Learning to Love the New Media

Everyone from President Obama to Ted Koppel is bemoaning a decline in journalistic substance, seriousness, and sense of proportion. But James Fallows, a longtime advocate of these values, takes a journey, for the Atlantic, through the digital-media world and concludes there isn’t any point in defending the old ways. Consumer-obsessed, sensationalist, and passionate about their work, digital upstarts are undermining the old media—and they may also be pointing the way to a brighter future.

From the great essay...

Giving people what they want as opposed to what they should want is a conflict as old as journalism, certainly as it has been practiced in this country. My capsule history of journalism is that for more than a century after the Civil War, American readers and viewers were in various ways buffered from getting exactly what they wanted from newspapers and, later, radio and TV news shows. News, like education, aspired to be as interesting as possible but to have an uplifting civic intent.

Regulations, from the “fairness doctrine” to a requirement for “public service” programming, affected radio and TV coverage. And technological and geographic constraints had already played a crucial role in the evolution of newspapers, many of which could operate as regional monopolies or duopolies. You couldn’t get the New York papers if you lived in Dallas, so the Morning News and Times Herald had the whole of Dallas as their audience. Like their counterparts in Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis, the families who owned these newspapers valued them not just as (good) businesses but also for their cultural and political roles. When there were only three nationwide broadcast networks, they could have a statesmanlike agreement on covering worthy events, like presidential press conferences, and treating their nightly news shows as prestige loss-leaders aimed at telling a broad Middle American audience what it needed to know. “I grew up when broadcast news was a duopoly,” the longtime anchor Tom Brokaw told me, referring to the relative dominance of CBS and his own NBC over ABC news until at least the early 1980s. “I figured I would be one of the people with the hands on the lever in deciding what mattered. It worked for me!”

That’s all gone, as Brokaw and everyone else knows. One by one, the buffers between what people want and what the media can afford to deliver have been stripped away.