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Nieman lecturer addresses the ‘crisis’ in modern journalism
By . Published April 30, 2009.
“Massive, unbelievably huge, off the charts, mind blowing, gargantuan, colossal.”
Those were the words Robert McChesney used to describe the governmental stimulus he said is needed to address the “crisis” in American journalism. He delivered the College of Communication’s Nieman Lecture in the Alumni Memorial Union Tuesday.
McChesney, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor and co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, said money to promote journalism can only come from the government.
“Simply hoping that advertising or philanthropists are going to give us the money to generate good journalism is wishful thinking,” McChesney said. “It’s simply not going to happen that way.”
McChesney said newspapers lost between 15,000 and 16,000 jobs in 2008 and with the current economic recession, the industry could lose up to 40 percent of all working print journalists in the next year.
“This is unquestionably the darkest moment in newspaper publishing in this nation’s history,” McChesney said.
To face the problems in journalism today, McChesney supports increased funding for youth journalism in high schools and colleges and increased spending toward public media.
McChesney said the emergence of the Internet’s advertising ability and the current economic recession are not the causes of the problem, but have merely sped up the process of journalism’s disintegration.
According to McChesney, the crisis in journalism is due to corporate conglomeration, reliance on power figures and an increasing focus on advertising-supported journalism.
To make as much money as possible, corporations that bought multiple newspapers in the mid-to-late 20th century would lay off reporters and replace real news with cheaper, more financially lucrative “fluff” stories, McChesney said. As the corporations pocketed money from the papers, the quality of news coverage began to decline, he said.
“Understood this way, we can understand why young people don’t read newspapers,” McChesney said.
According to McChesney, journalism’s reliance on power figures has also corrupted contemporary news. As journalism developed in the United States, journalists developed the idea that their job is to “shut up and report and not to question power,” McChesney said.
Criticizing reporters who claim to be neutral and objective because they report and fact-check what Republicans and Democrats say, McChesney said there is no room for criticism of the government in this vein of reporting.
“If you stand back,” McChesney said, “you’re only reporting what people in power are saying and ignoring everyone elProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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in society.”
Because professional journalism internalized this idea of only reporting what people in power have to say, McChesney said the Civil Rights Movement was largely not covered by the media in the 1950s and 1960s.
“They made it seem normal not to cover that community because you were relying on what people in power were debating,” McChesney said.
Today, McChesney said corporations take away the autonomy of the newsrooms and pressure journalists to cover politically insignificant but financially lucrative stories.
“More people know about the Octomom than the financial bailouts that are costing $2 trillion,” McChesney said. “That’s quite a statement about our journalism.”
McChesney also said journalism has become increasingly interested in reaching only the people in whom advertisers are interested, thus silencing the stories of the nation’s minority and impoverished populations.
Eventually, McChesney said there should be multiple independent newsrooms in communities with well-paid journalists competing and held accountable so that every community in the country has a journalistic voice.
In addition, McChesney said advertising must play a smaller role in journalism and that news organizations needs diversity in ownership to safeguard against any sort of conglomeration.
“Ultimately though, once we stabilize the system and stop the bleeding,” McChesney said, “we have to come up with a way again to build healthy, vibrant newsrooms that will go well into the digital era.”
Bonnie Brennen, Nieman chair and professor of journalism at Marquette, said she hoped McChesney’s lecture gave students and faculty a greater awareness of the Free Press movement.
“I hope it helps students to see that academics are working on the problems in journalism,” Brennen said. “It’s not like the field is dead. Change has been needed in our field for a while.”
Brennen said journalism isn’t just about giving people what they want to hear, but what the people need to know in order to function in a democracy.
“Without a free, active and independent press, then our democracy is in serious trouble,” she said.
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