I was involuntarily watching the “Family Feud” quiz show
today and a survey asked for occupations where one lied a lot. Politicians and
lawyers were the top two. But journalists came in third.
This hurts, bad. I have spent much of my life as a local
newspaper reporter, editor and magazine writer and editor. To my knowledge, I
have never written a lie.
I suppose the “fake news” accusations of the President have
had a strong impact on the survey. And I don’t watch Fox and rarely MSNBC
because of their bias. There isn’t a single so-called Internet “news” site I
give credibility to.
And the newspapers I grew up writing for are either gone or
reduced to half the pages they once were. The late and lamented Dover Daily
Advance in New Jersey had a circulation of about 20,000 in the early 1970s. The
editorial staff included about 10 municipal reporters, a county courthouse
reporter, two investigative reporters, three sports guys, three women’s
interest women, three photographers, an editor, and four desk editors including
a ‘lobster shift” overnight person.
Often, politicians did not like what we reported, especially
when we looked at things like spending taxpayer dollars. But while they were
angry about it, they never said we lied.
We tried to be objective. When there was controversy, we
tried to get interviews from all sides of a story. And when we were unable to,
we noted that a source did not respond to our call.
I started my career with the Morris County Daily Record.
There were usually two 16-page sections. Now, the second section is often four
pages. Today’s local newspaper survives mainly from two types of advertisers –
the supermarket chains and other big box stores and classified legal
advertising. Employment advertising used to be huge, as were car classified
ads. But we now use Internet sites. Car dealers can show buyers every car in
stock and change it on a daily basis. The social announcements such as
engagements, weddings, births, service group and church activities are rare,
moving to social media.
And with that came a loss of readership, and that meant
fewer advertising dollars. So our newspaper industry is near death. Most local
newspapers hire kids fresh out of journalism school. But J-school no longer
focuses on the newspaper business, opting instead for television and Internet.
In the mid-1990s, Disney bought ABC. ABC, in addition to
being a television broadcast and cable network provider, owned a number of
other highly-profitable newspapers and trade magazines. Disney quickly
jettisoned those businesses, often selling them to their competitors, who
absorbed them and often discontinued them. Disney practically gave them away,
rightly believing they would be irrelevant in ten years. . . and they were.
So while we know the business of journalism is floundering,
if not dying, why is there so little trust in our reporters?
I once heard that the freedom of the press is held by those
who own the press. Back in the 1970s, I worked for a newspaper whose editorial
staff opposed a major shopping center due to environmental issues such as
flooding. But the publisher refused to print editorials opposing the center and
ordered only positive editorial coverage. The only thing the staff could do was
ignore the story.
I also worked for a newspaper that supported an amusement
park in Budd Lake. The lake was already severely polluted due to
overdevelopment and the lack of municipal sewage. In this case, the owners
relocated their plans to South Jersey and the park became a part of the Six
Flags empire. Budd Lake, meanwhile became a hub for apartment complexes and
retail sites.
So now we have owners of presses, television networks and
Internet sites with agendas. The Murdoch empire, for example, has expanded and
changed the political landscape. Fox News coverage of the recent presidential
election has emerged as not just a conservative platform, but also one whose
coverage included racial bias.
And so, I hang my head in shame. I grew up with reporters
and columnists like Jimmy Breslin, Woodward and Bernstein, Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley
and Brinkley. And those were people we trusted and respected. Cronkite was
called “Uncle Walter” as he led us through the space age and the murders of the
Kennedys and Martin Luther King. He was influential in ending the war in
Vietnam. Murrow stopped the McCarthy era and Woodward and Bernstein forced a
president to resign.
A weeping Walter Cronkite announces the death of President John F. Kennedy.
What happened? I was ashamed when such icons as The New York
Times and The Washington Post published so much anti-Trump venom during and
after the campaign. Yet they are so disrespected that even though they have
brought forth much to impeach the President, the people give no credit to these
reports due to the lack of credibility from the election.
And so journalism has entered a vacuum. It isn’t trusted and
in the present environment, I doubt if it will be in the near future. I have
Facebook friends who repost both support and oppose stories about the President
with regularity. On both sides, claims are often distorted, if not false. Once
upon a time, the Internet was referred to as the “new media.” But now anyone
can create a news website.
I once lived in an area around Lake Ronkonkoma, Long Island.
There were three municipalities surrounding the lake. One was called Ronkonkoma
(part of the town of Islip) and the other was called Lake Ronkonkoma (part of
the town of Brookhaven). I attempted to create an on-line newspaper called
“Ronkonkomas.com” that covered the two towns. If and when I expanded, I would
cover the third one. It was the old-fashioned type of coverage that I grew up
with in the 1970s. I covered town councils, planning and zoning boards, boards
of education, civic groups and more. Though I built up circulation to more than
4,000 daily ‘hits,’ I simply could not get enough ad support. This information
was widely available on Facebook and town websites.
So what kind of journalism can survive? Something that
provokes outrage. And the problem is that to provoke outrage, one must attack
and never, ever tell the entire truth.
It is not journalism. Yes Donald, I can’t stand you but
there is too much “fake news.”
And I weep for a time when people believed we had integrity.
