As U.S. newspapers continue their financial slide, journalists are launching a pity party, watching once-lucrative and influential careers slip away. Alex S. Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly with the New York Times and now with Harvard University, serves as a host of that party with his recent book Losing the News. While this is a thoughtful work by a thoughtful writer, in the end it slips into the fantasy that our very way of life is in peril unless newspapers are rescued, either by government or by consumers having a change of heart.

I write from a different perspective than most economists, in that I was an undergraduate journalism major and worked at a few newspapers. I also briefly worked for Jones while at a paper owned by his family in Tennessee. (This review states my opinion of the book, not of Jones, who was a good boss.)

Jones is correct that American newspapers are in trouble. Many have closed. Others have downsized, and their futures are in doubt. However, the loss of newspapers in their present form does not equate to a lost society. Losing the News does not make its case that the decline of newspapers is a tragedy. Mainstream journalists are not losing their ability to report news, but instead are losing privileges that they once enjoyed, privileges that gave them special status. The salient issue is not that Americans are not “losing the news,” but rather that mainstream journalists have lost influence, which is quite a different matter.

Watchdogs Newspapers, Jones claims, are responsible for an “iron core” of important material:

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office…. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming.

He continues:

What goes into this cannonball is the daily aggregation of what is sometimes called “accountability news,” because it is the form of news whose purpose is to hold government and those with power accountable. This is fact-based news, sometimes called the “news of verification” as opposed to the “news of assertion” that is mostly on display these days in prime time on cable news channels and in blogs.

This core, he contends, is vital to our way of life and is threatened by cable and satellite channels and the Internet. Jones is not a Luddite and does not call for restrictions on new media, but nonetheless he labors under the false premise that mainstream journalists are “watchdogs” of government.

His second mistake is that, as a “progressive,” he fails to consider the role of entrepreneurs — and profits — in creating the outlets for “hard news.” Jones believes in the core of “objectivity” of news and asserts that a journalist has a duty to report facts, whether or not the facts adhere to the journalist’s worldview. For example, on the PBS show Media Matters, of which he was executive editor, Jones noted that the mainstream media gave false information about so-called partial birth abortion, claiming the procedure is rarely performed when, as investigations later demonstrated, thousands of them are performed each year. This admission took some courage, and I applaud his integrity. However, he erroneously assumes that this anecdote is a rare exception that “proves” the rule of mainstream media objectivity.

Editorializing the News Jones also claims there is little or no connection between newspapers’ editorial policy and the newsroom, with this necessary gulf preventing confusion between fact and opinion. In reality, this “gulf” is practically nonexistent, resulting in biased, politicized “news” coverage. Two case studies bolster my point, the first being the infamous Duke lacrosse team “rape” case, and the second the government’s pursuit of alleged “white-collar criminals.” These occurrences show how journalists often become enablers of government misconduct.

In March 2006, an African-American stripper falsely accused three white Duke University lacrosse players of raping her during a team party. Mainstream news outlets exploded with indignation. Daniel Okrent, former public editor for the NY Times, told New York magazine’s Kurt Andersen, “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.” Indeed, the Times immediately ran columns implying guilt, even though the original reporter assigned to the case doubted the story.

The Times gave the story to another reporter and openly pursued the “race, sex, and class” angle that conformed to the paper’s editorial viewpoint. Even after serious questions arose about the veracity of Durham County district attorney Mike Nifong’s case, the Times ran numerous stories ignoring the evidence, including one in which the paper featured what turned out to be a fabricated police report. Only after a December 2006 hearing demonstrated that Nifong had lied to judges and withheld exculpatory evidence did the newspaper change direction and start scrutinizing its own narrative.

The NY Times was not alone in this rush to judgment. Most major news organizations, including the Washington Post, the LA Times, Newsweek, Time, and the main broadcasters, all treated every statement issued by the prosecutor as being ex cathedra. Newsweek even ran a cover story using mug shots of two of the three indicted students, with the hackneyed title, “Sex, Lies, and Duke.”

The journalists later complained that they could not get the facts. This complaint is nonsense — it is reporters’ job to get the facts, not to mindlessly recite what government officials give them and ignore or reflexively deride statements made by anyone who disputes those officials. As opposed to the traditional media journalists, bloggers and independent writers began questioning Nifong and gathering troubling information almost as soon as the story broke. K.C. Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, created a popular blog called “Durham-in-Wonderland” that systematically took apart the prosecution’s case. Only one mainstream media member, CBS News’ 60 Minutes, took those dissenting voices seriously, broadcasting a segment in October 2006 that called the charges into question.

As one who wrote a number of articles on this case, I believe that the media’s self-proclaimed “ignorance” was willful. The facts did not fit the template of the journalists’ worldviews, so the press ignored the facts. Like the details about partial-birth abortion, the news was not “fit to print,” at least at Jones’ former employer, the nation’s “newspaper of record.”

If bloggers, independent writers, and good attorneys rescued the Duke defendants, people convicted of “white-collar crimes” have been less fortunate. As one who has written much on white-collar issues (see “Federal Crime and the Destruction of Law,” Winter 2009–2010), I see the mainstream media as keeping people charged with white-collar crimes from receiving a fair hearing.

The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and other mainstream media enabled Rudy Giuliani’s Wall Street witch hunt two decades ago. Unfortunately, we found that journalists will help prosecutors commit felonies and file questionable charges, as long as the prosecutors claim to be “fighting capitalism.” Daniel Fischel in his 1995 book Payback described how Giuliani and his lieutenants illegally leaked grand jury material to reporters from the N.Y. Times and Wall Street Journal to implicate Michael Milken, despite the fact that much of the material turned out to be false or misleading. The Giuliani leaks cannot be justified as “the public’s right to know” trumping “the defendant’s right to a fair trial.” Prosecutors teamed with reporters to commit felonies in order to keep prominent defendants from being able to defend themselves against criminal charges. As attorney Harvey Silverglate notes in his recent book Three Felonies a Day, Milken ultimately pleaded to “crimes” that the U.S. Supreme Court a few years later would say were not crimes at all, yet no one in the mainstream media was interested in that fact.

Misconduct of “prestigious” journalists hardly is limited to the cases I presented. Journalists often report prosecutors’ statements (and especially statements from federal prosecutors) without skepticism. The mainstream media is not a “watchdog of government.” Indeed, because most journalistic “sources” are people employed in government, journalists have become a voice of government.

Because most journalistic “sources” are people employed in government, journalists have become a voice of government.

Progressive Advocate When journalists do perform what they see as a “watchdog” role, their watchfulness tends to consist of admonishing government for not regulating to the extent “progressives” demand. Furthermore, government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency are outright sacred cows that mainstream journalists seem to believe should have no limits on their power.

Take “climate change,” for example. Jones excoriates the media for even interviewing people he calls “skeptics,” as he considers them “shills for industry.” Yet when emails from prominent “climate” scientists were made public last fall, we found these scientists had massaged and hidden data and bullied others to push their points of view. Just like prosecutors who illegally leaked material to the press, the scientists knew that the mainstream media had their backs.

Jones’ old employer, the NY Times, ignored the story, running editorials that, in effect, told readers to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Other “prestigious” media outlets followed suit and sat on the story. In fact, bloggers and independent writers made the scandal known to the public.

Why do mainstream journalists like Jones seem to be champions of the Leviathan state? One reason, I believe, is that the modern media is a creation of the Progressive Era of a century ago. For all its emphasis on “good government,” the very heart of progressivism was and is the empowerment of state authority and the elimination of protections for individuals and the checks and balances on government authority that the U.S. Constitution created.

Jones claims that progressivism arose because of a public revulsion of corruption and misuse of power, and that out of this revulsion, journalistic “objectivity was born.” Furthermore, he repeats the canard that the Standard Oil Company was an evil monopoly that was engaged in “bullying and business malfeasance.” The last charge is interesting, since Standard Oil’s real “crime” was adopting business innovations that resulted in the price of kerosene falling from 50 cents a gallon to nearly a nickel by the end of the 19th century.

Jones follows the account of Standard Oil presented by Ida Tarbell in her History of the Standard Oil Company. Tarbell, of course, was the daughter of a competing oil producer who was unable to cut costs as well as John D. Rockefeller and so went out of business. Jones may believe that cutting costs may be “malfeasance,” but others would call it good for consumers. For good measure, Jones also repeats the claim that Wal-Mart “destroys communities.”

The progressives envisioned a country with a powerful executive branch, a relatively weak Congress, a court system that places the burden of proof on private parties and gives the benefit of the doubt to government, and government bureaucracy staffed with “experts” who would run the daily affairs of individuals. As part of this vision, the Fourth Estate has publicized the brilliance and exploits of “good government” and has tried to keep government on that narrow “progressive” path.

For many years, this arrangement worked well, at least for the media. Reporters had cozy relationships with government officials (and many still do) who were happy to feed them stories, and in return the media promoted those officials and their friends, and punished their enemies. The broadcast media, protected by the Federal Communications Commission, had an even cozier arrangement. Broadcasters acted within a government-defined sphere of “public interest,” and progressive journalists had no argument against what essentially was state censorship of broadcast news.

Too many journalists see themselves as combating two great evils: government officials who do not follow progressive ideals and private business firms. In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and General Motors were the bad guys; in the 1960s, IBM; the oil companies in the 1970s; Ronald Reagan and Wall Street (and Michael Milken) during the “Decade of Greed;” Microsoft in the 1990s; George W. Bush, medical insurance firms, pharmaceutical companies, and Wal-Mart in the New Millennium. The storyline was pretty much taken from the same page as Tarbell’s History: companies have tried to spread their tentacles and control our lives, all the while providing shoddy products and services at high prices, while complacent government failed to stop those predations.

Because of the lack of alternatives, there was no way to break up the media oligarchy. If media leaders did not want a story to be told, then there was silence. For example, in an interview in Playboy in 1978, Geraldo Rivera (then with ABC News) told of the deliberate suppression of a story that would have been unfavorable to the Panamanian government, which at the time was demanding that the United States turn over the Panama Canal. Rivera explained that he and other journalists from prestigious media outlets feared that anything that gave bad publicity to Panama might kill the canal deal.

Consider the account of the affair President Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky. In his book, Jones claims that Internet writer Matt Drudge forced Newsweek to run its story breaking the affair prematurely, an assertion that is untrue. Drudge wrote his story only after Newsweek’s editors spiked it. Two decades before, a large media outlet could have sat on such a story indefinitely, and it may have never become public knowledge; today, such silence is much more difficult to enforce, thanks to the Internet.

In Need of Saving? The rise of the information age, together with media and telecommunications deregulation, has created a number of new media entities, complete with news operations. Bloggers put their opinions — and often accurate analysis and unreported facts — on the web, and more and more stories are broken by new media instead of traditional media. Traditional media no longer have the same special privileges they once enjoyed — and they do not like that one bit.

The mainstream media has been creating its own reality, promoting a view of government that is no longer defensible.

When Jones complains that the decline of newspapers will curtail the collection of “fact-based news,” he is wrong. He seems to believe that the average consumer of news is little more than a mindless cretin, eating fast food, shopping at Wal-Mart, and ignoring the news that he or she needs to know in order to keep our democracy functioning properly. Furthermore, Jones seems to believe, the consumer no longer is buying newspapers and has no commitment to supporting journalistic excellence.

What to do? Jones turns to the government as savior. His recommendations include expanding PBS, subsidizing newspapers, and empowering the FCC to once again determine what counts as news “in the public interest.” The irony that the supposed “watchdog of government” would thus be heavily dependent on that same government is lost on Jones, but such ideas are perfectly in line with his “progressive” beliefs. He believes that the “watchdog of government” must in turn be watched over and cared for by government.

I disagree strongly that we are “losing the news.” Journalists are losing their former benefits; news anchors no longer stride around like gods come down from the sky. Dan Rather endorses Jones’ book, but one should remember that Rather lost his job because he insisted on using forged documents whose authenticity he had not verified in order to push a story that was little more than a political hit job on a president Rather did not like. The blogs, not the NY Times, exposed Rather’s malfeasance, and it is clear from Jones’ weak defense of Rather that he does not like this new order in which the mainstream media itself is closely monitored by people other than the usual “progressives” at the Columbia Journalism Review.

There are plenty of good independent writers and bloggers who are interested in promoting the “iron core” of news and analysis. For example, Christopher Halkides, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, has done a masterful job on his own blog, taking apart the forensic evidence in the Amanda Knox case in Italy, something that the mainstream media has largely ignored. The Internet has proven to be a marvelous way to inform people, and whole groups of people find they can communicate without having to go through a media gatekeeper.

At the end of the book, Jones recites the story of the Bush administration official who told a reporter that “we create our own reality,” a statement that left journalists steaming. Yet, since the Progressive Era, the mainstream media has been creating its own reality, promoting a view of government that no longer is defensible. Just as the Bush administration’s attempts to create its own reality imploded under the costs of war and the collapse of the housing bubble, the mainstream media is losing its ability to shape our view of the world.

That does not mean we have “lost the news.” To the contrary, we are finding that we no longer need or even want a Progressive Era dinosaur to tell us what we are supposed to believe about the events of our time.