The old-fashioned, pavement-pounding, phone-calling, fact-checking, SOURCE-checking, note-taking kind of journalism that you see in All the President’s Men– does it still go on? Or has the 24/7 news cycle meant that media outlets just have to go with whatever they have or be scooped by some 12-year old’s YouTube video of an event? I used to love Lou Grant, too, and you saw the same kind of careful, responsible reporting there-- multiple sources had to confirm something before it was printed. I don’t think the major media outlets report “fake news” as our fearful leader has accused, but I also think rigor has gone out of journalism. (I know grammar has departed.)
Newsprint journalism was slower than radio/TV-- even so, in the day when big city papers put out several editions every day, they might have a couple of hours to get a story nailed down, where a TV station might have 1/4 that amount of time.
Any people in those industries care to comment?
Not sure if this belongs in GD, but I am asking for consideration of two sides of a question. Move if necessary.
The one that leaps to mind is the reporting done on a massive failure of journalism. In 2014 (I think) Rolling Stone published an article detailing a gang rape at the University of Virginia. When it was published the story was a sensation but some follow-up reporting done by the Washington Post revealed that the story was seriously flawed. In the end Rolling Stone retracted the story, the main subject was thoroughly discredited and the police found no evidence of a crime. At the request of Rolling Stone the very well regarded Columbia School of Journalism was asked to investigate and report on what happened which they did. The story is long but a good one and well worth a read. It shows where journalism failed and also shows where it succeeded brilliantly when rigorous reporting is done.
What saddens and sickens me is that you’re right that used to me more common really is “old-fashioned.” Oh, I know yellow journalism was always out there. It’s just that the standards have slipped so much that much of what passes for journalism is really just propaganda unloaded onto the public by Chiclet-smile spokesmodels with no real journalism background.
I’d like to rewatch All the President’s Men, but I’m afraid it nostalgia for what shouldn’t be gone would would overwhelm me.
The problem is the money is no longer there. Once upon a time having a NYT subscription was super common. Today not as many do and cash cows like classifieds are mostly gone. When your budget shrinks it is hard to maintain a robust editorial staff and reporters who can spend six months on one story.
While different, what you probably want is long term investigation type stories, as opposed to ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
For example I have an acquaintance that’s been following a story for years, with updates (in the form of articles in the news) every few weeks. She chases leads, she’s gone under cover to investigate claims, she makes phone calls to the right people etc. In fact, she’s picked up at least one Pulitzer Prize.
What, I think, you want is ‘investigative reporting’. Also, each article she publishes, as I imagine is the case for many people that do what she does, can be read as a standalone article. She can give an update about the factory poisoning the neighborhood, but you don’t have to read all the ones that came before it.
While perhaps not on the same level as the Post or the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune still does some investigative / longform journalism, and has several stories on which they’ve continued to dig and report on over the long term.
In 2013, Jezebel did an incredibly in-depth article investigating the working conditions of Lisa Frank in the 90s:
Jesse Frederik did an article blowing how companies are using the Netherlands as the tax haven of choice now (albeit this was originally in Dutch, so not American news):
On a lighter note, Ahoy almost conclusively proved the Polybius arcade cabinet legend was a hoax, down to narrowing it down to who probably started it by tracking down and interviewing the source of one of the earlier articles about it.
I’m not sure that it actually is any rarer now. It might just look that way because there’s now so much more bleeding-edge breaking news and biased propaganda that it gets lost.
I think that’s true, too. We’re drowning in news that isn’t news or even newsworthy.
I’d urge anyone who is so inclined to watch All the President’s Men again, or (OMG!) for the first time. I’ve watched it at least eight times in the last year. Exciting and inspiring. And all before computers, cell phones, or the internet.
I hope that you’re right, I really and truly due, but I fear you might not be. I honestly don’t know if newspapers and newspaper reporting are as robust as they once were.
Ad revenue was what drove newspapers in the past. My small local newspaper in my tiny town growing up (pop. 50,000) employed 10 people just servicing the adds and classified section of the paper. That paper is no longer in print.
My current local paper, the Washington Post had to kill a decent size tree on a Sunday. I bet the paper isn’t 25% of the size it used to be. The USAToday, probably never a bastion of in depth reporting to begin with, can’t be more that 20 pages anymore.
I worry that the money just there any more to support “rigorous journalism.”
Any problems web have are because of the people consuming the news, not those reporting it. Trump was right, he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his base wouldn’t care. It may be the most insightful thing he has ever said.
I think that that level of journalism is probably largely gone at smaller newspapers (if it was ever there in the first place). The newspaper in my hometown (the Green Bay Press-Gazette) was probably never a top-flight paper, but when I go home to visit my parents, and read the paper, it’s sad. There might be two pages of national news (and those are just syndicated pages provided by Gannett, the paper’s owner), and even the local news stories are usually very short. The paper’s focus is Packer news (and, particularly during football season, it’s a substantial part of the paper’s content), and the “arts and entertainment” section (which is mostly just stories about local entertainment events).
