Newspaper are still necessity
A frequently asked question as industry circulation figures and stock prices continue to slide is whether newspapers are still needed. Steve’s college students seldom read papers printed on “dead trees” (although they do read them online). And the recent sale of the Knight-Ridder chain, demanded by disgruntled investors, demonstrates the depth of the crisis.
Still, the answer to the question is an emphatic yes. Just look at the Pulitzer prizes announced this week. They recognize the sort of journalism — courageous, costly and comprehensive — that only papers can provide.
Of course, many papers are owned by outside investors, but they are written and edited locally, and that ties them to the welfare of their home communities. The impact of Hurricane Katrina produced three prizes for papers based in New Orleans, Dallas and Biloxi, Miss. In each case, the reporters, photographers and editors who covered the story were also living through it as relatives, homeowners and neighbors.
Bloggers might tell individual stories well, TV might produce indelible images, but only newspapers can produce the complete and complex coverage that a story like Katrina demands.
The same is true for rooting out corruption. Investigative reporting often requires an enormous commitment of time and money, with no guarantee that the effort will produce any news at all. Bloggers don’t have the resources, and TV journalists, with a few rare exceptions, don’t have the patience for that kind of work.
Reporters from the San Diego Union-Tribune did have the patience — and the support of their editors — to expose the network of bribes and favors spun by local Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif. Three Washington Post reporters were cited for their “indefatigable probe” of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
The very openness of democratic politics and market economics makes them easy targets for evildoers, and journalistic “watchdogs,” led by newspapers, have to defend the public interest. That’s exactly what the prize-winners did: Cunningham, Abramoff and others are headed for jail, and Congress, much against its will, has been forced to consider new ethics rules.
Foreign news, like investigative reporting, is a very expensive venture that does not always produce journalistic or economic returns. That’s why overseas coverage is shrinking, even while American interests abroad are expanding.
The biggest story that newspapers unearthed last year was the abuse of power by the Bush administration. The Post won an award for revealing a system of secret prisons maintained by the CIA in Eastern Europe to interrogate terrorism suspects. The Times disclosed a program of clandestine government eavesdropping that many lawyers have denounced as illegal.
In both cases, the Bush administration pleaded with the papers to withhold publication. In both cases, the papers listened seriously, as they should, to the requests. Both papers made adjustments — the Post omitted the exact location of the prisons, the Times delayed publication for a year — but in both cases the editors ultimately decided that the public deserved to know what its government was doing.
Here’s another important work that papers do every day: challenge the fixed assumptions of their readers. Modern communication systems present a troubling paradox. Technology gives individuals many more choices, but they can use that same technology to select sources that simply reinforce their prejudices, from partisan Web sites to talk radio shows.
Reading a well-crafted editorial or op-ed page means encountering opinions or ideas you don’t like, or don’t even know about.
Newspapers are in deep financial trouble. They have to find new ways to generate revenue from new business partners and models. But their role remains essential. Without newspapers, democracy fails.
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected].