Democracy and the problems of news
My ideal of a reporter was David Broder. Starting at the Washington Star, Broder eventually landed with the Washington Post (after the Star folded). A reporter of legendary renown, he showed up one evening in New Castle, where yours truly was a novice with the news. Broder brought with him a candidate for president in 1972, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
Honest to Grantland Rice, it was way more exciting seeing Broder than Jackson. Then Broder spoke to me. “What’s it like for Jackson around here?” he asked. The fact is I had no idea what “it was like for Jackson around here.” I blurted out something. Trying to sound like a seasoned political reporter, you know. I forget what I said. My voice was tremulous. Understand, this was the great David Broder talking to little-old me.
Another hero was Bill Lawrence of ABC News. With a voice that rumbled like a coal-fired freight train, Lawrence wasn’t exactly a smooth baritone in the tradition of Walter Cronkite. Rumbled and chunky, he didn’t exactly look the part of a star television reporter, which he both was and wasn’t. An old news hound, Lawrence first chased down political stories for the New York Times starting with Franklin Roosevelt. He was still with the Times when John Kennedy stumped West Virginia in 1960. He joined ABC News the following year.
Lawrence died with his boots on – in a hotel room near Manchester, New Hampshire, while covering that state’s “first in the nation primary” in March 1972.
God bless them both. Broder and Lawrence knew politics from the ground up. For years, they were the gatekeepers of political journalism, along with the likes of R.W. Apple, Jack Germond, Jules Witcover, Doris Fleeson, and Mary McCrory.
Except for Witcover, all of these men and women have passed from the scene. So has the nomenclature, the context within which they worked. While their reporting was influential, they were not, in modern parlance, “influencers.” They were writers and reporters, not “content creators.” They had readers, not “followers.”
And they labored for newspapers, not internet sites.
Maybe the latter is the biggest change, the basic change. Newspapering is the past. Circulation and advertising revenue are the rusting barnacles of a bygone industry, not the anchors of a robust enterprise.
As late as the 1990s, the George Costanzas of the world eagerly anticipated reading the morning (New York) Daily News, or its equivalent. Today, it’s the latest podcast that’s on most everyone’s radar. The latest “drop” or “post” from sites such as Search Party, Mo News, Shade Room, or Comments by Celebs is the thing.
In place of publishers, there is TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.
What’s happening to print journalism is just this side of tragic. Things have gotten so bad that the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., is now offering free meals to out of work reporters, according to a recent Associated Press story.
The same article, by David Bauder, details some of the most recent developments in the devolution of newspapers and magazines from their once high perch to the low branches of American journalism. This includes layoffs of reporters and photographers at the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Daily News, Sports Illustrated, and Time magazine.
A little more than 2,000 newspaper jobs were lost in 2023, according to Bauder. On average, 2.5 American newspapers a week run their presses for the final time. Bauder cites a November 2023 study by Northwestern University which states that the United States lost one-third of its newspapers and over 60% of its reporters, editors, and photographers since 2005.
All of that is incompatible with a functioning democratic social order that relies on ordinary folks being able to make sense of things beyond their own households and places of work. Forget, for a moment, the nation. The stress that lost and diminished newspapering puts on healthy local government and politics can be debilitating.
Not knowing what’s happening at the level of school boards and municipalities handicaps the best of well-intentioned citizenship.
Putting aside the problems posed by the proliferation of fake news, the good news is that it’s possible to stay abreast of national developments. Broder and company are gone, but the likes of Dan Balz, Ashley Parker, Peter Baker, and Chuck Todd are alive and reporting.
And, truth be told, “new” media can be informative as well. The parts on “how this piece was put together” were an irksome distraction, but the “content” of a recent Search Party segment on the business of professional sport leagues was enlightening.
The real catastrophe is the growth of news deserts in towns and regions across the country.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.