Why Pay to Read Lies? Newspapers in Decline

By Alan Caruba

The job I loved most in my long career as a writer was as a journalist, first on weekly newspapers and then on a daily. I loved breaking news, the deadlines, and the thrill of seeing my words in print. Old enough to remember Linotype, I even would set pages with the newly minted metal strips of text.

The day The New York Times Jersey edition published a piece I wrote, I thought I had reached some magical place amongst my fellow journalists. What I had unknowingly reached was being published in a newspaper with a long history of printing lies and doing everything in its power to influence events through its news columns. That’s a no-no.

In a long career as a public relations counselor I have counted many reporters and editors among my friends and still do. I have been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists since the 1970s.

Sadly, journalism never did and probably still doesn’t pay salaries commensurate with the economy. So, in the words of Mae West, “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

In 1984, I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns that were designed to influence public opinion and policy. My primary concern was all the lies being told by self-identified environmentalists. Simply stated, if some Green group tells you something, get a second and third opinion. They are lying.

The worst of it that the media has taken their lies at face value and continue to pass them along to a public that is easily fooled and easily scared. This is especially true of “official” sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and others. All governments lie to their citizens and ours is no exception.

The damage that Green lies do can get people killed. Since the publication of Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring” millions, particularly in Africa and subtropical nations have died from malaria because DDT was banned as the result of her book. Similarly, the least reported, but most current story is the deep freeze that has affected much of Europe and which has caused several hundred deaths.

Like a biblical punishment, newspapers are feeling the brunt of the changes the Internet has brought about. With search engines at our fingertips, anyone can research any topic of interest, often finding that what the daily newspaper or news magazine had to say about it is replete with omissions of critical facts or the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods.

Then there’s the way the newspapers and other news media tend to focus on stories like the death and funeral of Whitney Houston or some local tragedy that briefly attracts national attention. Wars are usually reported in terms of casualties. Political campaigns are reduced to horse races. Religious and moral issues barely tolerated.

Almost anything published about Islam must be read through the thin gauze of political correctness that ignores the menace of Islam to those living in Muslim nations and in nations where they gain a population foothold. It is a religion that sanctions stoning women to death, decapitating “infidels”, and even sending children into mine fields to clear them. It is pure barbarism and has zero tolerance for freedom of speech, the press, other religions, or independent thought.

All of this has much to do with the decline of newspapers nationwide. In January, on the website of Editor& Publisher, Alan D. Mutter, a former editor who blogs at Newsosaur, wrote the “Daily Paper Going the Way of the Milkman.” That caught my eye because I am old enough to remember a horse-drawn milk wagon (it was during WWII) pulling up at the driveway of my home to make deliveries.

The thought that newspaper delivery will cease in many cities around the nation is disquieting, but circulation is plunging.

The result is that reductions of newsroom staffs, reporters and editors, have been surging, with jobs eliminated in 2011 reaching nearly 30% more than the prior year. There have been five years of revenue declines. One blogger, Erica Smith, who follows the trends, estimated that 3,775+ newspaper jobs were eliminated in 2011.

According to an annual survey by the American Society of News Editors, nearly one in three newsroom jobs have been eliminated since the number of journalists peaked at 56,900 in 1989. By the end of 2010, there were only 41,600 ink-stained wretches left on the industry’s payrolls.

In recent weeks The Wall Street Journal reported “Gannett’s Profit Drops 33%” and “Thompson Reuters Posts Loss.”

Putting aside why advertisers are seeking greener pastures and platforms to sell their goods, let me suggest that an underlying and largely unexplored reason for the declines being felt throughout traditional print journalism outlets is that people simply do not want to pay for lies every day between the horoscope, the crossword puzzle, and the obituary page.

Lies? The print media and its broadcast counterpart fell totally in love with Barack Obama in 2008 and we ended up with a completely unknown and largely unvetted former Senator who hadn’t even served a full term there. People remember stuff like that.

They remember years of unmitigated lies about “global warming” when there wasn’t any threat at all.

They remember being told that coffee was bad for you followed by stories that coffee is good for you.

There are many factors at play in the decline of newspapers, but I think one factor is the general disenchantment with the product—the news—that too often tends to turn out to be false.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Love of Scandal

By Alan Caruba

The television coverage of the British Parliament’s inquiry of the Murdoch’s, father and son, Rupert and James, was wall-to-wall on every news channel including Fox News, part of the Murdoch media empire. As an American, I found myself straining to understand what many of the MPs were saying as their accent often rendered them unintelligible to my ear.

The Murdoch’s were most sincerely and contritely saddened by the behavior of some News of the World reporters and editors, but I doubt they were too surprised by it, nor were the British who read the now defunct trashy tabloid. Some of the reporters had hacked into the phones of people, violating their privacy in hopes of a scoop. The editors in charge pretended not to know.

In sum, it was sordid behavior by a handful of people who had lost sight of what passes for journalistic standards. Scotland Yard had largely ignored the crimes. Top crime fighters dutifully resigned their positions. The whole mess was so incestuous, one would have to be quite blasé to ignore it.

Heads rolled. People were fired, quit their positions, and one, a reporter who blew the whistle, died though he was said to have been ill. Suicide cannot be ruled out. The police arrested an editor or two, but unless it can be proved that they were accessories to the crime, not much may come of that.

The Brits, however, love a good scandal and who doesn’t?

Americans were recently treated to former Representative Anthony Weiner’s antics and are currently obsessing over the acquittal of Casey Anthony, alleged to have killed her child and tossing the remains in a nearby swamp. While the nation heads over the financial cliff into default and bankruptcy, the last scraps of the Anthony story are still being picked over by the news and popular culture jackals. Bill Clinton's Oval Office misconduct with an intern provided months of entertainment and political theatre.

From Oscar Wilde, a famed Irish writer of the 1880s and 90s who was sent to Reading Goal for “gross indecency” to the 1963 affair of John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, who was sexually linked to Christine Keeler, the reputed mistress of a Russian spy, to Princess Diana who divorced Prince Charles and later died tragically in an auto accident, the Brits are no slouches when it comes to scandal.

I do my best to keep abreast of what is going on in Great Britain because they are the closest thing to a rational and dependable ally we have, save for the Canadians who always stick with us through thick and thin, despite being largely ignored.

One of my favorite bloggers goes by the nom de plume of Archbishop Cranmer, a pseudonym taken from the actual archbishop who was burned at the stake in 1556. Normally he comments on things theological and ecclesiastical in England, but his comments on the Murdoch’s stuck a note of rationality devoid from most coverage.

“But it’s all a bit of a show,” said Cranmer. “Rupert Murdoch owns three (non-profitable) newspapers and a minority share in BSkyB, the output of which is regulated by Ofcom. In what sense is this an ‘empire’ which exerts ‘too much power over British public life’?”

“It is about the relationship of Parliament and the media, politicians and journalists, and prime ministers and proprietors. It is about the balance between power and scrutiny, influence and manipulation. Ultimately, it is about the right to express an opinion, because if the end result is statutory regulation of the press, another liberty will have been sacrificed to the lust of the state.”

That’s worth repeating, “another liberty will have been sacrificed to the lust of the state.” We are seeing and experiencing a lot of that in America where hardly any activity of our lives, from the cars we drive, the food we eat, the light bulbs we may purchase, and the health insurance we don’t want to purchase is grinding American liberty to dust.

Rupert Murdoch is not just an Australian, British, and a naturalized American phenomenon, a media genius with a talent for acquisition that includes The Wall Street Journal. Fox News has become the go-to television channel that is indeed, “fair and balanced”, presenting a cacophony of liberal-to-conservative analysis that is often a bedlam of viewpoints.

As this has been occurring, other U.S. newspapers have been losing circulation and revenue, laying off editors and reporters, publishing thin editions of mostly syndicated gloss, and, as often as not, closing their doors. Too many have debased themselves with their liberal slanting of news and are now useful only for their obituary and sports sections.

Let us, therefore, keep an eye on the British journalism scandal to see how their politicians use it for their own gain and hope that their avaricious American counterparts do not take any lessons from it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Information Deficit

By Alan Caruba

To those who have mostly known the Internet as their source of news, the notion that there is an “information deficit” may seem an odd judgment, but it is one that an old friend and longtime observer of the public relations profession recently made.

What Jack O’Dwyer, publisher and editor of Jack O’Dwyer’s Newsletter and PR Report, doesn’t know about public relations is probably not worth knowing. Ebullient and feisty, Jack has long been the nemesis of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), an organization that has managed to render itself irrelevant to the profession it proposes to represent.

So I pay attention when, in a recent blog, Jack concluded that “What the U.S. is suffering from, besides a trade deficit, is an information deficit. The root of the current financial collapse is secrecy—including ‘dubious assets’ hidden in off-balance-sheet entries.” Not all business news is devoid of insight or even outrage, but too much comes after the fact.

When you tie secrecy to the death throes of newspapers and magazines these days, you get a public that is increasingly distrustful of a government that manufactures false statistics about jobs, extends the protection of the U.S. Constitution to Islamic terrorists seeking to replace it with Sharia law, and is filled with “czars” given power to influence and determine national policy without any accountability to Congress.

You get a mainstream media so in love with Barack Obama that the protests against his administration are mocked and reports fail to address their issues.

Jack’s blog examined the findings of former journalist, Richard Sine, who received a fellowship grant to conduct a study of business journalism. He concluded that journalism schools should “close down” because students might as well study “blacksmithing, bloodletting or steamship design.”

Jack quoted Art Stevens, a former president of the PRSA, who believes that both journalism and PR are in a state of collapse.

As a longtime PR counselor, I concur because PR has long been dependent on a thriving base of newspaper and magazine outlets, in addition to broadcast outlets. As that base erodes, the capacity to inform and influence the public through them declines in tandem.

Add in an economy in freefall due to insane government “stimulus” and “bailout” programs, choking government regulation, the prospect of increased taxation, debt unto the third generation to come, and I can personally attest that the market for PR services has been in serious decline.

Public relations which had its beginnings in the early 1900s had been peopled with former journalists and thus was generally based in journalistic standards of accuracy and the free exchange of information. An early PR practitioner, Ivy Lee, counseled corporate clients to be responsive when the press came calling.

“In today’s strictly controlled environment,” Jack wrote, “PR pros jeopardize their careers by meeting with journalists or even talking to them on the phone.” He placed the blame on corporate lawyers, chief financial officers and even the marketing departments for shutting off the information spigot. Ironically, this applies as well to the five advertising and PR conglomerates as well.

When you put together the secrecy practices, the failures of government oversight, and the inadequacies of business reporters from recent generations of J-school and PR graduates, you end up with a perfect storm that culminates in the sudden collapse of the financial system that no one was monitoring sufficiently to protect the public.

It has largely been left to trade associations, think tanks, and ad hoc groups such as the Tea Party organizers, to make essential information about the conduct of national affairs available. They frequently have been forced to by-pass traditional journalism outlets in order to reach the public via Internet news and opinion sites, blogs, newsletters, and other means.

This explains why traditional journalism outlets continue to report on “global warming”, “greenhouse gas emissions”, and other bogus “science” while the public observes that, wherever they are, the climate is getting colder. This disconnect continues to undermine the diminishing credibility of most mainstream media outlets.

The forthcoming Copenhagan UN climate conference will be reported as “news” instead of being exposed as an effort to use false science to initiate a one-world-government treaty and the creation of a market for bogus “carbon credits.”

This explains, too, why Bernie Madoff was able to fleece investors of billions with his bogus hedge fund until the unraveling of the economy exposed him when neither the Securities Exchange Commission, nor the mainstream business press took notice of his ponzi scheme.

This explains why the mainstream press continues to avoid “offending” Muslims and, like the Obama administration, avoids the fact that a segment of fanatical Islam threatens the world with terrorism to advance its goal of a global caliphate. Destroying the U.S. is the key to their plan.

You are reading this on the Internet. Neither Jack’s, nor mine, nor other experienced, knowledgeable public relations professional’s, nor business reporters’ insights and information is available in a mainstream press that continues to censor the truth.

Editor’s note: For those seeking PR counseling and editorial services, you are invited to visit my website, www.caruba.com.

Newspapers: The Credibility Question

By Alan Caruba

Of all the jobs I ever held, the ones I enjoyed the most were as a reporter for weekly and daily newspapers. Every day was different. You got to interview interesting people. You attended events. And then you got to write about all manner of things about which, as often as not, you had no clue.

As a rookie reporter in my early twenties, I learned “on the job” how a community was administered by a city council. I knew nothing about how businesses were run. On the subject of politics, I apparently was born a Democrat and liberal, so I didn’t question these biases. Mostly, reporting never seemed like “work.” You talked to people. You took notes. And you could even win awards on the state level because, if there is one thing the journalism community loves to do, it is to give out awards.

For example, have you ever wondered why The New York Times, Washington Post, and a handful of other dailies always seem to win Pulitzers? Occasionally some unknown reporter from some Midwest newspaper may pick up a Pulitzer, but it is almost always the same dailies. In 2008, the Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes out of fourteen categories, one of which didn’t give any award. The New York Times won two and the local reporting prize went to a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The trade magazine of newspapers is Editor & Publisher. In better times, it was fat with advertising. These days it is as thin as your local daily. Its writers are uniformly liberal in their outlook, but occasionally they rise from their stupor and wonder out loud why people no longer trust newspapers like they once did.

Greg Mitchell, E&P’s editor, recently noted that, “When the watchdogs are asleep, we all get robbed.” It bothered him greatly (me, too) that one in four Americans think that the “faux” news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert has replaced “real” news as viable outlets. From my occasional observations, both Comedy Channel shows offer the same liberal bias as the mainstream media.

C-Span recently aired a Writers Guild panel with several of the writers for the fake news shows and they unanimously said they regarded the shows as “entertainment” and seemed wary of the notion that anyone would consider their content as real news. This was disingenuous. They are well aware of the way they influence viewer’s perceptions of real events and personalities.

The stupidity level of too many Americans is demonstrated by the way they apparently are having difficulty differentiating between the idiocy offered by Stewart and Colbert, and what passes for news on the front and other pages of their daily newspaper. Stewart gained attention when he attacked the alleged financial pundit, Jim Cramer of CNBC, for having no idea why the nation lurched into a financial crisis.

The problem with Mitchell’s citation of Stewart is that, with few exceptions, just about the entire cadre of those assigned to cover business topics and all of those covering Congress rarely, if ever, identified the government as the chief culprit in the meltdown.

None cited the government’s interference in the housing market with laws intended to make owning a home a right that even low-income citizens could enjoy. They did not notice the rise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, owning fifty percent of all the mortgages made initially by banks and mortgage loan firms. Why was that? Because the government required them to lend billions in sub-prime loans. Then these two “government entities” took those bad loans, bundled them together, and sold them as “securitized” loans to hedge funds and others. They were essentially worthless. The banks got stuck with a lot of “toxic paper.”

Mitchell wrote that journalists essentially failed to adequately report about the Iraq War and the financial meltdown. As regards the former, I think the criticism is unfair. They reported what the government told them. They had few opportunities to determine if the intelligence being cited was accurate and we are all pretty much conditioned to believe the CIA and other government agencies. Even Colin Powell believed them enough to make the case for war in the United Nations.

As regards the financial meltdown, Mitchell is right. There were ample warnings, particularly in the financial press such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, as well as whole books written on the subject of the imbalances and risks inherent in the government’s role the housing market.

As Mitchell pointed out, “The media miss stories all the time, always have, always will, and there’s nothing to be ashamed about in that—you can only do so much, especially in a time of slashed newsroom staff. But to miss a story of this enormity, with consequences that will echo for decades, only adds weight to the warnings of doom for the ‘old’ media.”

Ironically, it is warnings of doom that have always dominated the “news.” To this day they still write about “global warming” despite ample evidence that the Earth has been cooling for a decade! Even the environmental groups that have foisted this hoax on us are quietly advising one another to change their terminology as the public grows wary of their lies.

The issue is credibility and the “old” media has been losing it now for years. The advent of the Internet, lively news and opinion websites, and bloggers, has released countless experts in various fields to write and be read regarding issues involving climate, immigration, national security, education, foreign affairs, politics, and countless other topics that touch our lives.

I no longer get my local daily delivered in the morning. And long before I stopped delivery, I had become painfully aware of how biased and often astonishingly uninformed or misinformed its reporting had become.

That’s particularly sad for me as I genuinely love newspapers. I will tell you this, however, after spending most of my working life as a public relations counselor, I have long since concluded that there would be no “news” if those of us providing it weren’t on the job.

In the end, the reporter’s job is not to trust us or any other source without personally verifying what we provide. As corny as it may seem, I always told clients that anything other than the truth would come back to bite them.

There’s an old newsroom piece of advice to which I still adhere. "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."