I pay my photoshopping guy too much.

So it looks like the great news medium is finally going down. The Rocky Mountain News has already gone under, the New York Times is constantly increasing its focus on web content, and the San Fransisco Chronicle is about to go belly up. They’re all dying, and I, as a student of journalism and a freelance journalist, can’t wait to see them go. But it isn’t the death of journalism I’m celebrating, it’s the death of shitty journalism.

Don’t listen to what the papers PR guys are saying. The newspaper is going down. It doesn’t matter what they do to reform or how much they emphasize that the internet is a “commenting medium,” where there’s is a “reporting medium.” They can increase investigative journalism and begin addressing more controversial stories, they can try to become public trusts, it doesn’t matter.

The three main sources of income (advertising, classifieds and subscriptions) for newspapers have suffered a major coronary, and they’re not going to pull through. Readership is way down, to the point where almost no money is coming in from circulation. Why? Because the internet offers all that information, from multiple sources, in an easily searchable way, for free.  With readership down advertisers are pulling out; they get way more bang for there buck by advertising on Google searches and Facebook pages that apply to their product (say car ads on the side of searches about cars). And classified advertising is totally useless, Craigslist and Kijiji are way more effective, free, alternatives.

And the situation is just dripping with irony. The free marketplace of ideas John Stuart Mill supported, the dialectic of journalism John C. Merrill advocated, these were the ideals behind newspapers. Or they were about sixty or seventy years ago. Now corporate homogenization (most newspapers, TV stations and radio stations in the US are owned by about six companies, source) has killed journalistic integrity.  That very  ideal of the free marketplace is what’s killing newspapers now, because the free marketplace has shifted to the net.

That's terrible, his ass is fired.

The reason the newspapers are dying isn’t the internet, its the newspapers. They’ve gotten fat, impotent and morally corrupt (and I don’t mean that in a Rush Limbaugh Pat Boone kind of morally corrupt). The second they started emphasizing profits over content, they were doomed. Socrates predicted that back in c. 450 BC.

I know it sounds cliche, but it’s true. Newspapers were meant to be small, individually owned, and loud. There were supposed to be fifty papers for every major market. But people figured out they could make more money with one or two big newspapers in one place. The real value of newspapers died back when the little newspapers died. Because once a newspaper got a monopoly, it didn’t have to care about content, people would read it because they had no other choice.

Want an example of the problems of newspapers, and why they need to go under? The Iraq war. A Cowardly, lazy, and stupid press is the reason the American people were told outright lies funneled straight from the government, without fact checking or oversight. Personally, I think the press is more to blame for Iraq then the Bush administration, but that’s another argument.

And this all brings us to today. Guess what newspapers, the little guys are back. The internet. It is the true dialectic, the true free marketplace of ideas. Newsmen love to say that the internet is an unreliable source of poorly reported news. First off, so are newspapers. Secondly, the internet brings all the politics, opinions, passion and bias of the early newspaper era back, allowing people to form an opinion after hearing a multitude of voices. And thirdly the reporting is a hell of a lot better, when you look at the right places. Want an example? Here’s a pretty damning one:

The biggest story of the decade would have the headline (I’m plagiarizing this) GOVERNMENT LIES TO BRING AMERICA TO WAR. The senate select intelligence committee’s report on US intelligence on the existence of Iraq’s WMDs revealed that the Bush administration knowingly lied to the public. They said there were WMDs while having read plenty of intelligence proving there were none. So, GOVERNMENT LIES TO AMERICAN PUBLIC, or something along those lines. Who reported it? No major media organization, except for a passing mention on ABC and a buried story in the Washington section of the NY Times. The Huffington Post (an on-line news source) had a pretty damn good story on it, as did the Daily Show. And this happened in 2007, just six years after the press so royally screwed up with the Iraq coverage and had to apologize for it.

American journalists have failed the public, and there’s no redemption coming. The owners of media prefer soft, easy, and profitable stories. They hire friendly, stupid journalists who don’t stir up shit, and when they do, they get canned. That’s what happened to MSNBCs Phil Donahue. He was fired, for what the network claimed was low ratings, while literally having the highest rated show on MSNBC at the time. Why? Because he was being a responsible journalist and allowing anti-war views on his show, source. NBC didn’t want to seem anti-war during the zeitgeist. And as the networks lack of coverage on the intellegence committees report shows, they still only give Americans what they want to hear.

A Confederacy of Dunces

That’s why the internet, the only true free marketplace of ideas, needs to take over. It is the only thing that can take power out of the hands of the top 5 percent and put it back in the hands of the people. I hope TV news croaks soon too.