Iraq and the state of the newspaper industry

Recently, veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus penned an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review on what led to the current state of the newspaper industry. Instead of just blaming the usual suspects - the loss of classified advertising to the internet, and the increasingly competitive media landscape - Pincus focuses on the "move away from expertise" in reporting and "the growth of public relations in government."

Most newspapers and the broadcast media have cut the number of reporters on beats. Meanwhile, young reporters are increasingly shifted from beat to beat, never having enough time to master complex subjects such as health care, public education, or environmental policies. As a result, more of their stories are based not on reportorial expertise, but on pronouncements by government sources or their critics.

Reporters are shifted around in part because of decreasing resources, and in part because within the profession, reporters are encouraged to become editors, editors to become publishers, and publishers of small papers pushed to manage bigger ones. This results in less expertise at the most important level—where reporters gather information.

Meanwhile, we have turned into a public-relations society. Much of the news Americans get each day was created to serve just that purpose—to be the news of the day. Many of our headlines come from events created by public relations—press conferences, speeches, press releases, canned reports, and, worst of all, snappy comments by “spokesmen” or “experts.” To serve as a counterpoint, we need reporters with expertise.

Consider the worst of recent examples. I believe the Bush administration sold the March 2003 invasion of Iraq to the American people beginning with a public-relations campaign that started in August 2002. Vice President Dick Cheney kicked it off with a series of speeches on the growing threat from Saddam Hussein, and it continued almost daily, with key members of the administration giving speeches, statements, or press conferences. The result was that the threat from Saddam Hussein—his alleged nuclear weapons, the idea that he would give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists—dominated news coverage right up to the time the first missiles hit Baghdad on March 19, 2003. [Columbia Journalism Review]

I'm glad to hear a top reporter put some of the blame for the current state of the industry at the hands of publications themselves. Personally, the media's failure to provide quality coverage during the lead-up to the Iraq War was what inspired me to start this blog (not that I have any delusions that it could fill the shoes of a major newspaper). When I hear about a newspaper closing its doors, the first thing I do is worry about how it will impact the news landscape, and feel sorry for the reporters who have lost their jobs. But then a part of me thinks back to 2003 and says: "Wait, I'm supposed to be sad that another company that was involved with that is going under?"

I know it's a little irrational to hold the entire industry responsible for the selling of a war. But the American newspapers' Iraq debacle came at the exact wrong time: the moment that internet news sites and blogs were first gaining widespread legitimacy. The mainstream media's woeful coverage of the lead-up to Iraq probably did more to level the playing field for alternative media outlets than any other single factor.

"Newspaper Narcissism" [Columbia Journalism Review]