Alex S. Jones - Losing the News: The Uncertain Future of the News that Feeds Democracy

LOSING THE NEWS

Institutions of American Democracy

Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Jaroslav Pelikan, Directors

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THE FUTURE OF THE NEWS THAT FEEDS DEMOCRACY

ALEX S. JONES

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Alex S.

Losing the news : the future of the news that feeds democracy / Alex S. Jones.
p. cm. (Institutions of American democracy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-518123-4
1. JournalismPolitical aspectsUnited States.
2. JournalismEconomic aspectsUnited States.
3. JournalismObjectivityUnited States.
4. Journalistic ethicsUnited States.

I. Title.
PN4888.P6.J66 2009
071.3dc22 2009018385

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

FOR SUSAN

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland

CHAPTER 1
The Iron Core

CHAPTER 2
Media and Democracy

CHAPTER 3
The Fragile First Amendment

CHAPTER 4
Objectivitys Last Stand

CHAPTER 5
Media EthicsThe Painful Balance

CHAPTER 6
The Curious Story of News

CHAPTER 7
Newspapers on the Brink

CHAPTER 8
The New News Media

CHAPTER 9
Saving the News

The origin of this book was an invitation to write it from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Geneva Overholser in their capacity as coeditors of The Press, a part of the American Institutions of Democracy series of books published through a partnership of Oxford University Press and the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. Losing the News is also part of that series and a complement to The Press, which is a collection of scholarly essays that examine the history, identity, roles and future of the American press.

Their confederate in conceiving what became Losing the News was Tim Bartlett, who was the books first editor at Oxford University Press and was instrumental in framing what it should be. When Tim left Oxford, it passed into the extraordinarily capable hands of David McBride, who has been its principal guide and editor. But it has also been encouraged and enabled by an array of people at Oxford who believed it had an important message and have been enormously forbearing and supportive throughout. I especially wish to thank Niko Pfund, Oxfords academic and trade division publisher, for his commitment to seeing that the book was published well, and Keith Faivre, Sarah Russo, and Steve Dodson for their special efforts on my behalf.

I am grateful to friends who read the manuscript and offered guidance and corrections: Tom Patterson, Steve Oney, Nancy Palmer, John Carroll, Dan Okrent, Dudley Clendinen, Fred Schauer, Floyd Abrams, Nicco Mele, Camille Stevens, and Laurel Shackelford, whose rigor saved me many times.

My superb associates at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government, and Walter Shorenstein, the centers principal benefactor, have been my allies throughout.

I am also most grateful to Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, my agents, who were my allies from the start and contributed their counsel as well as their editorial wisdom.

It is important also to thank some particular people who inspired me along the way: Arthur Gelb, Joel Fleishman, Eugene Patterson, my late grandmother, Edith OKeefe Susong, and my parents, John M. and Arne Jones.

Throughout the making of Losing the News, I have had the support of family and friends too numerous to mention, but who are most appreciated and loved. They bolstered me in some dark days and were essential.

I wish also to say that I have drawn strength from my fellow journalists, who share many of my concerns, if not always my views. You are my colleagues.

Finally, I thank Susan Elizabeth Tifft, who is my first and last reader, my trusted editor, my boon companion and friend, and my beloved wife.

My best moment as a journalist took place in January 1986, around 3 A.M. in a hotel room that reeked of cigarette smoke and was littered with half-eaten sandwiches and abandoned glasses of watery iced tea. I was in the Hyatt Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, and for five days had been working on a story about why the Binghams, the towns most famous family, had abruptly decided to sell the newspapers that had made them Kentuckys first citizens. Family strife had prompted the sudden announcement of the sale of the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times, and I had immediately caught a plane to Louisville to cover the story for the New York Times. My beat was the press itself.

The collapse of the Bingham empire was big news because the Courier-Journal was regarded as perhaps the nations finest and most honored regional paper. It was also a catastrophe to the nations dwindling number of newspaper-owning families, who had looked at the Binghams as a model of success and determination to remain independent of chain ownership.

From my perspective, it was also a great story, and, after writing two fast articles, Id fought with my editor in New York for the chance to stay in Louisville to report and write a longer, more penetrating account of what had happened to this family. My editor was reluctant because I had been at the Times for only two years. He had a far more seasoned person in mind for the job, but I fought for it and managed to persuade him to give me my chance. For five days I interviewed frenetically, talking to everyone I could reach who might shed light on why this family had come apart. At night I wrote and rewrote a piece that eventually swelled to more than 6,500 words, which was practically novelistic by