The Slow Death of the American Newspaper

Shoe leather and fact-checking have given way to agendas and identity

Woodstein: Just the facts, ma’am

An old newspaper colleague, Tom Debley, posted an eloquent eulogy to Robert MacNeil and to journalism in general last week. “For me, MacNeil’s death marks the end of an important era in the history of journalism in America,” Tom wrote.

“Tragically, journalism standards have degraded dramatically in the last few decades,” Tom continued. “And worse still, the corporate takeover of most of our media has become a dangerous monopoly that has closed more than 2,000 newspapers, leaving so many communities without a reliable source of information. That has left me personally devastated. I spent all my daily newspaper career in San Francisco’s East Bay counties of Alameda and Contra Costa, starting in 1969. There were fourteen daily local newspapers then. Today, not one of them exists. It feels, I expect, like it would be looking back on your life that every home you have ever lived in had burned to the ground.”

I posted a reply and thanked Tom for his eloquence, remarking that journalism today “has tied itself into a knot and I suspect it will be a while before it’s untied.” So, yeah, two old geezers lamenting the old days, I’ll cop to that, but there’s also an element of contemporary truth to our chit-chat. Journalism today is at an inflection point (there’s the knot) that’s calling into question not just the structure of the business, but its fundamental ideals, or at least those that prevailed for the last half of the 20th century.

Like Tom, I scribbled at newspapers for 12 years, from 1975 to 1987. As a young man starting out in the world, I can’t imagine a better learning ground. I joke a little when I say that everything I know I learned in the newsroom, but it’s sort of true. As a reporter, city editor, business editor, copy editor, feature writer, and music critic, I learned the universal skills of curiosity, initiative, imagination, collaboration, deadline management, dependability and others, like dealing with transgressive personalities and coping with really bad cafeteria food.

I left the business because the demands were too big (especially at a morning paper) and the paycheck too small. But to this day, there are still few things more pleasurable than good journalism — well-sourced, well-written, impartial stories that make complicated issues easier to understand. Unfortunately, as Tom noted, good journalism is getting harder to find. We’re not alone in that opinion.

“I am coming to a conclusion I have avoided for my last three decades working on the internet and news,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, one of the industry’s most astute observers, in his blog Buzz Machine. “It may finally be time to give up on old journalism and its legacy industry. 

“I say this with no joy, no satisfaction at having tried to get newspapers and magazines to change, and much empathy for the journalists and others caught working in a dying sector and those who count on them. But the old news industry is gasping for air. I’m not suggesting performing euthanasia on what is left. Nor do I dance on the grave. In my time running a Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, now ending, I have tried to balance support for startups and legacy companies. But I wonder whether it is time stop throwing good money and effort after bad.”

How did this happen? How did the Fourth Estate take its eyes off the prize? How did it plunge from a so-called “Golden Age” (roughly from the 1960s through 2000) to an era where it seems to be fighting for its very survival? There was a time when Warren Buffett invested in the Washington Post because he said the business was like operating a toll booth — all you had to do was sit back and collect the money.

Then the Internet happened.

The newspaper industry couldn’t have reacted with more hubris than it did, blithely going on about its business centered on the daily delivery of a physical product. First, the Internet stole the ad business, especially classified ads, the bread and butter of local newspapers. Then the Internet obliterated the idea of the 24-hour news cycle. Finally, the Internet just started using newspapers as a free content generator before newspapers wised up and walled off their gardens. By then, though, it was too late. The foxes were having a field day. WaPo traded one billionaire owner for another when Jeff Bezos swooped in to take on the paper’s welfare as if it were a starving child in Africa (the paper lost approximately $100 million in 2023).

The Internet, along with cable news, also had a more pernicious, slow-moving effect. Both of these relatively new platforms trafficked in the opposite of traditional journalism, which prided itself on sobriety, objectivity and order. These new platforms were done with that. Their currency was immediacy, emotion, unfiltered commentary, outrage and eyeballs. In newspapers, “voice” was always defined as a writer who wrote in the third person, stayed a degree or two removed from the subject, and valued impartiality (or at least never let it show). “Never let yourself be part of the story,” was the 11th Commandment in most newsrooms. The Internet and cable openly mocked that commandment and provided the first-person singular with rocket fuel.

Then Trump happened.

It was after Trump’s election in 2016 that the Washington Post adopted the first slogan in its long history — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — a phrase that Bob Woodward used to throw around casually, but which now adorns the masthead everyday. The idea, of course, is at the very heart of journalism, which is why Thomas Jefferson once remarked that he would prefer “newspapers without government over government without newspapers.” Still, there was something a little grandiose — a creeping odor of elitism — proffered by the slogan. It was certainly a long way from “just the facts, ma’am” or even “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

It’s hard to argue against taking a contrarian point of view to Trumpworld. But is it the job of daily journalism? Or is the job of daily journalism to report the facts, point out the lies, call out policy successes (like Operation Warp Speed and the border) as well as policy failures (numerous), and then let readers and listeners decide where they stand? That kind of impartiality is long gone.

In a rousing piece in The Free Press last week, veteran NPR reporter Uri Berliner said he’s had enough. NPR, he said, has become an institution hewing to the orthodoxy of the left and refusing to chase stories like Hunter Biden’s laptop because, as one veteran reporter said, “it could help Trump.” It wasn’t just Trump, said Berliner. On a number of topics, NPR has drifted into dogma, not reporting. “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR,” Berliner said, “and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.”

We see this happening everywhere. Over at NBC News, the editorial staff (Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow and others) staged an open revolt over the hiring of former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel as an on-air commentator (much the same as Jen Psaki, George Stephanopolous and others) because she had carried Trump’s water for so long. NBC management caved and McDaniel is now off the air. At the New York Times, the staff is in open revolt over the paper’s coverage of the Israeli-Hamas conflict (too pro-Israel they say).

And on the topic of objectivity, the North Star of daily journalism? Well, even that has become a bit outdated in today’s changing world. Here’s Leonard Downie, a former graybeard at WaPo:

“Increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality. They point out that the standard was dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly White newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world. They believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading ‘bothsidesism’ in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

And so here we are. Today, journalism is not about informing, educating and empowering the public so much as bringing your own identity, life experiences and “cultural context” into the work. Indeed, it’s not about reporting the facts anymore, but “pursuing truth,” which seems to me a pursuit much better left to the field of philosophy and history than to daily journalism.

This notion that reporters must bring their “whole selves” to work and inject their reporting with their identities and life experiences has corroded the most valuable asset that newspapers have — trust. Readers, to a great extent, just don’t believe everything they read anymore. Does the reporter have an agenda? Did they leave something out or twist something to fit their narrative? “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story,” was an old joke in the newsroom, but today it’s morphed into “Never let objectivity get in the way of my cultural context.” No wonder trust in media has collapsed. Today, according to Gallup, only 32 percent of Americans have a “great deal or fair” amount of trust in journalism. That’s no way to run a democracy.

There is, of course, a wide range of daily newspapers still focused on informing, educating and entertaining their readers responsibly and factually. My local newspaper, which humbly calls itself “A Good Newspaper In a Good Community,” does everything from covering the Kiwanis Club to holding the powerful to account. I couldn’t imagine the town without it. And publications like The Atlantic and the Economist, among others, continue to educate and illuminate with style and flair.

But to a great extent, my colleague Tom is right, and the newspaper industry today is in a huge knot. First, it lost its business model. Then it couldn’t adapt. And then it decided objectivity was boring. Now it’s watching itself implode in slow motion, like a melting glacier. One day, we may wake up and realize that of Jefferson’s two propositions, we chose the wrong one.