‘Professional’ journalism in America
Commentary by DICK DORWORTH
I live in our small town of Ketchum, and
most people reading this know it and the surrounding area. I write for this
small town’s weekly newspaper, which you are reading. This small town is unusual
in ways too numerous to describe here, but in many more ways it is not unusual
at all. Despite abundant material wealth, it is still just a town, a part of the
world where people live and die and work and dream and do their best to deal
with the problems and choices of the human condition. There are people who live
in Ketchum and the surrounding environs who think and refer to the area as "not
the real world," as "fantasyland," as a place and, by inference, a citizenry
somehow removed or isolated or protected from the "real" world out there
someplace else. I don’t agree with that perspective because it doesn’t match my
observations of the world and how it works (and, sometimes, doesn’t work),
locally, nationally and internationally. And, of course, a person who admits to
living in fantasyland and not in the real world is, by self-definition, of
questionable reliability and has a skewed perception that requires, at the
least, skepticism.
As a citizen, it is my responsibility not
to agree with the opinions of those who admittedly live in fantasyland. As a
journalist, it is my job not to agree with them. Where we live and work is, in
my view, part of and connected to everyplace else in the world and to everything
that lives within it. What we do and how we think and how we are at home is real
and has an effect in the world. Actually, it’s the only effect we can have.
In recent weeks, in both letters to the
editor and in conversations with citizens of this small town, I have heard the
opinion expressed that those of us in the small town journalism trade should
refrain from writing about national and international issues and, instead, focus
our efforts on local topics and leave national and international issues to those
who live and work in the national centers of power, like Washington, D.C., New
York and Los Angeles. There is certainly merit in the argument that journalists
with easy access to centers, positions and people of the power of America should
have more direct information with which to inform their writing. But the merit
is not definitive. Being too close to something is, in itself, in many ways a
limited perspective. That power corrupts is known to all. Power also distorts in
order to protect its own. One intention of democracy is to limit the corruptive
influence of power by dispersing that power among the citizenry. "Of the people,
for the people, and by the people" is not just a sound bite in a political
speech, or, at least, it is not supposed to be.
If the people in the small (and big) towns
of America get all their information and opinions about the nation and the world
from the major television networks and large, big-city newspapers, they need to
keep a few things in mind: In 1983 the majority of all U.S. news media was
controlled by 50 corporations; by 2000 it was controlled by only six giant
corporations. Political and other biases aside, those corporations are by law
obligated to put profitability at the forefront of their priorities. News media
makes its money from advertising, and advertisers, at the local, national and
international level, tend to put their money into media that endorses their
perspective of the world. While this is understandable and corporations have
every right to place their advertising where they choose, it makes professional
journalism an arm of the advertising industry of the corporate business world.
To say that ethical journalism is compromised by such a circumstance is to
understate the case. The problem is compounded when the very corporations that
pay for advertising own the media that lives on advertising. That largest of the
media giants is AOL/Time Warner, followed by the Disney Corporation and General
Electric. For an interesting exercise in what this might mean for the media, I
suggest tracking down on the internet the names of the Board of Directors of
AOL/Time Warner and the large corporations and businesses they represent and run
in addition to the media. Another is to track down all the businesses General
Electric is into, including the military. The journalists who work for the media
these mega-corporations control are unlikely to examine too closely issues that
might tarnish or call into question their employers’ interests. At least they
won’t do it more than once.
If journalists and other citizens
(journalists are citizens, too) in the small towns of America do not pay
attention and contribute to the larger dialogue, then the larger dialogue will
not pay attention or contribute to them, and that is the death of democracy. In
a recent local radio talk show about the upcoming war in Iraq, a local citizen
expressed the opinion that we needed to "trust" that our national leaders know
what they are doing, that they are telling us the truth about what they are
doing, and that they are acting in our best interests. This opinion, in my view,
has an intellectual content equivalent to that of those who live in a
self-described fantasyland. This is not only because of the obvious and repeated
mendacity of the current administration on a variety of topics---the economy,
the environment, the war on Iraq, immigration policy, justice, the re-building
of Afghanistan, Enron, education and the 2000 election in Florida, among other
things—but because in all administrations to mindlessly trust people in power is
dangerous, dumb and undemocratic. And it is the responsibility of small town
journalists who work for privately owned newspapers to continue to point this
out.