No Dancing on Journalism's Grave

In general I think we fret too much over the changes roiling the journalism business these days. Many good people are losing their jobs and they need help – I’d love to know HOW to help them – but we can’t bemoan the changes in technology that are driving the trend. They just ARE. It’s like the weather. No sense railing; just adapt. Find another way to deliver the social good that newspapers have traditionally delivered, with admittedly uneven success: an informed citizenry. It’s a mistake to want to save newspapers out of sentimentality, or fondness for the ways of our youth, or insistence that it’s more “natural” to read the news on paper. Since journalists, er, tend to write a lot, we tend to read a lot of commentary about the future of journalism that goes, “We must save the newspaper industry because AIEEEEEEEEeeee….” (sound of author falling off cliff). One news consumer on the San Antonio Express-News website put it bitingly, “A good reason to read a newspaper is to keep them in business because, if we don't read they don't print and they then go out of business.” But while we’re all busily trying to find that magical other way to deliver that social good of the informed citizenry, we have to note with alarm who’s dancing on journalism’s grave. Part of what makes the decline of newspapers really alarming is the relish that the American far right is taking in their demise. If the drooling pack of know-nothings that has been howling away in the Uinted States over the last decade is welcoming the end of newspapers, then there must really be something to mourn in their passing. Take a look at some of the other comments on the San Antonio Express-News website, responding to the sensible and even-handed column of Bob Rivard, “2 Reasons You Should Read the Newspaper”: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/Good_and_bad_news_2_reasons_you_should_read_the_newspaper.html?c=y&viewAllComments=yThe comments are no uglier than what we all see on the internet every day. But let not familiarity mellow our revulsion: that’s pretty ugly. These people have been shouting loudly and rudely in the national political conversation for quite a few years now. The presidential election makes clear that they’re in a minority in the United States, thank god. But they may garner an even more disproportionate audience thanks to the collapse of newspapers, which have traditionally helped orchestrate and filter the political debate. Where journalists ebb, these morons flow. We live in an incredibly information-rich society, much richer than ever before. But we haven’t figured out how to fund news-gathering (as opposed to news-commenting). Just as important, we haven’t figured out how to ensure that news commentary is reasonably civil. The commercial viability of the media and the civility of American debate are connected, and their solutions are likely to be connected as well -- hopefully soon. History is littered with examples of dangeorus political movements gaining momentum as public discourse grows more shrill, and more chauvinist. Very recent American history, in fact. And maybe some history that’s yet to be made.