There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment.
To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper drone can do to whip up a frenzy of public pity. Too many other industries have been gutted in recent years, and to your typical forty-hour-week wage slave, newspapering always seemed like light lifting and comparative fun.
On the second point, though—despite the blame placed on greedy investors milking papers for ridiculously unsustainable profits, and indifferent twenty-year-olds getting their faux news from the Internet—there’s the question of how well newspapers are performing their fundamental function of being the primary driver of news.
A case in point is the Star Tribune’s curious handling of whether former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger was in any way part of the now well-documented purge of attorneys around the country, and whether his replacement, Rachel Paulose, was in any way linked to the White House or Justice Department officials who were coordinating the process.
By the time you read this, all questions may have been resolved. Ms. Paulose may have demonstrated newfound competence in her job, and it may have been confirmed that there was never any connection of any kind between her and Justice Department officers like Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and the Justice Department White House liaison Monica Goodling, people she once worked closely with and who are believed to be central to the firings. But I doubt it. The story appears to have both legs and unusual depth, which is why the Star Tribune’s laissez-faire, punch-pulling approach through the winter and into early April is so striking.
What is knowable is that the Star Tribune’s former Washington, D.C., correspondents, primarily Greg Gordon, filed at least two provocative reports—the first on January 26—detailing the unusual political nature of replacement U.S. attorneys around the country, with specific mention of Paulose. And yet the Star Tribune declined to run not just those pieces, but anything at all on what clearly was a relevant, tantalizing story until columnist Nick Coleman weighed in on March 31. Coleman’s column came after several weeks of badgering his editors to first get someone to do a straight news piece, at least on whether Heffelfinger might have been on a 2006 list of prosecutors to be moved out for more “loyal” replacements.
The fact that the Star Tribune was not alone in showing insufficient urgency for this story is central to my point. Besieged by new competition and gutted by their parent companies, big metro daily newspapers are still, for better and worse, the primary legitimizer of what is news in their home cities. They continue to set the news agenda—particularly on slow-evolving stories with complex bureaucratic twists.
TV reporters and news directors who say they don’t generate assignments off the morning papers are flat-out lying. The Twin Cities have the unique advantage of Minnesota Public Radio’s presence, with its comparatively large reporting staff. But MPR’s game is depth, not breadth. More to the point, MPR lacks the nerve to lead on a story like this, what with the first-ever female U.S. attorney in Minnesota—and a minority at that—as the central figure.
Two Star Tribune reporters, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, tell of being lectured once by McClatchy corporate types on the need to avoid the appearance of liberal bias. There probably isn’t a reporter alive who’d listen to something like that without taking offense. But the two Stribbers took even greater umbrage because the McClatchy-ite didn’t bother to offer examples of any of them engaging in bias, liberal or otherwise. What the two took away from the episode was the suspicion that “liberal bias” was really a marketing problem, and it’d be better for marketing if “we pulled punches on Republicans,” as one of them described it.
The appearance in the Paulose story is one of news judgment compromised by political and marketing concerns. For those who would hope that news judgment was above such considerations, this is just another bit of evidence that self-censorship and editorial timidity are compounding the effects of investor greed and the Internet. At the very least, newspapers could stop accelerating their own demise by killing off their lone remaining competitive advantage.
Read more Brian Lambert online.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply