The Crisis of Journalism and the Internet

Reflecting on Robert W. McChesney’s “The Crisis of Journalism and the Internet”…

In an earlier post I said there are those suggesting that we’re in the early stages of a new social reform, one that will include drastic changes to the structure of the Western media and the way it operates.

I was talking about Robert W. McChesney (specifically his and John Nicols’ 2002 book, Our Media, Not Theirs: The democratic struggle against corporate media).

To quote McChesney at length: “I believe (democratic journalism) must provide a rigorous accounting of people who are in power and people who wish to be in power, in both the government and corporate sectors. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least prevent liars from getting away scot-free. And it must prove a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times; not only the issues of the day, but the major issues that loom on the horizon. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about. Journalism must provide our early warning system. It is not necessary that all news media provide all these services; that would be impractical. It is necessary that the media system as a whole make such journalism a realistic expectation for the citizenry.” 

The fact that journalism has failed to live up to this expectation, that in fact these expectations seem so truly unrealistic, is why McChesney believes we are experiencing a crisis of journalism.

“What does the crisis of journalism entail? The corruption of journalism, the decline of investigative reporting, the degeneration of political reporting and international journalism, the absurd horserace coverage of campaigns, the collapse of local journalism, the increasing prevalence of celebrity and scandal…”

There are those who would say that this crisis has been brought on by the internet, that this latest innovation in communications technology has siphoned off resources from traditional journalism, and created unfair competition for the dominant commercial news media, but McChesney disagrees. According to him, the crisis was in play long before the internet was ever a “threat”.

The real cause of the crisis was the professionalization of journalism. To understand this, we need to look into the past.

“Professional journalism” was not defined by journalists, or the public at large which they are meant to serve. Media owners and their commercial interests are what came to define the “professional” journalist. And this is when we began to move away from the democratic journalism our society needs to thrive politically and culturally.

The first notable result of the professionalization of journalism was the increasing dependence on “official sources”. As newsrooms shrunk and looked to cut costs, there was less time and fewer resources left for journalists to put together stories the old-fashioned way – research and reporting – so more and more they were forced to take at face-value information distributed from officials within institutions that were previously open to the journalist’s critique.

McChesney cites the most powerful example of the reliance on official sources in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where even the prestigious New York Times and Washington Post had issued apologies to their readers for printing lies and exaggerations that led the USA to an “unnecessary, illegal and disastrous war.” According to a study from by the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity (CPI) there were 935 lies designed to garner public support for the war – with “several hundred” coming from President Bush and Vice President Cheney. How could the media have fed blatant lies to the public realm?

To understand the media we need to understand the political economy of the media, and the first place to look is towards its structures.

McChesney states, “It is not that owners and advertisers and managers need to directly interfere with or censor editors and journalists; it is more the case that organizational structures transmit values that are internalized by those who successfully rise to the top.”

Simply put, professional norms – like the reliance on official sources, the popularity of celebrity and scandal pieces, the rating-boosting coverage of sensational crime and natural disaster stories – have been internalized by practicing journalists to such an extent that it’s the only way they know to climb to the top of the corporate food chain. And it’s what the citizenry has come to expect of journalism itself.

As I discussed in a previous post, technological innovation has a way of altering a professional environment, and sometimes it’s the professional who notices last.

What we need to hope is that the internet is capable of bringing changes to the political economy of the media, by opening more doors and dissolving the barriers between journalist and citizen, author and producer, form and content. If we are in fact in the early stages of a new media reform, it will certainly be brought on the wings of the internet.

There are, of course, many more things to consider. Such as control and ownership of the internet, Net Neutrality, and free and ubiquitous internet access for all. But that’s another post, for another day…