Everyone knows this story, though fewer and fewer read it on paper.\u00a0 There are barely enough pages left to wrap fish.\u00a0 The second paper in town has shut down.\u00a0 Sometimes the daily delivers only three days a week.\u00a0 Advertising long ago started fleeing to Craigslist and Internet points south.\u00a0 Subscriptions are dwindling.\u00a0 Online versions don\u2019t bring in much ad revenue.\u00a0 Who can avoid the obvious, if little covered question: Is the press too big to fail?\u00a0 Or was it failing long before it began to falter financially?<\/i><\/p>\n
In the previous century, there was<\/em> a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel. \u00a0Then came regression to the mean. \u00a0Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming<\/a> that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us<\/a> into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built.\u00a0 When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising<\/a> and the shriveled newsrooms — there were fewer newsroom employees<\/a> in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept — also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.<\/p>\n Deserting readers mean broken business models.\u00a0 Per household circulation of daily American newspapers has been declining<\/a> steadily for 60 years, since long before the Internet arrived.\u00a0 It\u2019s gone from 1.24 papers per household in 1950 to 0.37 per household in 2010. To get the sports scores, your horoscope, or the crossword puzzle, the casual reader no longer needs even to glance at a whole paper, and so is less likely to brush up against actual — even superficial — news. Never mind that the small-r republican model on which the United States was founded presupposed that some critical mass of citizens would spend a critical mass of their time figuring out what\u2019s what and forming judgments accordingly.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t be fooled, though, by any inflated talk about the early days of American journalism.\u00a0 In the beginning, there was no Golden Age.\u00a0 To be sure, a remark Thomas Jefferson made in 1787 is often quoted admiringly (especially in newspapers): “If it were left to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”<\/p>\n Protected by the First Amendment, however, the press of the early republic was unbridled, scurrilous, vicious, and flagrantly partisan.\u00a0 In 1807, then-President Jefferson, with much more experience under his belt, wrote, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.\u201d<\/p>\n Two Golden Decades<\/strong><\/p>\n If there was a Golden Age for the American press, it came in a two-decade period during the Cold War, when total per capita daily newspaper circulation kept rising, even as television scooped up eyeballs and eardrums. \u00a0Admittedly, most of the time, even then, elites in Washington or elsewhere enjoyed the journalistic glad hand.\u00a0 Still, from 1954 to 1974, some watchdogs did bark. Civil rights coverage, for example, did help bring down white supremacy, while Vietnam and Watergate reportage helped topple two sitting presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.<\/p>\n Of course, press watchdogs also licked the hands of the perpetrators when Washington overthrew democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and when it helped out in Chile in 1973. \u00a0As for Vietnam, it wasn\u2019t as simple a tale of journalistic triumph as we now imagine.\u00a0 For years, in manifold ways, reporters deferred to official positions on the war\u2019s \u201cprogress,\u201d so much so that today their reports read like sheaves of Pentagon press releases. \u00a0Typically, all but one source quoted in New York Times<\/em> coverage of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incidents, which precipitated a major U.S. escalation of the war, were White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials (and they were lying).\u00a0 In the war\u2019s early years, at least one network, NBC, even asked the Pentagon to institute censorship.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, the sense that the war was an unjustifiable grind grew, especially after the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968, startling the U.S. military, Washington officials, and journalists alike. When, in 1969, Seymour Hersh reported for the tiny Dispatch News Service<\/a> that a unit from the Americal Division <\/strong>had slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a village named My Lai, his story went mainstream.<\/p>\n Still, the long bombing campaign that President Nixon ordered in Cambodia and Laos did not feature on television, and barely made the newspapers. \u00a0And even when, in a remarkable feat of reporting, it finally did in a major way, there was no journalistic sequel.\u00a0 The \u201csecret\u201d bombing of Cambodia — secret from Americans, that is — was reported on page one of the New York Times <\/em>on May 9, 1969, and 37 years later, the reporter, William Beecher<\/a>, said this about his story: \u201cWe’re not talking of some small covert operation here, but a massive saturation bombing campaign, with a false set of coordinates to mislead the Congress and the public\u2026 You would have thought that such a story would have caused a firestorm. It did not.\u201d<\/p>\n After Watergate, whatever hard-won, truth-bound independence the mainstream press had wrested from its own history failed to hold. \u00a0In the run-up to George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq, for example, most Washington journalism once again collapsed into deference<\/a>, and so, too, did the financial press on its own front. \u00a0Washington\u2019s war-making might and Wall Street\u2019s financial maneuvers were both deemed too mighty, too smart, too hypermodern to fail.<\/p>\n Although the New York Times<\/a> <\/em>and the Washington Post<\/a> <\/em>later acknowledged flaws in their Iraq reporting, neither paper nor other major outlets have owned up to the negligence that led up to the great global economic meltdown of 2007-2008. We are far from grasping how fully business journalism played cheerleader and pedestal-builder for the titans of finance as they erected a fantastical Tower of Derivatives, which grew way too tall to fail without wrecking the global economy.<\/p>\n Start to finish, financial journalism was breathless about the market thrills that led to the 2007-2008 crash: the financialization of the global economy, the metastasis of derivatives, and especially the deregulation underway since the late 1970s that culminated in the 1999 congressional repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (with President Bill Clinton blithely signing off on it).\u00a0 That repeal paved the way for commercial and investment banks, as well as insurance companies, to merge into \u201ctoo-big-to-fail\u201d corporations, unleashed with low capital requirements and soon enough piled high with the potential for collapse.<\/p>\n A Proquest database search of all American newspapers during the calendar year 1999 reveals a grand total of two <\/em>pieces warning that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake.\u00a0 The first appeared in the Bangor Daily News <\/em>of Maine, the second in the St. Petersburg Times <\/em>of Florida. Count \u2018em: two.<\/em><\/p>\n On February 24, 2002, as the scandal of the derivative-soaked Enron Corporation unfolded, the New York Times\u2019s <\/em>Daniel Altman<\/a> did distinguish himself with a page-one business section report headlined \u201cContracts So Complex They Imperil The System.\u201d\u00a0 He wrote: \u201cThe veil of complexity, whose weave is tightening as sophisticated derivatives evolve and proliferate, poses subtle risks to the financial system — risks that are impossible to quantify, sometimes even to identify.\u201d He stood almost alone in those years in such coverage.\u00a0 Most financial journalists preferred then to cite the grand Yoda of American quotables, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.\u00a0 And he was just the first and foremost among a range of giddy authorities on whom those reporters repeatedly relied for reassurance that derivatives were the great stabilizers of the economy.<\/p>\n On March 23, 2008, as the bubble was finally bursting, Times<\/em> reporters Nelson Schwartz and Julie Creswell noted<\/a> that \u201cduring the late 1990s, Wall Street fought bitterly against any attempt to regulate the emerging derivatives market.\u201d They went on:<\/p>\n \u201cA milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLittle-noticed\u201d indeed.\u00a0 According to Lexis-Nexis, <\/em>not a single substantive mention of this law appeared in the Times <\/em>that year.<\/em> \u00a0On October 1, 2000, Washington Post <\/em>writer<\/a> Jerry Knight did note ruefully, \u201cWhat’s fascinating about the policy debate is the agreement on the guiding principle: \u00a0The government should not stand in the way of financial innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n In a syndicated column on Christmas Eve, way-out-of-the-mainstream columnist Molly Ivins was not so poker-faced.\u00a0 She called<\/a> the new law \u201ca little horror.\u201d And in that she stood alone.\u00a0 That was it outside of financial journals like the American Banker<\/em> and HedgeWorld Daily News<\/em>, which, of course, were thrilled by the act.\u00a0 That magic word \u201cmodernization\u201d in its title evidently froze the collective journalistic brain.<\/p>\n Or in those years consider how the New York Times<\/em> covered the exotic derivatives called \u201ccollateralized debt obligations,\u201d among the principal cards of which the era’s entire international financial house was built.\u00a0 These tricky arcana, marketed as little miracles of risk management, multiplied<\/a> from an estimated $20 billion in 2004 to more than $180 billion by 2007.\u00a0 The Times\u2019s<\/em> Floyd Norris<\/a> drily mentioned them in a 2001 front-page business section article about American Express headlined \u201cThey Sold the Derivative, but They Didn’t Understand It.\u201d\u00a0 He quoted the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank this way: “There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn’t understand it.” \u00a0From then on, no substantial Times<\/em> front-page business section article so much as mentioned collateralized debt obligations for almost four years.<\/p>\n In 2009, in an enlightening article<\/a> in the Columbia Journalism Review<\/em>, Dean Starkman, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, looked at the nine most influential business press outlets from January 1, 2000, through June 30, 2007 — that is, for the entire period of the housing bubble. A total of 730 articles contained what Starkman judged to be significant warnings that the bubble could burst.\u00a0 That\u2019s 730 out of more than one million articles these journals published.<\/p>\n The formula was simple and straightforward: the business press <\/strong>served the market movers<\/a> and shakers.\u00a0 It was a reputation-making machine, a publicity apparatus for the industry. \u00a0In other words, the job of financial reporters in those years was to remain fast asleep as the most flagrantly abusive part of the mortgage industry, subprime mortgages, was integrated into routine banking.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, thanks to that same financial press, a culture of celebrity enveloped the big names of finance: CEOs of major banks, Wall Street investors, operators of hedge funds.\u00a0 They were repeatedly portrayed not just as fabulously successful tycoons doing their best for the society, but as fabulously giving philanthropists, their names engraved into the walls of university buildings, museums, symphony halls, and opera houses.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t just bringers of liquidity to markets, but wise men, too.\u00a0 In an all-enveloping media atmosphere in which the press indulged without a blink, they were held to be not only creators of wealth but moral exemplars.\u00a0 Indeed, the two were essentially interchangeable: they were moral exemplars because <\/em>they were creators of wealth.<\/p>\n The Desertification of the News<\/strong><\/p>\n Oh, and in case you think that the coverage from hell of the events leading up to the financial meltdown was uniquely poor, think again.\u00a0 On an even greater meltdown that lies ahead, the press is barely, finally, still haphazardly coming around to addressing convulsive climate change with the seriousness it deserves.\u00a0 At least it is now an intermittent story, though rarely linked to endemic drought and starvation<\/a>.\u00a0 Still, as Wen Stephenson, formerly editor of the Boston Globe\u2019s <\/em>\u201cIdeas\u201d section and TheAtlantic.com<\/em> and senior producer of National Public Radio\u2019s \u201cOn Point,\u201d summed up the situation<\/a> in a striking online piece in the alternative Boston Phoenix<\/em>: the subject is seldom treated as urgent and is frequently covered as a topic for special interests, a \u201cproblem,\u201d not an \u201cexistential threat.\u201d \u00a0(Another note on vanishing news:\u00a0 Since publishing Stephenson\u2019s article, the Phoenix <\/em>has ceased to exist.)<\/p>\n Even now, when it comes to climate change, our gasping journalism does not \u201cflood the zone.\u201d\u00a0 It also has a remarkable record of bending over backward to prove its \u201cobjectivity\u201d by turning piece after piece into a debate between a vast majority of scientists knowledgeable on the subject and a fringe of climate-change deniers and doubters.<\/p>\n When it came to our financial titans, in all those years the press rarely felt the need for a dissenting voice.\u00a0 Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment.\u00a0 Two British scholars<\/a> studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of\u00a0climate-change\u00a0doubters as to the consensus of scientists.<\/p>\n And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace.\u00a0 Despite the record temperatures<\/a> of 2012, the intensifying storms<\/a>, droughts, wildfires<\/a> and other wild weather events, the disappearing<\/a> Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown<\/a> of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute.\u00a0 The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites — those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public — were otherwise occupied.<\/p>\n All last year, according to<\/a> the liberal research group Media Matters,<\/p>\n \u201cThe Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change… ABC’s\u00a0This Week<\/em>\u00a0covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes\u2026 NBC’s\u00a0Meet the Press<\/em>\u00a0covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention\u2026 Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming \u2018junk science\u2019 on ABC’s\u00a0This Week<\/em>. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change\u2026 In\u00a0four\u00a0years,\u00a0Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n The mounting financial troubles of journalism only tighten the muzzle on a somnolent watchdog. \u00a0It\u2019s unlikely that serious business coverage will be beefed up by media companies counting their pennies on their way down the slippery circulation slope. \u00a0Why invest in scrutiny of government regulators when the cost is lower for celebrity-spotting and the circulation benefits so much greater?\u00a0 Meanwhile, the nation\u2019s best daily environmental coverage takes a big hit.\u00a0 In January, the New York Times’s <\/em>management decided to close down<\/a> its environmental desk, scratching two environmental editor positions and reassigning five reporters.\u00a0 How could such a move not discourage young journalists from aiming to make careers on the environmental beat?<\/p>\n The rolling default in climate-change coverage cries out for the most serious professional self-scrutiny.\u00a0 Will it do for journalists and editors to remain thoroughly tangled up in their own remarkably unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes news? It\u2019s long past time to reconsider some journalistic conventions: that to be newsworthy, events must be singular <\/em>and dramatic <\/em>(melting glaciers are held to be boring), must feature newsworthy<\/em> figures (Al Gore is old news), and must be treated with balance<\/em> (as in: some say the earth is spherical, others say it\u2019s flat)<\/em>.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t let anyone off the hook.\u00a0 Norms can be bent.\u00a0 Consider this apt headline<\/a> on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek <\/em>after Hurricane Sandy drowned large sections of New York City and the surrounding area: \u201cIt\u2019s Global Warming, Stupid.\u201d \u00a0Come on, people: Can you really find no way to dramatize the extinction of species, the spread of starvation, the accelerating droughts, desertification, floods, and violent storms?\u00a0 With all the dots you already report, even with shrunken staffs, can you really find no way to connect them?<\/p>\n If it is held unfair, or na\u00efve, or both, to ask faltering news organizations to take up the slack left by our corrupt, self-dealing, shortsighted institutions, then it remains for start-up efforts to embarrass the established journals.<\/p>\n Online efforts matter. It\u2019s a good sign that the dot-connecting site InsideClimateNews.org was just honored<\/a> with a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.<\/p>\n But tens of millions of readers still rely on the old media, either directly or via the snippets that stream through Google, Yahoo, and other aggregator sites.\u00a0 Given the stakes, we dare not settle for nostalgia or restoration, or pray that the remedy is new technology.\u00a0 Polishing up the old medals will not avail.\u00a0 Reruns of His Girl Friday, All the President\u2019s Men, <\/em>and Broadcast News <\/em>may be entertaining, but it\u2019s more important to keep in mind that the good old days were not so good after all.\u00a0 <\/em>The press was never too great to fail. \u00a0<\/em>Missing the story is a tradition.\u00a0 So now the question is: Who is going to bring us the news of all the institutions, from City Hall to Congress, from Wall Street to the White House, that fail us?<\/p>\n ____________________________<\/p>\n Todd Gitlin, who teaches journalism and communications at Columbia University, is the author of <\/em>The Whole World Is Watching, <\/em>Media Unlimited, and many other books including, most recently, <\/em>Occupy Nation:\u00a0 The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n