks of Publications. Some at the time voiced concerns that corporate and advertisers interest might interfere with the freedom of the press, but those last casts of worry faded after the New Deal. That’s in part because complaining about free enterprise started sounding a bit Tommy curious.
Journalism professionalized, creating standards for objective news to justify its insistence on self-regulation. When TV news rolled around, seasoned newspaper reporters transitioned onto the screen. Importantly, in 1949, the perceived objectivity of radio and TV journalism was bolstered by What’s called the fairness Doctrine which mandated that holders of broadcast licenses had a duty to the public interest, thus they needed to spend a certain amount of time covering issues of importance and giving voice to disparate points of view.
Flash Forward 20 years, aspiring president Richard Nixon meets a young TV producer named Roger Ailes and hires him to advise his his winning campaign in 1970. Ales, obsessed with the supposed liberal bias in media, wrote a plan for putting the glp on TV news, which he thought could be paid for and run by the White House. According to him, “people are lazy with television, you just sit watch listen, the thinking is done for you, unlike YouTube where you think for yourself.” Though his dream was to provide pro-administration videotape hard news actualities, the plan today reads like a blueprint for Fox News, which ales would later Helm. Of course, Nixon didn’t last long enough for ales to realize his dream, but the perfect B-movie actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan did, and he and ales together helped to usher in the era of media deregulation which allowed for the proliferation of cable news channels and the birth of Fox News. It’s worth noting that profit-minded thinking has led to less investment in important but expensive positions like foreign correspondents, investigative journalists, and science journalists. This has resulted in an increase of shock and feel-good news, with the same stories being disseminated across the country due to the growing dominance of chain newspapers and consolidation of TV news. Local daily newspapers have seen the most dire results, with cost cutting measures leaving lone journalists to cover beats formerly manned by 25 reporters. Research from Notre Dame and the University of Illinois has found that when newsrooms institute layoffs, taxpayers actually pay more money due to less oversight against government corruption.
Local news has always flown upstream, inspiring anywhere between 85 and 95 percent of professionally reported news in national newspapers and television news. Losing local news leaves national news to pick up the slack, meaning many people in the United States do not see where they live or people like them authentically presented in the news. This has led to people tuning out media, and multiple studies have found that the decrease in local news is correlated with declining public knowledge and political fragmentation. The end of the Fairness Doctrine has taken away all requirements for broadcast news to be public-serving, further exacerbating the issue.
The now-constant 24-hour news cycle means that we get daily chunks of news often disconnected from a time context. This distorts our sense of reality and even the continuity of time, and forces journalists to rely more on speculation and sensationalism than fact. Investigative journalism has been hobbled, as it is the priciest and riskiest investment for any news outlet. However, it is arguably the most important when it comes to shining light on endemic wrongs. From 1993 to 1998, a Pew Research study of local TV stations found that the number of original watchdog reports fell from one per 60 news stories to one per 150. oses in power want reported
This trend of decreasing investigative reporting in local communities accelerated again after a huge buyout in 2019, followed by massive layoffs after the Austin American-Statesman was acquired by a national publishing change in 2018. As scholar Gregory J. Martin puts it, “the worry is who else will investigate a scandal in some small regional city? The existence of this kind of coverage is important for accountability of elected officials and has positive effects on the functioning of representative democracy.”
Corporate consolidation doesn’t just affect the capacity of journalists to investigate corruption, it affects their editorial independence too. According to journalist Ben Bagdikian, it gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history. Corporate consolidation effectively destroyed editorial independence, once journalism’s prime currency.
Karim argues that publishers are increasingly meddling in editorial coverage, especially any content deemed subversive. As he writes, “if you work for a large corporation covering the news, does anyone think the board of directors would want or allow inquisitive reporters poking their noses into the corporate business? No sir.” To make matters worse, strapped budgets and increased need to churn out copy has increased journalistic reliance on PR from corporations and special interest groups.
Back in 2003, Professor Anne Gregory estimated that 80 percent of business news and up to 50 percent of general news was generated or directly influenced by PR firms. They’d provide copy and prepared journalistic forms, thus empowering spokespeople to shape the story. You’re not exactly going to get hard-hitting reporting on Corporate America when their well-paid foot soldiers are the ones writing the copy.
Given these conditions, it’s no surprise that something like the labor beat, which caught a news coverage from the 30s to the 60s, basically vanished by the 90s. Research by Christopher Martin found that in the 70s, coverage started focusing less on unions and more on how labor conflicts affected upscale consumers. We can see this pretty vividly in a lot of the coverage of the current writer strike, which explains which HBO Max shows you might not get to enjoy instead of explaining why newbie writers are often no longer earning living wages.
The focus on upscale consumers has affected news at large because under the advertising model, news outlets are leveraging their reader’s captive attention and who are the most valuable readers? Rich ones, which is why news has increasingly skewed toward the interests of the wealthy elite in hopes of attracting luxury advertisers. Even if your publication runs partly on a subscription model, in which patrons subsidize you, you’re likely still catering to the interests and concerns of the ones who can afford to pay those dues: the same wealthy elite.
In the end, advertising and subscription models can both yield a myopic focus on issues that matter to the rich. But today’s journalists aren’t only pressured to write easily consumable media that appeals to Corporate America, advertisers, and wealthy patrons; they’re also disincentivized from criticizing the government, which media monopolies are dependent upon to make favorable policies or even offer subsidies.
Karem argues that this leads news operations to refrain from criticizing various administrations or politicians. The supposed benefit of deregulating commercial media was what McChesney and Nichols describe as the structural independence necessary to let the press criticize the government and politicians without fear of punishment or retribution, but instead it just manufactured a conflict of interest.
Chris Hedges, the former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes, “it is a dirty quid pro quo: the media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully report what those in power want reported.”