Jon Talton: Democracy Wounded as Newspapers Cut Washington Bureaus
The New York Times recently wrote about the shrinking Washington bureaus of American newspapers. Cox Newspapers, Advance Publications and Copley have all shut down their operations, along with scores of other papers. Those that remain are drastically smaller. Hundreds of experienced journalists have been thrown out of work, “at a time when the federal government — and journalistic oversight of it — matters more than ever.”
The same thing is happening at statehouses nationwide. Washington state is one example. “During the past 15 years, the state population has increased by 25 percent and the amount of tax money spent by the state has more than doubled,” according to the Seattle Times. “Yet the number of print, television and radio journalists covering the state Legislature full time has dropped by about 70 percent” to about 10.
Some of this is a result of the newspaper industry’s worsening financial troubles. But some, too, is a result of a mindset by many newspaper companies to focus on the trivial, the distracting and the uncontroversial. It’s also less expensive to get rid of the most experienced journalists and close bureaus. All this had been cloaked by reams of readership data, much of which I have always found highly questionable. All the readers I hear from — and the focus groups I’ve attended — want real news, including government “process” news. Sure, they say, get online and add links and video — but don’t take away my real news.
Citizen journalism fills the void? Hardly.
Does this even matter with the proliferation of blogs, so-called citizen journalists, GoogleNews, YouTube, social networking, bookmarking, and news aggregator sites such as Digg and NewzNozzl? Does it matter when the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal continue to produce superb coverage of D.C., and have developed popular, advanced presences on the Web?
The answer is an emphatic “yes!” — but we may not even be asking the right questions.
I’m deliberately omitting television from this discussion. We’re a long way from Walter Cronkite and the trained journalists of his generation, and with few exceptions TV news is mostly entertainment. Also, television is a passive medium, where viewers sit, watch and listen. Newspapers and even much of the Web entails the active effort of reading — which also is more likely to encourage analytical thinking, a search for context, even some skepticism. Still, our society is poorer for the cutbacks in serious reporting at television news divisions, including the near total extinction of such journalism at local stations.
At their best, newspaper D.C. bureaus provided unparalleled, authoritative coverage of how the federal government, and their members of congress were affecting states and cities. The same coverage came from reporters based in state capitals. In a populous state such as Ohio, where I worked in the 1980s and 1990s, the capital bureaus of many newspapers not only wrote “local local” news of real consequence coming out of state government, but were in competition with each other as watchdogs. The reporters themselves were usually smart, deeply plugged in and had vast institutional and historical knowedge. The big beneficiaries were citizens.
(And yes, there were instances of mind-numbing dull coverage. But the answer was not to stop covering an entity as important as government — just as the answer is not to cut back business news or turn it to weak personal finance nuggets — but to ensure high-impact story selection, and quality reporting, writing, editing and presentation).
Today the engaged citizen can find more information than ever thanks to the Internet. Politicians can be caught instantly in lies or embarrassing comments, thanks to YouTube and Google searches. Great investigative reporting continues to be done by a handful of newspapers, and newspaper-generated journalism remains the basis for much of the conversations of the Web. Agencies and think tanks post reports and data. The blogosphere is rich with voices. Web “production values” and tech tools keep getting better.
But being well-informed this way can take much more time, even with the most carefully constructed news filters. One must adjust for partisan bents and omissions. Instant Internet “news” can turn out to be false. The entertaining video of the president dodging shoes in Baghdad doesn’t contain the sober context of the news event and its aftermath. The remaining serious newspaper journalism tends to look down from 30,000 feet — or drop in to cover a community in depth once a year, ferreting out a story the diminished local paper failed to cover. A few Web site, such as Raw Story and TPM Muckracker have produced compelling scoops — but they are national and international in focus, and often reach small audiences.
And none of the new firehoses of information so far replace the work of traditional local newspaper bureaus in Washington and the state capital. Thus, the news agenda for many states and localities becomes extremely narrow, dependent on Associated Press coverage that is itself being cut or other wire services. It usually doesn’t drill deep into a story’s local or state impact, much less provide the spectrum of news reporting that the Web promises. The occasional blogger may break a big story — but to count on that regularly assumes a lot of luck, or a lot of bloggers with independent means and substantial journalism skills. Someone with a cell phone camcorder might catch the governor saying something foolish or untoward. But that’s not the same as paid, experienced reporters sifting through hundreds of pages of legislation to find the hidden environmental bomb, the payoff to a big contributor or the costly unintended consequence. And doing such work every day.
Greatest damage at the local level.
We may see some of the greatest damage at the civic level. Most communities and states won’t develop their own version of Raw Story. Most residents just won’t know what’s going on at City Hall, the state house, or how Washington affects them. Many won’t care, at least at first. Many will be more prone to accept the “news” as given out by the chamber of commerce, dominant political party or business interests. The inevitable malgovernance will sometimes blow up enough to cause notice.
I won’t bore readers now with stories of the glory days. The newspaper industry may well be in a fatal, self-reinforcing cycle of cutbacks, missteps, foolishly acquired debt and a hopelessly broken business model. It missed, and perhaps contributed to, a sea change in societal habits. Whatever emerges on the other side may still not have a way to compensate many skilled journalists. It will be one more piece of shattered mass media, with audiences in hundreds of niches but without the old public square provided by local newspapers. The citizenry of such a world will be infinitely more distracted, but will it be more informed?