One way to view the new Internet universe opening around us today is an immense cornucopia, pouring out a endless stream of facts and findings. A revolutionary democratization of knowledge is underway, the cyber pundits proclaim, making more information accessible to more people than at any moment in history.
Another way to view that universe is a catastrophic explosion, fragmenting knowledge into a vast amorphous cloud and obliterating the very institutions that give it shape and value.
At issue in this choice of metaphors, whether benevolent or apocalyptic, is not the capabilities of the Internet and its myriad applications. Their promise is almost infinite.
But 20 years into the Information Age, it’s time to set promises aside and ask what the revolution’s sum results have been. The answer, at the moment, is “explosive.”
REPORTERS: AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
As the Internet has taken hold, the institutional machinery that collects new facts about local and world affairs, organizes them and places them in context – in short, the established press – has been shattered.
With print circulation evaporating, and free access to online editions generating a tiny percentage of advertising revenues that comprised the principal source of newspaper income, publications all over the country are cutting their operations to the bone or shutting down altogether.
In the 30 months since World View first addressed the Internet’s effect on news, more than one-fourth of all fulltime newspaper reporting posts in the United States have been eliminated. The nearly 6,000-job decline in 2008-2009 alone was the greatest one-year loss in the history of the annual employment census conducted by the American Society of News Editors (ASNE).
The 2010 ASNE census found that a paltry 1,333 journalists nationwide, roughly 2 percent of the number who once filed in print, work solely online. A sizable proportion of them are columnists, rather than reporters.
It’s not the financial crisis of the news industry as a viable business that concerns us here, not simply the sinking fortunes of venerable media enterprises. Business models come and go. What matters is their performance.
The evidence, overwhelmingly, is that the basic functions of the news media are being abandoned – and with them, an essential bulwark of democracy.
On April 26, Arizona Republican John McCain defended his state’s xenophobic new anti-immigration law in a fiery speech at the U.S. Senate. He described the nation’s southwestern frontier as “unsecured,” wracked by lawless violence, and witnessing arrests of illegal border-crossers in numbers “that stagger.”
YouTube videos of the speech immediately went viral on the ‘net, and its most provocative excerpts were cited ad nauseum by conservative gurus on cable television and talk radio. Amid the rising clamor, President Obama sent 1,200 National Guard troops to the borderlands, tacitly suspending plans for comprehensive immigration reform.
It took three months before a single journalist, the New Yorker’s William Finnegan, filed the basic facts that tell the real story. According to the U.S. Border Patrol, he reported on July 26, arrests are actually at their lowest point in 35 years, and down 60 percent since 2000. Violent crime has risen in Mexico, but on the U.S. side of the border region it has plunged by 30 percent over the past two decades. The country’s four safest big cities, the F.B.I. confirmed, are San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, all of which are in border states.
Not long ago, reporters would have been assigned to follow up on McCain’s charges at scores of U.S. dailies. But that was before their staffs were gutted and their national bureaus shut down.
The Internet is destroying the Great American Fact Machine, while creating no new fact-hunting institutions to replace it.
THE GREAT AMERICAN FACT MACHINE
For a century or more, the American press recorded the life of cities as large and powerful as New York, and villages as modest as Whitesburg, Kentucky (pop. 1,600), whose weekly “Mountain Eagle” published my own early dispatches in the 1970s.
The Fact Machine registered marriages and births, murders and robberies, wars abroad and wars at home against disease and poverty, the peaks and valleys of economic output, the effects and causes of natural disasters, the scheduling and response to films, plays and concerts, the triumphs and traumas of sports and fashion.
In effect, it painted a complete and ever-changing portrait of a civilization, pictured down to its smallest elements.
“There’s a local angle to every story” was the punchline of a running joke in the business, but it was a joke with the ring of elementary truth. American democracy hummed with a ceaseless conversation fueled by the Fact Machine – a constant exchange of new data and analysis that connected the dots between Whitesburg, the Big Apple, Washington DC and the rest of the world.
The implicit object of that conversation was a search for meaning: accumulating new and more precise knowledge through direct experience, and interpreting it. There’s no better definition of journalism’s fundamental purpose, whether the setting is Main Street, Pennsylvania Avenue – or the far side of the planet.
A decade ago, ambitious reporting forays, foreign and domestic alike, were the lifeblood of the American press and the society it served. Their cumulative effect was perspective, taking seriously the axiom that nearly every story in today’s globalized world is “local”.
In 1998, the San Francisco Chronicle sent photographer Tim Kao and me on a three-month assignment to the Middle East and Central Asia. The main focus was on huge discoveries of oil and natural gas in the region surrounding the Caspian Sea and the Anatolian Plateau.
The series that emerged from our trip eventually touched on the rise of radical Islam, the consequences of the Soviet empire’s collapse, the emergence of a global traffic in arms, human beings and contraband, the impact of all these forces on such volatile lands as Iran, Iraq, the Caucasus, Eastern Turkey and Afghanistan – and their distant ripples in California.
The point is not that Tim and I had accomplished something unheard of. Our assignment might have been undertaken at dozens of regional U.S. newspapers then. Today, almost certainly, it would be considered by none but the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.
The well of reported facts is drying up. The dots are no longer being connected.
INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
With each passing day, the need for extensive media restructuring to meet this crisis grows more critical. The initial steps must be taken at the bottom line – convincing the public that news online is worth paying for, and building new online institutions that will invest in reporting.
The battle hasn’t yet been lost, especially if the surviving producers of news can agree on a unified economic strategy and lobby for legislation that extends effective copyright protection to online intellectual property.
But until restructuring is seriously underway, reporters will continue to vanish, not only at the international level, but also in the monitoring of local affairs. On both ends of that long chain and everywhere between, hardly anyone is watching the shop.
Aggregate press sites, such as Google News, Yahoo News and the Huffington Post, are what now passes for institutionalized journalism on the Internet. They are famous not for what they report – aggregates dispatch few or no reporters of their own into the costly fields of fact-gathering – but for what they snatch, without payment, from the shrinking ranks of print publications that continue to bear those costs.
The damage is piling up across the entire gamut of events and developments that once made the news an indispensable part of daily conversation, and by extension, daily life.
The army of reporters who once covered culture in all its guises – books, films, theater, architecture, painting and sculpture – has been reduced to a demoralized platoon. Musicians and actors complain of appearing before half-empty houses. “Our industry is dying along with yours,” a talented young violinist from Wisconsin told me in June “People don’t know when or what we are playing. They don’t read reviews anymore.”
I’ve had similar conversations with medical researchers appalled at the steady decline of science reporting in the press, and with it an indispensable link to ordinary citizens whose support is crucial to their work and its funding. Two decades after the Internet assumed a major role in U.S. society, promising its hyper-democratized flow of information, 85 percent of the scientists polled in 2009 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that the public’s ignorance of their work had become “a major problem.”
The Great American Fact Machine’s reporting role, we’re told, has been passed on to Facebook and Twitter, to millions of “people’s journalists.” Whatever their skills or motives, the effect is to reduce the world’s complexities to cursory electronic messages, spat promiscuously into a cyber-space environment whose chief characteristics include high-velocity “web surfing” and a dismally brief attention span.
Studies conducted by the Danish researcher Jakob Nielsen, an expert on human-computer interaction, have found that many people who follow news exclusively online read no more than 20 percent of an article.
HARRY WHO?
The system has all but collapsed, and its analytical conversation has faded into silence – or worse, been replaced by the braying of Fox News and talk radio, which trade in destructive propaganda and outright invention, nihilism disguised as journalism.
When professional reporting crumbles, so does the edifice of documented facts that offer safeguards against lies and manipulation. Against the perils of ignorance.
In a January 2010 nationwide survey of 1,000 American adults by the Pew Research Center, less than 40 percent recognized the name of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a main player in almost every significant American political debate over the past decade.
Only 32 percent knew that not a single Republican senator voted for the health reform bill, the number one domestic issue of 2009.
Last year, the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a national test designed to measure “civic literacy.” It surveyed U.S. students who entered college after 2005 – the first generation of Americans whose entire lives have been passed in the Internet era – on their grasp of the major issues of our day, the core premises of democracy and the key themes of American history and government. Fewer than half of incoming freshman were able to choose the right answers to 50 percent of the questions. Seniors hardly did better, with an average of 54 percent correct answers.
Not one of the participating schools, which included Harvard and Yale, achieved a score higher than 69 percent in its graduating class.