Wide Open afternoon delight

You know, I thought this thing was going to taper off, but no.

Background links: WO category on this blog, Poynter, Editor & Publisher, Jay Rosen

New today:

Henery Hawk with an excellent piece deconstructing Dick Feagler’s column.

Chuck Butcher, from Oregon, also with a very accurate and insightful post.

NixGuy on BizzyBlog on Feagler. (Tom - I can’t remember if I linked to that post or not so here’s a bonus in case I did already.)

The Newspaper Association of American is doing a series of posts on the future of newspapers. I learned about it from Mindy McAdams.

Finally, there’s this piece called Newspapers in the Digital Age that included this section:

Profits and democracy

We don’t know when profits are going to return, or how.

We can’t rely on the First Amendment to provide us with a paycheck; the First Amendment is not a financial model. And yet, as newspaper men and women, we return to the articles of democracy to give us a place at the table, and with it the notion that we will find a meal.

Without democracy — which means not just freedom but the robust life in a democratic state — the free press cannot survive, no matter how rich it gets. Indeed, I can imagine a fat and prosperous press without the freedoms of contradiction and accuracy. It would not be a free press, just a profitable one. Its people might think themselves free, yet would not be.

A warning

From “Today’s Word on Journalism … ” comes this trenchant warning, from a small newspaper with very large ideas:

“While the newspaper is expendable, the tradition it represents and the information it supplies are not. The evolution from Gutenberg to Gates may be irreversible, but as new media replace the old ones there’s no official passing of the torch of responsibility, no automatic transfer of the sacred trust the First Amendment placed upon the free press and its proprietors. In fact, the handoff, such as it is, has been fumbled very badly. As newspapers are eviscerated, marginalized and abandoned, they leave a vacuum that nothing and no one is prepared to fill — a crisis on its way to becoming a tragedy. When railroads and riverboats began to go the way of the passenger pigeon, no one was harmed except the work force and a few big investors who had failed to diversify. If professional journalism vanishes along with the newspapers, this thing we call a constitutional democracy becomes a banana republic.”

Now, see. The first thing that comes to my mind is that the First Amendment should never have been reserved or restricted to only certain people in the first place - and I know that there are journalists who say the same. So why is this red herring being pushed?

Well, a lot of us think we know why, but is there more? Or not?

Sphere: Related Content

By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:59 pm November 19th, 2007 in Wide Open, Media, Blogging

Comments

4 Responses to “Wide Open afternoon delight”

1 Mindy McAdams on November 19th, 2007 5:54 pm

Re: “no automatic transfer of the sacred trust the First Amendment placed upon the free press and its proprietors.” I think the idea here is that with great privilege (free press protections) comes great responsibility. So if someone is going to wave the banner of free press (not just free speech, which is of course the right of every citizen), that person needs to take responsibility to check facts, reveal biases, etc., etc.
2 Jill Miller Zimon on November 19th, 2007 7:39 pm

Thanks for reading and leaving the comment, Mindy. I understand - I think I knew that but am multitasking through deadlines and getting ready for the holiday.

I agree with that, btw.
3 Keith on November 20th, 2007 3:11 pm

The First Amendment generally is the last refuge of the print journalistic scoundrel as it seems to be in this case: if we die, free speech dies with us.

Not hardly. In fact the death of print journalism might be a good thing when we consider just how bought and purchased the ‘news’ is on most papers nowadays. People might actually get exposed to what the real news is.

And this is from someone who once thought I’d spend a lifetime as a happy print journalist.
4 Jill Miller Zimon on November 20th, 2007 7:24 pm

Definitely another way to think about it - I like the expansive view.