A factor in this trend may be that MSM journalists, looking at the rapid decline of their own institutions, don’t want to get themselves black-listed from possible future work at right-wing outlets.
The predicament facing key mainstream news outlets is indeed grim as the industry faces its own “Napster-ization.” Newspaper readership is declining as millions of readers drop their subscriptions in favor of reading the news free on the Internet or getting the same stories re-posted at “aggregator” sites that pay nothing for the content.
The proud New York Times has been forced to go hat in hand to Mexican billionaire wheeler-dealer Carlos Slim Helu to borrow $250 million at a stunning 14 percent interest rate. Other newspapers, including the Washington Post, have been shedding senior staff in waves of buyouts and layoffs.
In the next year, there could be a surge of shuttered newspapers and others teetering on bankruptcy, including such important regional papers as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News. Even the strongest papers are likely to survive only in a much reduced form, with fewer reporters and bureaus.
Some critics may feel that the MSM brought this fate down on itself by betraying its responsibility to inform the American people as fully and fairly as possible. There may even be a sense of schadenfreude, the German word for deriving pleasure from someone else’s misfortune.
But there also should be alarm bells going off among American progressives and liberals. As the MSM declines, the right-wing media is likely to grow even more powerful.
As we’ve argued for years at Consortiumnews.com, the only long-term answer is for concerned Americans, who truly care about a thriving democratic Republic, to invest substantially in honest media, to build an infrastructure that employs brave reporters who will dig out the important news and subject it to thoughtful analysis.
Today’s troubling media trends make that undertaking all the more imperative.
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