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What's Most Indispensable? Freddie MAC, AIG, Goldman Sachs or Journalism?

The news about the news business is grim. Broadcast news has largely failed, the AP foundering. Newspapers are under siege. The Christian Science Monitor and other newspapers have reduced frequency. The LA Times and Tribune Company are in bankruptcy. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone. The Chicago Sun-Times for sale, The Rocky Mountain News but a memory. Amidst today’s kerfuffle over bailouts, bonuses and banker bandits one question goes unanswered: Who’s Responsible For Saving American Journalism?

Robert W. Butche
Publisher Newsroom Magazine

Washington

Time For A National Policy On Journalism

This nation and this generation are under siege. The mistakes of the past have caught up with us even as the unfolding digital world of the future extends knowledge, reshapes culture and redefines media. The same forces which have corrupted business and finance have crippled the Fourth Estate. Big media, like big banks, big insurance companies and big Wall Street is badly damaged and widely corrupted. Newspapers owned for the wrong reasons and managed for cash flow have neither the vision nor drive to survive the technological tsunami.

The problems of failed, or failing journalism and news gathering are no less important to the long term survival of the nation than business and finance. The American nation cannot stand without responsible, credible and widely available institutions of journalism. Why isn’t America saving its most credible journalists and newspapers?

There is a higher calling — one that rests in an honored realm beyond the ordinary affairs of men. It is a sacred place — having been erected in the traditions of freedom, and consecrated in the blood of those who have paid the ultimate price in pursuing journalism’s enduring quest for truth. It is called The Honorable House Of The Fourth Estate being that place in the American experience where the bells of freedom ring loud and clear so that all free men and women shall forever know what matters most to their livelihoods, families, communities and nation.

Who's Looking Out For Credible Journalism?

What Sort Of America After The Los Angelse Times?

Who Will Ask The Critical Questions?

A Matter Of National Priority

The ultimate question facing journalism today is whether we are to be, or not to be.

In our national rush to save ourselves from ourselves, our narrow sense of time makes it nearly impossible to see the big picture while scrambling to fix symptoms. Banks, brokerages, finance, insurance are all critically important to our economic well being.

Saving them is not an option, but saving only them comes at far greater risk.  Somehow lost in the noise of economic collapse are issues of even greater importance. At the top of that list is first saving and then rebuilding our most critical non government institution: a free and vital journalistic presence in every community and every media.

If you haven’t heard it before, or covered it in your own reporting — listen up: The ongoing failure of American journalism threatens every other institution, organization, entity and person in the United States. With broadcast news badly corrupted, inept and flaccid, the backbone of responsible journalism rests entirely with what has traditionally been the print media. Who’s responsible for saving American journalism?

Unlike the failures in banking and finance, the mounting failures in this nation’s journalistic institutions threatens the Republic itself. Where will we be in the next generation if our most vital news sources wither and die?

One need not ponder this question for long before realizing that when it comes to saving those who speculated with our money or saving the institutions that speak truth to power and inform us on our world and nation, saving Wall Street has little meaning if we lose our fundamental freedoms, or our independence.

Widely available, honest, probative, credible and reliable journalism is fundamental to sustaining our democracy. Whether our best journalistic institutions publish on paper or electronically is not an issue — for the critical question is whether they can, or will continue to publish.

We need a national policy on journalism and a clear national goal to preserve the House Of The Fourth Estate in the new media world before us. Absent such a policy raises question as to whether or not the land of the free and the home of the brave could long stand in a world absent probative, credible and relevant information about ourselves and those who seek to govern us.