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newspapers are dying because journalism is a joke

By American Girl in Italy on April 24, 2009 at 8:30 AM in Media Bias, Media, Print

This is testimony Business and Media Institute’s Dan Gainor gave before the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy of the Committee on the Judiciary April 21, 2009. The topic was a hearing on “A New Age for Newspapers.”

Newspapers are a dying breed because of technology and disappearance of neutrality in reporting.

While it is fair to blame much of the decline in newspapers to technology, it is not the only factor. The newspaper industry has changed too – for the worse. Standards have slipped or all but disappeared. The concept of a journalist as a neutral party has become a punch line for a joke, not a guideline for an industry.

We all saw how poorly the mainstream press covered the last election. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, voters believed that the media wanted Barack Obama to win the presidential election. “By a margin of 70%-9%, Americans say most journalists want to see Obama, not John McCain, win,” Pew reported. Other surveys confirmed it: According to Rasmussen, “Over half of U.S. voters (51%) think reporters are trying to hurt Sarah Palin.”

It wasn’t just surveys, it was journalists themselves. According to Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, in a column headlined: “An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage,” the paper’s election coverage consistently supported Obama in everything from positive stories to flattering photos.

That same slant reappeared last week during the Tax Day Tea Party protests. The Post didn’t write a story about more than 750 events nationwide until the day they happened – far different from how they handled other protests. Their own media critic Howard Kurtz even knocked such minimal coverage. The New York Times did preview the events six times – and five of those were negative.

Such one-sided reporting has destroyed the credibility of the print press. Among newspapers, the most trusted name in news is The Wall Street Journal and just 25 percent of readers “believe all or most of what [that] organization says” according to Pew. For The New York Times, that number is 18 percent and USA Today 16 percent. The only publications lower are People magazine and The National Enquirer.

Perhaps it’s hard to make a living in the media when you back a candidate who has a large base of supporters residing on park benches, their mothers basements, overseas or six feet under.