Our friend David Frum offered some provocative thoughts earlier in the week on the changes that are afoot in the media:
Ratings are declining and circulations are plunging. Advertising revenues are tumbling, layoffs, buyouts, marquee properties sold, bought and sold again. Yet, troubled as the news media business is, media as a human activity is pulsing with dynamism, creativity and invention. There's just one problem. Nobody wants to pay for any of this, which is why salaried journalists are coming to feel like the steelworkers of the 21st century.
Perhaps some brilliant person will devise a new model to revive and sustain the big, professional news corporation, now under so much pressure, but what if it does not work? In that case, the future of the American media may look a lot like the past.
A century and a half ago, the American news media were small, polemical, often heavily subsidized by political parties and relatively poor. Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune with $1,000 in capital. That was obviously more money in 1841 than it is today, but even then, it was not so much money, not the kind of money needed to start a railway or a foundry, more like the kind of money used to start a nice looking Web site today.
Frum is quite right - the old media are dying. One of the things that is killing them is their dual pretense of objectivity and neutrality. If Dan Rather was fairer or more objective than the Huffington Post, he had me fooled.
So what will rise from the ashes of the old media castles? What we'll likely have is a Wild West of information where news consumers will have to seek out truth on their own. This isn't unprecedented. After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone's two newspapers gave starkly different accounts of the affair, one championing the Earps and the other the Clanton/McLaury faction.
Horace Greeley ran for president at the tail end of his career and invented Andrew Jackson's most famous quote at the start of it ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). Newsmen with an agenda are nothing new under the sun. And the market will reward those with a fidelity to the truth and punish those who demonstrate the opposite. Please see the pathetic Mr. Rather currently toiling away on something called HDNet for comforting evidence of that fact.
The prospect of not having a newspaper or news source of record may frighten some people since it would be new territory for the modern era. But far more frightening is a thankfully bygone era when a media powerhouse like Walter Cronkite could call the Vietnam War lost because he didn't understand what had happened with the Tet Offensive. Worse still, so impeccable was his credibility that the country would believe him.
Better to have a nation of citizens actively engaged in finding the truth than assuming they're getting the truth from what's in fact an unreliable source.
