Daily Blague

When I say that the answer is "corporations," I want to be perfectly clear that the businesses that publish and broadcast our news have always been organized as corporations. But their corporate structure was a little more than an accounting technicality. Nobody thought of "newspapers" as "corporations," not even when the newspapers in question were published by W R Hearst. The Hearst and Pulitzer organizations were instruments - I would almost say "weapons" - that their creators wielded with idiosyncratic freedom.

Modern corporations are not run offensively. Marketing campaigns are aggressive, it is true, but they are too calculated to be called offensive. There is a heedlessness of the consequences about genuine offensiveness that corporations, purged as they are of individual authorities, can't even simulate. Old-time newspapers were bold, particularly when they'd been warned off a story. We used to have a robust press. What happened?

Too much attention to the bottom line, perhaps. Too much marketing. To much thinking about things other than the news. We all know about the declining readership problem that plagues every newspaper in the country (with the exception of the Grey Lady). The question is: how to deal with it? The explosion of the Blogosphere suggests that the problem is inaccurately described. Perhaps the Cold War made the great newspapers sleepy; perhaps newspapers became too dependent on scandals to hold onto tough-minded readers. Somewhere along the way, too many of these readers began to ask themselves why they ought to read about matters over which they had no control? This was a question that robust journalism forestalled with an almost Biblical display of authority. And nobody appears to be asking it in the Blogosphere. Have there ever been so many daily consumers of "printed" news as there are now? Newspapers have been slow to adopt new technologies, and they've done almost nothing in the way of adapting new technologies to the delivery of their product.

Product? Did I say "product?" There you have the corporate creep in all its banality. Can you imagine an old-time newsman talking about product or (my favorite) content? These terms betray the all-purpose thinking of corporate generalists: it doesn't matter what you fill the pages with so long as readers buy the product. And that proposition leads quickly to another: don't put anything on the page that readers won't like!

To these anxieties about sales, Karl Rove has brilliantly added concern about supplies - access to the White House. Journalists who displease the White House are routinely frozen out; the President himself, when a candidate in 2000 (I think it was), insulted Times reporter Adam Clymer in public. The old-time newsmen would have fought back like tigers, but Mr Rove knows that old-time newsmen aren't running the show anymore. Indeed, they've passed largely out of existence. Today's reporters are almost as image-conscious as broadcast personalities, and have lost the taste for haphazard lifestyles kept their predecessors stoic. But whether or not newsmen have changed, control of media enterprises has changed, and the new masters are as defensive about the markets, their products, and their customers as any auto-maker.

How newsmen came to be replaced by bean counters is a matter that our country's "B" schools will have to answer for. For the time being, you have a choice: you can get your news from "professional" sources that only once in a great while hire a Jayson Blair, or you can plunge into the Rialto of commentary that's no more than one link away from this page - in which case you will have to use your own head. Presently, I hope, there's a new Horace Greeley clicking away at his or her keyboard. Eventually, this writer's voice will generate its own authority, and beg politely but firmly to tell us things that we may not like to hear.