In decline
The mainstream media, and especially the broadsheet newspapers, are never shy of publishing the latest ‘church in decline’ story, especially figures relating to falling attendances. They are somewhat less forthcoming in reporting their own decline. Newspapermen all over the world are nervously watching their circulations fall (along with their profits), especially among younger readers.
According to Jospeh Epstein, writing in January's Commentary magazine, in the decade 1990-2000 daily newspaper readership in American fell from 52.6% of the adult population to 37.5%. Among those aged 18-34 the figure was down to 19%.
This sort of decline is evident in Australia and the UK as well, and papers have rushed to slow the decline through new features, layout changes, giveaways, and the like.
Like most commentators, Epstein laments the slow and seemingly irreversible decline of newspapers, but he also thinks that many of the mainstream papers deserve to be taken less and less seriously by fewer and fewer people. He says:
The self-proclaimed goal of newsmen used to be to report, in a clear and factual way, on the important events of the day, on subjects of greater or lesser parochialism. It is no longer so. Here is [American news-anchor] Dan Rather, quoting with approval someone he does not name who defines news as ‘what somebody doesn't want you to know. All the rest is advertising.’
‘What somebody doesn't want you to know’—it would be hard to come up with a more concise definition of the target of the ‘investigative journalism’ that has been the pride of the nation's newspapers for the past three decades. Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Seymour Hersh, and many others have built their reputations on telling us things that Presidents and Senators and generals and CEO's have not wanted us to know.
Besides making for a strictly adversarial relationship between government and the press, there is no denying that investigative journalism, whatever (very mixed) accomplishments it can claim to its credit, has put in place among us a tone and temper of agitation and paranoia. Every day, we are asked to regard the people we elect to office as, essentially, our enemies—thieves, thugs, and megalomaniacs whose vicious secret deeds it is the chief function of the press to uncover and whose persons to bring down in a glare of publicity.
All this might have been to the good if what the journalists discovered were invariably true—and if the nature and the implications of that truth were left for others to puzzle out. Frequently, neither has been the case.
Epstein goes on to show how the culture of the modern newsroom, built as it is on leaks and ‘sources’ which cannot be cross-examined or checked, and driven by the agenda of the journalists themselves, has led not only to the politicization of ‘news’ and the polarization of public opinion, but also to reputable newspapers losing whatever reputation they once had. Journalists are “more and more regarded as unnaccountable kibitzers [meddlers] whose self-appointed job is to spread dissension, increase pressure on everyone, make trouble—and preach the gospel of present-day liberalism”.
All of which rings fairly true to the mainstream press in my part of the world as well. Interestingly, and ironically, it's the big mainstream, liberal denominations that are in decline with Christendom; it seems that their natural counterparts in the newspaper business are suffering the same fate.