News:

Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, by Alex S. Jones Oxford University Press, 234 pages, $24.95

The arrival on the bookshelves of Alex S. Jones’s new book, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, seems serendipitous. Scant months after the book’s release, the Obama White House disavowed Fox News Channel as a legitimate, objective news outlet and characterized it as a branch of the Republican Party. That controversy took place against a backdrop of perpetual accusations of bias against the so-called liberal media establishment, particularly, of late, regarding its supposed fawning over President Barack Obama. Jones is worried about such issues: even if news organizations are not steadily abandoning objectivity, growing numbers of Americans perceive otherwise. This increasing skepticism of journalistic objectivity, and general cynicism about the news, has led more and more citizens to get their news from explicitly opinionated sources: talk radio; blogs; and even satirical programs, like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report.

However troubling this trend may be, Jones argues in Losing the News that the problems facing journalism go beyond presumptions and allegations of bias. According to Jones, the illegitimatizing of objectivity is part of a larger dilemma that also includes the decline of newspapers, the rise of Web journalism, and the abandonment of media ethics. The histories and trajectories of these trends are intertwined, and Jones argues passionately, yet also reasonably, that they have coalesced to present a dire threat to First Amendment rights and to a functioning, open civil society. In Jones’s view, the pervasive distrust toward, occasionally even disdain for, traditional news sources and the ascent of new media is responsible for a full-scale crisis—not just for journalism but also for the country.

 

Jones is an old-fashioned journalist—a newspaperman—and he has lived a life immersed in and devoted to the Fourth Estate: his family owns and operates Tennessee’s Greenville Sun; he wrote for the New York Times from 1983 to 1992, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1987; he has written two notable books on the history of journalism; and he currently is director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University. Although Jones’s life of the news and love of traditional reportage is palpable in every sentence, which gives his book a real energy, he does have a tendency to romanticize. His arguments are often laced with sentimental and nostalgic evocations of small-town newspaper life, scrappy reporters in the His Girl Friday vein, and intractable investigators a la Woodward and Bernstein.

Still, despite his moments of wistfulness, Jones is clearly focused on the years ahead. His book deftly analyzes the current state of the news, leading logically and persuasively into its dim prospects unless changes are made: “News—or something that looks like it—will exist in the future, of course. There will be, through the Web, a torrent of news and opinion. But high-quality news is expensive to produce, and in even shorter supply. . . . One thing is certain: the revolution in news now taking place will be critical to defining what kind of a nation we become in the years ahead” (xvii). Jones’s contention is that the ongoing deterioration of traditional print and broadcast news business models, a result of the assault of twenty-four-hour cable news and the Web, is having a stultifying effect on the public sphere and is corroding the public interest. Jones is a talented writer, and his prose is engaging and persuasive. Despite some limitations—most glaringly, the few substantive solutions to the problem—Losing the News is a thoughtful and important account of journalism’s role in policy and public life. 

Jones’s central metaphor is that of an iron core around which the news—as an entity that also includes opinion, sports scores, entertainment information, special interest features, and Sudoku—is constructed. Fact-based journalism constitutes this iron core, which Jones divides into a three-tiered hierarchy: the bearing witness of significant events; fair disseminations of public policy; and prolonged, probing investigative reports. As the foundation of this iron core, Jones identifies not only the costly Washington and foreign bureaus of larger papers but also the city-hall beats that are steadily disappearing from smaller newspapers. He, of course, cites the journalistic exposure of the Watergate conspiracy, the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, and prestigious Pulitzer Prize recipients as evidence for the iron core’s value. For the most part, the metaphor works: in addition to evoking a sense of sturdiness and gravitas, Jones’s vehicle suggests the familiar concept of hard news that tends to be reflexively lauded and unquestioningly respected, even by those who ignore it.

Jones is smart to point out that the iron core of newspapers has never been profitable in and of itself; rather, sports, comics, and crosswords have always subsidized the news. Jones describes “a virtuous circle of profitability and public service. The greatest news expense was for serious journalism, which was not necessarily the part of the paper that prompted the most sales, but which was in the public interest”. Jones does not attempt to convince his readers that the news is, should be, or has ever been popular and widely read—only that it plays an important public role by grounding all national conversations. Appealing to a civic spirit in the era of bowling alone may seem like a dubious strategy, but Jones’s acknowledgement that to prefer the “Living” section over the front page is neither a recent nor a necessarily shameful phenomenon could be an effective means of preserving the news’s public function. If Jones and like-minded others maintain this line of persuasion, they could potentially enlist advocates of hard news out of people who will guiltlessly avoid it. Of course, the audience for Losing the News more than likely overlaps significantly with the iron core’s audience; nevertheless, Jones is wise, strategically, to stress the point that Americans should have their vegetables but don’t all have to eat them, too.