Why Print Journalism Was Always Going to Die And Other Myths About It Those Mourning It Refuse to Share

 

 

““You have preserved in your own lifetime, sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born.”

A New Leaf (1971)

 

“ I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here.”

Other People’s Money (1991)

 

Over the last couple of years I have dealt with many of the major flaws that so many apparently well-educated people have in their arguments about the demise of basically any major institution – politics, movies, sports, television, even criticism itself. I have spent a lot of time and energy trying my very best to debunk so many of these arguments.

In hindsight, I think the summation of both sides can be put up in these two quotes from two very different forgotten movies filmed twenty years apart. The details about so many of why things have declined varies on the topic, but the crux of it always has the tone of the nostalgia factor, which is best summed up in the first quote. The main reason that all of these things were ruined usually comes down to different details all of which involve some combination of money, progress and the change in generations.

 My answers have had some variation on why those people who have been arguing that it was better before are guilty of what politely could be called selective omission of how things have always been and were even back then. It is only now that I realize the people who have been bemoaned the deaths of these institutions to progress and economy could best be answered by the speech that Danny DeVito gave that contains that same quote. His argument is defending greed but its also a real-eyed look at the march of how progress goes. “Once upon a time there were lots of companies that made buggy whips” he tells a bunch of stockholders. And that’s fundamentally true of basically every single institution that has ever existed. Eventually they have to evolve or they die. In many cases – such as film, television and baseball – the institution recognizes it has to evolve and takes steps to do so to survive. That’s when the oldest and loudest voice make arguments that any change to these institutions is an obscenity and the people who are trying to do change them are destroying what they love. They always forget that the thing that it is an amusement to them is a livelihood for the people running it.  In their minds, it would be better for the industry to go bankrupt  - and by extension, completely disappear – then lose its purity. In some cases the loudest voices are the ones who made a living in the business and now call it an art. The logic is hard to comprehend.

A couple of years back I encountered a column by media critic Jeff Jarvis arguing that television was dying. I won’t repeat his criticisms but they essentially came down to that there might be good TV on certain services but he didn’t want to pay for it and that the only hope for the future of the medium was in glorified fanfiction for television. This was an easy argument for me to dismantle. Last month, Jarvis was announcing the eulogy of the demise of print journalism and while some of the details were different than the ones I’ve heard for film, books or television, much of it comes down to the same myth that it was a good thing – a calling -  before money was involved.

I wrote a longer criticism on his post, which keeping within the tradition of someone not wanting to puncture their bubble, he has not answered. I’m now going to put in a longer form. Perhaps he’ll see it; more likely he’ll just call me uninformed even if he does. Nevertheless, I’ll try.

The idea of a newspaper ever being something that was purely objective, a calling that was beyond trustworthy, something that was ruined only when money came involved is a myth. One that you’d think a man who calls himself a critic of media would be aware of. From the founding of the Republic newspapers and magazines have almost always had agendas that were built on the ideas of the men who founded them. The agendas were political, though in the first century of the United States, much of that agenda was based more on location than anything else. The wars on slavery were divided on where the papers were and broke down essentially on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line was. If journalism was truly impartially, the attack of Charles Sumner would have been viewed nationwide as an atrocity; instead the North considered Preston Brooks a villain and the South was angry he had left Sumner alive.

Newspapers have always been at their core operating on a political agenda. Indeed Horace Greeley, hailed by media historians as a hero, was the definition of a journalist who used his publication to meddle in national affairs. Greeley was as much a thorn in Lincoln’s side as the Radical Republicans could be, and he made no secret of judging every move that went on in D.C. through how he thought it should be done. Greeley was a national celebrity because of his paper. It did not make him a bastion of journalistic integrity.

And it’s not like the papers that followed in his footsteps in New York were any different. For over a century the gold standard of journalism has been the Pulitzer Prize. How many reporters – how many people in media – know that every time they win it or are nominated they are involved in what has been a century of whitewashing or that for all intents and purposes, he was as devoted in the same kind of sensationalism most people today think Rupert Murdoch invented?

For his entire career Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in newspaper wars in order to peddle their financial and political influence. It was their battle for New York readers that was one of the causes that led to the Spanish-American War. “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war,” is famously attributed to Hearst, but it’s not like Pulitzer himself was a saint. During the 1890s, he and Hearst competition led to what was called yellow journalism, which featured sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. That is what journalism has been based on for a centuries, not some great idea of investigative work. Both Pulitzer and Hearst had political careers that were aborted and they spent their lives influencing every aspect of politics for the rest of their lives. Pulitzer’s recruitment of the iconic Nellie Bly was to sell papers, more than any belief in social progress or even what kind of reporting she was capable of. He left $2 million to Columbia in his will, and they founded the Columbia school of Journalism. For all the good it may have done, it is built on the same kind of exploitation that the other ‘robber barons’ such as Rockefeller and Morgan are infamous for. The media hasn’t done as much to remind us of that. They know where their bread is butter.

After Pulitzer died, Hearst basically kept on going as did so many other mass publishers including Henry Luce. The muckrakers that ended up breaking through – Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair – were no doubt writing to expose the ills in society. They were not doing it for free. Nor were the publishers of the papers they worked for doing it for social change; they wanted to make money and seeing the ills of society was just another form of sensationalism. There’s always money in showing how badly people are being exploited; that’s as true today as it was a century ago.

And these same publishers were just as intent in maintaining their hold on political power as the media has always been.  All the way through FDR’s first reelection campaign, two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers backed Alf Landon. In one of the most infamous polls in history the Literary Digest, the first political poll, argued that Landon would be elected  with 360 electoral votes. FDR won with 523, every state but Maine and Vermont. The publication folded not long afterwards.

The only kind of newspapers that advocated as much for social change as much as financial success were those run by African-Americans. Publications like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender might have been pushing sensationalism but they were trying to raise social awareness and force equality. They were hoping for integration to succeed even if it meant that their businesses would, as a result, have to go under. Men such as Wendell Smith might be amused – or annoyed – that this generation of African-Americans is now angry that their vision succeeded as well as it did: they argue for both equality and independence, something that many of the publications at the time would have considered impossible. (But that’s another story.)

For those like Jarvis who might argue that social media has killed print journalism, it was going to happen for the same reason that we don’t have any need for the manufacture of buggy whips any more. When movies came along, they were able to spread reporting to a national audience. When radio became effective, local newspapers became less pertinent to their readers for national news. The nightly news did more damage and when CNN was founded in 1980, the death of print journalism was inevitable.

 For the past forty years, the newspaper industry has been doing everything in its power to avoid the fact that they can not stop the march of time. I read newspapers every day growing up and well into my forties but I’ll be honest by the time I was in my twenties; their values were out of habit more than any real value. TV was already able to report long stories in the same detail the day they happened, had the budget to do more research and work and do so more efficiently. What’s the benefit in reading yesterday’s news when the TV is always going to have today’s? All that social media and the internet have ever done is hasten the inevitable. The fact that these days MSNBC is bemoaning the death of newspapers strikes me as a cruel joke: I’m reminded of a serial killer wearing a human mask of their victims.

The newspaper reporter, in all honesty, has been an anachronism for at least half a century maybe more. Do you know the real reason you’ve survived as long as you have, the real reason so many of you are mourning a way of life that perished well before you were born?

Hollywood. Ever since The Front Page was nominated for Best Picture in 1931, the movies and later TV have made your job look glamorous, glorious and even sexy. That actual investigative journalism is nothing like what we see in movies and TV has done nothing to diminish its appeal to Hollywood, because the industry relies on a formula and reporting has made it one. (Hell, The Front Page was remade for movies four separate times, and the last one moved it to television.)

I guarantee you that over the last half-century many of the women who have gotten into journalism did so as much to be Lois Lane as they did Nellie Bly or became photo-journalists to be Peter Parker rather than Jacob Riis. If you can’t actually be a superhero, the next best thing is the alter ego of one. Hell, we’re in the 2020s and Lois Lane is still a former newspaper journalist on Superman & Lois. You’d think by now she’d have at least become a reporter for a Metropolis local news station but the nostalgia factor plays out.

And it’s not like it’s changed when it came to stories of real-life investigative journalism. This may end up being part of a larger column but I really think the reason political journalism became a huge thing after Watergate was because of the film version of All The President’s Men. The 1976 film, it’s worth noting, comes to an end right before all of the Senate Hearings that really led to Nixon’s downfall – we see all of the highlights being played out on a typewriter typing all the headlines. I don’t deny Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting helped, but it was just the first domino that led to Nixon’s downfall – and it’s something they themselves know all too well but have spent half a century more than willing to wear the mantle of single-handedly bringing down Richard Nixon.

That’s the myth Hollywood has played in helping journalism for the last half-century: if you become a reporter, you can be played by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman. This is something that film has leaned into hard for half a century and print journalism does nothing to diminish. Even though reporters say over and over “we’re not the story’, they don’t seem to object when they are portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac or Michael Keaton in Spotlight. Truffaut misspoke: all movies get reporting wrong because they all make it look glamorous. This is something they should have telling new interns before they ended up taking unpaid jobs at the Boston Globe.

That’s the real reason that I think so many old men and women are bemoaning the demise of journalism. They’ve been reading their own books, seeing the films and shows made about them and talking in their inner circle for so long that they believe their own press clippings. Journalism has never been some higher calling the way that Aaron Sorkin described in The Newsroom; it is and has always been a business built on economic realities and never immune to the march of time. Newspapers have always been the subject of political agendas, the whims of the millionaires and built far more sensationalism than anything else. At a certain point progress was always going to catch up with it and we now seem to be at that point.

Jarvis and his ilk bemoan this as a great lost for the world and while there is some truth to it, it still requires the kind of selective vision and idealism that the first quote that headed this article has in just about every context.  Collectively their attitude here is akin to that of every other time progress comes to something they love: it is Canute trying to hold back the tides. The tide they claim that did the job is the Internet. To that I’ll just remind of them of the second quote. Don’t worry. Like everyone else, you can make a good living on other forms of media, bemoaning the loss of the thing you held dear. For people whose career was built in writing, you never seem to have learned about irony.