Newspaper Deaths Suicide Not Murder

Newspapers play a vital role in society by holding the government accountable. They have the investigative power to reveal corruption and expose truths. They have been limited to just a handful of mass media conglomerates, however, that are far more accountable to their advertisers than to their readership. Increasingly political powers and big business seam to hold huge influence over the content of the news.

The apparent death of the printed news is typically blamed on the rise of free media on the internet. The newspaper industry blames mega internet search engines like Google for stealing the news stories out of newspapers and publishing them online for free, substituting the original advertising with their own. Google collects the ad revenue and gets the story for free, without any compensation to the newspaper that did all the work and footed the bill. It was newspaper investigative journalists that exposed the Catholic Church scandal involving priests who molested boys. The required foot work cost the newspapers millions of dollars. With readers shifting from the printed news to online sources, newspapers are losing the revenue needed to continue such investigative journalism.

The mass media argues that they have huge spending power to fund important investigations and therefore are essential in an honest democratic society. They say that small blogs and low-budget internet news sources aren’t capable of such critical reporting. They do acknowledge, however, that the blogs are winning over their readers and decreasing their funding for investigations.
The common, unchallenged theory is simply that readers are switching because online news is free. This theory ironically proves itself wrong. Failing to uncover the route of the cause and expose the reality behind the story is precisely why readers are losing faith in the printed press and jumping ship. The mass media has lost readership not simply because the internet is free or because independent media has stolen their hard work and given it away for free, but because the major newspapers have failed to do the job that they claim is so vital.

Those “minor” blogs and underfunded independent internet news sites are the ones that exposed so much of the George Bush regime’s lies. They are the ones who made the truths about 9/11 and Iraq known to the public. They are the ones that blow the whistle on corporate cronyism. Only much too late, when most people already read about the “conspiracy” online, did the major news pick up the story and report it as fact.

The mainstream media induces a self-inflicted wound every time it denounces the blogosphere as a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists. The media conglomerates are out of touch with the public, and greatly underestimate their intelligence and demand for tough reporting. The mainstream media has gone soft. They fail to ask the important questions which may expose the lies of the government, and far too many people recognize this huge oversight. These people are turning to internet news not because it is free in the monetary sense, but because it is true democratic freedom.