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Scandal Your Problems Away |
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Newspapers are dying, but it's not their fault. At least that's how the newspaper people look at it. They're mere victims of a changing economy and fickle consumer preference. If only the people understood the essential – and irreplaceable – role of the traditional newsroom, paradise would be restored.
There's no doubt newspapers have lost substantial ground to the Internet. But rarely do you hear any newspaper traditionalist look inward at what they did to contribute to the decline and fall of the industry. It's not always about the new technology supplanting the old; perhaps the newspapers themselves were producing a shitty product. Indeed, perhaps the media as a whole is suffering from a case of poor product development.
In an article for LewRockwell.com earlier this month, I lambasted Steve Czaban, a DC-area sports talk radio host, for his moral crusading against Michael Phelps smoking a marijuana plant at a private party. Czaban's radio act has long depended on the simplistic view that any “illegal” drug use by athletes is immoral and must be pursued by the sports media at maximum volume. Certainly we see this principle in the ongoing coverage of Alex Rodriguez. The New York tabloids have kept the story of Rodriguez's steroid use – six years ago – as front page news in the midst of economic depression and ongoing U.S. warfare.
I have yet to see any evidence that news consumers consider drug use by athletes a priority. Yet it remains a fanatical obsession of the “traditional” media outlets that cover sports. It even takes priority over, well, covering actual sports. Again, using Mr. Czaban as my model, for years his local radio show has refused to cover the Washington Capitals, the local hockey team which is now one of the top contenders for the Stanley Cup. Czaban has offered many excuses, but they all boil down to “I'm not that interested in hockey, and I don't want to put in the work to learn more about the sport.” But he'll spend a week or more talking about Michael Phelps smoking a plant, because it's easy and requires no particular knowledge or technical skill. I suspect there are far more people in Czaban's audience interested in the Capitals than a post-Olympics Michael Phelps, but the traditional media affords Czaban a bubble to reflect his own interests without outside interference.
Again, it's not just one person. Every city faces this same problem with its longstanding newspaper, television and radio outlets. In the post-Watergate media, actual reporting takes a back seat to second- and third-hand gossip known as “anonymous sources.” There's little accountability. Selena Roberts, the Sports Illustrated reporter who “broke” the Rodriguez story using unidentified sources, has been lionized by her media brethren. But some may recall Roberts' own role in perpetuating a criminal conspiracy against four Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape. Roberts, then at the New York Times, used her reporting perch to promote the “guilt” of the four men despite a lack of evidence. Roberts was never disciplined for her poor, malicious reporting, and in fact she parlayed it into a more prominent post at Sports Illustrated.
The Rodriguez story is like a performance-enhancing drug for the media, since it creates modest buzz and temporarily inflates the press's sense of self-importance; but when the effect wears off in a few weeks, the underlying industry problems remain. Newspapers can't scandal their way out of decline. Those media outlets that emerge from the current economic depression will have to rebuild themselves as consumer-first products, which means reporting on subjects that matter to the reader, not the reporter; substantially greater transparency in sourcing; hiring reporters and broadcasters with a work ethic that promotes research and development; and actually holding people accountable when their reporting causes harm to innocent people.
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