Public Rejects Newspapers’ Survivalist RhetoricRandy Shawbyline‚ Jun. 09‚ 2009Markos Moulitsas, whose Daily Kos helped shift the nation’s politics leftward, recently noted that newspaper circulation began its steady decline in 1993, well before the rise of the Internet, and that “what the newspaper industry is trying to save right now isn't ‘journalism’, it's ‘shareholder value’.” Moulitsas created a site that regularly produces critical news “missed” by newspapers and the corporate media, often by design. And Daily Kos does this at a fraction of the budget of a major newspaper. But he is an all too rare voice questioning the oft-repeated link between newspapers and the survival of democracy, and the profit-hungry media giants’ redefining themselves as agents of the public interest. The fact is that the rise of corporate media ownership weakened the quality of newspapers, and that while the Internet expedited the decline, an inferior product, not lack of money, is the top problem. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle has responded to its recent crisis by rerunning top stories of the past 144 years, and by profiling prominent people who once graduated from Bay Area schools. And then it blames the Internet for its failure to attract new readers. |