Gonzalez shared, "Well, and even within the old media, newspapers are still the, as I say, the fountainhead of news. I remember once in 1985, I was at Philadelphia Daily News and Inquirer. We were on strike, and we were on strike for five weeks. And all my friends in TV came to me and said, "When are you guys going to go back to work? Because without you, we don't know what to report." This is the TV news [today and historically].
Nichols agreed, "Hey, Juan, let me tell you how real that still is, and this is the scary part. There's a new Pew Center study out. They actually studied Baltimore. They looked at where all the original newspapers came from. They looked at all the independent media, all the online, everything. They found that 96 percent, almost 96 percent--there's a little debate about the precise figure, but well over 90--came from old media, largely from the daily newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. But here's the scary part: the footnote. The Baltimore Sun is producing 73 percent fewer original news stories today than twenty years ago. So new media is commenting on old media, but it's not filling the void of news. Old media is giving us a lot less."
"And so, you say, well, OK, come on, Pew Center folks, tell us, where is the news coming from? Who is generating it, if it's not--well, it's in there. Eighty-six percent of the stories came in the form of public relations, either from government or from corporations; only 14 percent produced by a reporter who went out and tried to speak truth to power. This is a scary zone we're entering." Nichols concluded.
McChesney had later noted, "The business model that has supported journalism for the last 125 years in this country is disintegrating. There will be some advertising, but much less. There will be some circulation revenues, but much less. And if we're going to have journalism in this country, it's going to require that there be public subsidies to create an independent, uncensored, nonprofit, non-commercial news media sector. And we argue in the book, as you said, that we actually have a very rich tradition of this. The first hundred years of American history, the founders did not assume the market would give us journalism. There was no such assumption at all. They understood it was the first duty of a democratic state to see that a vibrant, independent, uncensored Fourth Estate exist."
What I couldn't tell from this whole educational (historically educational because of the details on the first six or seven generations of American history) report on media in America was why these journalists and media experts are still upbeat about their being a coming media revolt or revolution in the future, i.e. with federal government support (including financial support) for free speech and free media.
The only good news for me as a listener was to hear that the Obama administration is currently clearly in favor of continuing Net Neutrality, in order to keep big media from controlling the web unfairly as has occurred in small and large radio, newspaper, and TV markets in the last 4 or 5 decades.
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