Watching the news industry nowadays is perhaps like watching one of those disaster movies where you as the audience know that if the group just walked a few steps that way through the rain that they’d get to higher ground and not keep losing people to the flood.  Only of course they don’t see that so they stay where they are while struggling to stay afloat as the water rises, and drama ensues as people vanish beneath the water.  The news media is like that, they could save themselves but they just can’t see the way to higher ground and safety.

Oh they talk a good game and they’ve got all kinds of very logical reasons why there is just nothing else they can do.  They believe they are the experts and that they are already doing everything they can to stay afloat in this contemporary ongoing media disaster.  Howard Kurts has an article out documenting some facts:

But the number of old-fashioned fact-gatherers is dwindling, and will almost certainly continue to shrink.

In the Philadelphia area, for instance, the number of newspaper reporters has fallen from 500 to 220 in the last quarter-century. Most of the local television stations have cut back on traditional news coverage. Five AM radio stations used to cover news; now there are two.

These figures are drawn from a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism describing what it calls a "seismic transformation" in the media landscape. The good news is that the average consumer can in effect create his own news, picking and choosing from sources he trusts and enjoys rather than being spoon-fed by a handful of big corporations.

But the decline in the number of reporters, especially at newspapers, means less digging into the affairs of government and business. What is "most threatened," says the report, "is the big-city metro paper that came to dominate in the latter part of the 20th century . . . Even if newspapers are not dying, they and other old media are constricting, and so, it appears, is the amount of resources dedicated to original newsgathering."

But why?  Howard’s article goes on to discuss the internet and blogs as a factor, and commercialization as another.  But these things do not reduce the need for news gathering and a case could be made that the needs of the blogosphere and the internet at large only increase the demand for more news.  Howard points out that the internet does not provide the revenue to support the overhead needed to generate news, and that is a point.  But news was shrinking far before the advent of the internet so it seems only a too convenient excuse to blame the problem on the internet now.  To locate the reason why we would need to go back further and ask why the long term trend began.

That’s old ground and there are a bunch of answers offerred by media analysts:  people are increasingly too busy, people are increasingly too stupid or poorly educated, people increasingly don’t have the attention span, people are increasingly selfish and just don’t care, and on and on.  In other businesses we would call this blaming the customer, and it fits here.  The news industry has tried to change to address the interests of the perceived increasingly stupid ADHD uneducated busy selfish viewing public.  They became more sensational, picked stories perceived to have emotional impact, shortened the reports, changed sets and technology and page layouts, and sexed up everything.  Didn’t work.  Isn’t working.  They keep sinking beneath the waves in bewilderment, and most now are just increasingly fatalistic about it.  Now they mostly just talk about how to limit the damage and manage down the best they can.

The thing is, as their fellows sink beneath the waves, they deny the very existence of the one thing that could save them and basically say ‘hey we already ARE on the highest ground around here’.  And they keep drowning.  What is the higher ground, the savior for the news industry?

Honest unbiased reporting.  The news media has two reactions to this:  either there is no such thing as an ‘unbiased perspective’ (their quote marks implying its suspect nature), or that they are already completely and totally unbiased and reporting all the news fit to report.  You see they can’t seek higher ground because it is an article of faith to them that they ARE the high ground.  This is the core of their perceived identity, their motivation for getting into the profession, to go forth and ‘make a difference’.  Ask any journalism major classroom why they are going into the field and you will get that answer, ‘to make a difference’.  It isn’t a job, it has become a movement in and of itself.

And that is why they are losing customers and going under.  Because the rest of us want news, hard facts, as the basis to form our own opinions and make important decisions in our own lives and in public policy.  There’s no point spending time or money consuming information you know is selected to provide a particular point of view, in a word:  Propoganda.

Its a free market, the world is more complex than ever, and people are thirsty for good solid news now more than ever.  But we aren’t going to pay for propoganda.  The news professionals could fix that problem, but even those few hard headed businessmen running the places can’t admit it exists because they would lose most of the customers they have left and they can’t guarantee they’d get any customers back.  That’s why the Wall Street types don’t step in, and they’re scared of the bad press too.  The vast majority in the news profession are in denial so deep they’d rather whither away than face the alternative.  Because they would lose their guiding purpose in life, so they self select the information that allows them to keep doing what they are doing.

Its all very gloomy when you take it as it is and project into the future.  But this is a free market so sooner or later somebody is going to turn one of these places around or start a new venture and beat the others at their game.  That person will get stunningly rich doing it and through competition the rest will have to adapt.  Might be a good while though.

Meantime I’ll watch the news industry disaster drama with guilty pleasure, and I’ll keep shouting at the screen for them to ‘go over there to high ground’.  I have just as much expectation they’ll hear me.

Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt for the link to the Howard Kurtz story.