The State of the Fourth Estate

...Henry offers only occasional nods in the direction of those who do good, as when he allows that “professional journalism continues to play a complicated but critical role in a rapidly changing technological society...

...We have television networks giving up the quaint idea that they have a responsibility to cover the world...

...Never mind fuddy-duddy ethical guidelines or oldschool notions of shoe-leather reporting...

...Or is that too much to ask of them because, you know, there are more important things going on, like Britney Spears’ latest round of rehab...

...At least as likely, though, it says a lot about a public that is too busy, or perhaps just too lazy, to pay attention to world events, if only out of self-interest...

...Anyone who has seen Billy Wilder’s 1951 film Ace in the Hole, a scathing portrait of a thoroughly cynical and unscrupulous reporter played by Kirk Douglas, knows that contempt for the press has a long tradition...

...But great journalism, some of it heroic, is performed almost daily under extraordinarily hazardous conditions by gutsy men and women, be it in Iraq, in Western Africa or on the PakistanAfghanistan border...

...American journalism, Henry tells us, is a sorry mess, and there is no reason to believe it will fix itself any time soon...

...But there is nothing especially illuminating about it, either...

...Much of the damage results from Wall Street’s demands for profit margins that cannot be sustained...

...Now and then, Henry acknowledges, bloggers break stories that elude conventional news organizations...

...That’s so yesterday...

...Considering Henry’s background—he used to be a reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wa s hington Post, and has long taught journalism at the University of California’s Berkeley campus—his indictment of the news game deserves to be taken seriously...

...Nor does he entirely live up to the promise of his subtitle, which leads a reader to expect fresh insights into the special challenges for journalists created by the so-called new media...

...Not that there is anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say...

...Better to keep sharp objects away from them as they read this book...

...How to make the Web profitable may be the most important challenge of all for American journalism...

...Wouldn’t you think people might be a tad curious about what is bubbling inside the heads of fanatical Islamists who just might be the next ones to fly airplanes into our buildings...

...There’s that awful phrase again...

...The answers, however, await another book...

...Sooner or later,” Henry warns, “you may cut so many costs that you lose the very product you are in business to sell...

...Henry admits as much, even if he waits until he is about a third of the way done, when he talks about “the carnival fun house, a lively place full of trickery where hoaxes, spoofs, and extraordinary feats of myth-making rule the day...

...He seems worried that too many young people entering the field think that all they need to succeed is their opinions...

...It is not going too far to view Wall Street, increasingly, as an enemy of the First Amendment...

...All this having been said Henry is inarguably correct when he describes American journalism as standing at a critical juncture...

...We have stock markets punishing newspapers for the crime of making money, just not the insanely high profits demanded by shareholders...

...Reviewed by Clyde Haberman New York “Times” columnist IF OLD-TIMERS in journalism aren’t already depressed about the state of their craft—and by now there may not be enough unbridled optimists among them to form a basketball team—Neil Henry’s grim dissection of news reporting in the early 21st century ought to send them completely over the edge...

...And Then there are the pressures of the stock market, a topic Henry might have explored more deeply...

...It has always been thus...

...The blogosphere is made for these folks...

...REGRETTABLY, Henry’s monochromic focus on journalism’s evildoers gives short shrift—almost no shrift, really—to a more complex reality: Yes, there are charlatans, and sloppy reporting abounds...

...The only problem is that not much of what he has to say will come as revelation to anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the changes shaking journalism down to its boots for well over a decade...

...Henry’s litany of modern woes stretches toward infinity: We have a procession of journofabulists, typified by the execrable Jayson Blair, formerly of the New York Ti m e s , who not only committed fraud but also lacked the wit to do much more than steal and reconfigure the reporting done by his betters at other publications...

...a teacher of aspiring journalists, Henry is understandably sensitive on this score...

...Ah, but what to do...

...Is this stunning display of mass ignorance proof that the news media have unconscionably fallen down on the job...

...The situation became so grave at the Los Angeles Times that its admired editor, Dean Baquet, decided he had no choice but to quit...

...What one person deems a straitjacket, though, may be what some of us call professional standards...

...Maybe...

...And it is...

...Surely it comes as no surprise that journalistic reliability is, for many Americans, an oxymoron...

...Of course, he does not have to...

...The stage version of The Front Pa g e made that clear way back in 1928...

...More than 70 percent of those who voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election believed that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the September 11 terrorist attacks, that his stockpiling of illicit weapons was a fact, that most of the world supported the American invasion of Iraq...

...There isn’t a major American paper that has not had to reduce its staff and by extension, its coverage...

...A bogus news account of wild animals breaking loose from the Central Park Zoo in New York City ably illustrates the point...

...That story took up the entire front page of the New York Herald—on November 9, 1874...

...But someone will have to figure out, and soon, how newspapers make the inevitable transition from their dead-tree format to the Web...

...We have “mainstream media,” to use an irritating phrase of current vintage, so lacking in self-confidence that barrels of Zoloft could not pull them out of their funk...

...By insisting on annual yields of 20 per cent or more—when was it that a 15 per cent profit began qualifying as chump change?—newspaper shareholders have forced editors to slice their budgets ever more drastically...

...Newspapers that once justifiably bragged about providing their own foreign reports, and not merely recycling dispatches from the Associated Press or the New York Times News Service, have shuttered overseas bureaus...

...We have papers responding by slashing their staffs and their space for news...

...ajournalist’s role is primarily to illuminate a problem...

...I could go on, but you get the idea...

...Published falsehoods may not be a new phenomenon, but the Web can spread them so fast and so far that the truth cannot hope to catch up...

...Many of the woes that he recites have been around almost as long as the printing press itself...

...Bloggers may offer a promise of citizen journalism and visions of a democratic new world in which anyone with a laptop computer, a digital recorder and reasonable cyber-skills can provide news and opinions, liberated from the straitjacket of rules imposed by selfappointed guardians of information in the mainstream media...

...Things are so bad that he dismisses the news business as an “American carnival,” with its “freak show” of distorted reporting, its “fun house” of poseurs and fakes, its “world of illusion” that blurs the lines between news and advertising and allows phony baloney press releases to make their way into print and on the air as if they were real news...

...As an example, Henry cites the findings of a University of Maryland study...

...Henry does not really offer solutions...

...Most of the time, the only person ever interviewed by a blogger is himself...

...Most of them give their digital product away free, an ultimately selfdefeating policy that requires nothing from readers to help pay for the high level of independent, expensive reporting that a mature democracy requires...

...We have politicians and radio gasbags demanding that courageous reporters and editors be tried for treason, even executed, for revealing unlawful wiretapping by the government and torture by the military—in short, for doing their job with integrity...

...Even the finest reporting does not change the fact that much of America remains distressingly, dare we say frighteningly, ill-informed...

...We have a modern journalism with ethical standards so weakened that hoaxers and hucksters can gull the public almost at will...

...Whether tediously rehashing Orson Welles’ classic Wa r of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 or inexplicably devoting more than five pages to “Hunting for Bambi,” a fake 2003 story about a Las Ve gas game in which men armed with paintball guns supposedly chased naked women pretending to be prey, Henry gives an impression that he is recycling old lecture notes...

...We have corporate “video news releases” finding their way onto the airwaves in the guise of honest reporting...

...But “overall, the blogosphere contains far more rhetoric, carping, provocation, and rumor than meaningful information to benefit wide segments of the American population,” he says...

...We have the Internet draining daily papers, Dracula-like, of advertising dollars essential to their survival...