Media

Now I'm an old-fashioned guy. I think my record is pretty clear on that.

But I've never loved newspapers. Perhaps that's because for my generation, "old-fashioned" means Jim Lehrer instead of Keith Olbermann. And while the dulling radiation of TV is still sickening, it's not nearly as grotesque to me as a hand full of ink and the fingernail-on-chalkboard tactility of folding and creasing the old papers.

So right now, the current self-obsession the print media has with its own demise I find completely uninteresting. My only surprise is that it's taken this long to happen, considering the morning news is often stale by the afternoon, to say nothing of the evening. Papers, being what they are, keep reading the same as they did the night before when they were printed.

As best as I can figure, from the stories that pop up on the subject - despite my earnest attempts to ignore them - the argument boils down to, "If the newspapers don't do the 'real, nose-to-the-ground reporting,' then who will?"

Obviously this question is retarded. Nothing would seem to reflect the current media's liberal bias more than the fact that they have no faith in basic economics- that if we knew what would replace something before it happened, then it would have happened already. Cool down and enjoy the ride is the winning strategy for those of us on the slightly-more-right.

As usual, the only real danger at this moment of self-conscious suffocation is that someone might seek to initiate a solution prematurely which could short-circuit the natural "creative-destruction" process. The only one in a position to do that now would be Uncle Sam.

The Obama administration's endless enthusiasm for doing good may be the only real danger here. Nothing feels better than "saving" someone or something from demise. But we economists know that saving is more dangerous than dying. Protecting is more dangerous than fighting. And with the newspaper industry (as with autos, steel, and agriculture), propping up a dying industry would be a disaster long on our hands.

The good news is that the Obama administration remains committed to change and a certain kind of populist progress. He is the Blackberry President and so must realize the value of new media in displacing the old. Nothing would be more helpful to instigating change in Washington than shaking up the media-government duopoly of information that culminates each year in the National Press Club Back Scratching Extravaganza.

But that might be the point. Frank Rich, in his piece today in the Times (which I read online), mentions four important examples of big media snooping that he thinks represent their importance to Americans at this time: Walter Reade, Steroids, Enron, and warrantless wiretapping.

The furor around these subjects is somewhat akin to the furor over the torture techniques the country has used- they are lightweight compared to what's really out there, and that's the truth. Let alone that two of those "big stories" would never have existed if the press had gone after the real story, which was the phony build-up to the Iraq war. Once you blow that one, you don't get let off the hook. Sorry, guys. In any event, even if you give the press a pass on that one - and you shouldn't - these stories, for all of the indignation they elicit, are relatively minor.

The more important questions are: what are the stories that they didn't get to? Giving the public its regular dose of outrage-bait is useful, and if I were a politician engaged in foul play somewhere, I would welcome such distractions. Doesn't everyone know that phone calls in the US are monitored? Why is that such a shocker? There are a million bills that go through the House each day that would blow your eyeballs out, but we never hear about them. And if I were in the House, I would want it that way.

Ditto, obviously, for steroid use in baseball. Who cares? And who is really that surprised? Like wiretapping, most of us were happy to tacitly go along as long as it kept us somewhat safer and more likely to catch a home run ball in the bleacher seats. But once revealed as fact, the indignation became a necessary display of piety, and so we were distracted from real news for a dozen news cycles or more.

[Note: I will concede the value of the Enron story, but it appears the company was crumbling on its own without too much press digging, no?]

At any rate, if there is some body that would benefit from maintaining the journalistic status quo besides the journalists, it would be the politicians. So watch out for any high-minded "save the free press" campaigns you hear coming out of the Capitol. It's a racket.


In a previous post, I was pleased to suggest an approach for dispersing government throughout the country so as to better represent the people and better guard against terrorist threats in a centralized region. One of the advantages I didn't mention was that it would require a dispersement of the press corps as well. Spreading the culture of journalism across the country would make the cronyist element of news gathering a little less intense.

And while there would be adaptations to the new forms, it would largely mean a clearing of the air in terms of what is reported- primarily, one could envision a lot of conflicting information from different parts of the country, since the "group think" of all living in the same town would be whittled away. This is a good thing. Conflicting reports spur action to find "truth," where that is possible. It reveals that the "truth" we discovered when everyone was living in the same city might not have been truth at all but something more akin to a collective conspiracy.

This would do an awful lot for openness of journalism. It may even revive some of the lost jobs.