As the Internet soars and newspapers wither, cheats and liars rejoice

To say that the way you receive your news has changed dramatically over the past 20 years might be considered a striking understatement. Or is it? Yes, broadcast network news shows have less than one-third the viewers they did in 1990, and newspaper readership is down by 50 percent, but that doesn’t mean the news delivery systems have changed all that much.

Newspapers have been damaged by corporate consolidation, selling and reselling properties until their owners were reeling in debt. This phenomenon has been repeated among American businesses of all types. It’s one of the reasons so many jobs have disappeared. If the Miami Herald were a stand-alone business and not part of a heavily indebted chain, it could easily be successful as a local daily with a complementary website. After all, news-gathering is news-gathering, regardless of how you distribute it.

It’s true that many people now get their news online, but they also get quite a bit of garbage, unsubstantiated rumors, and flat-out lies promulgated by people with off-the-wall agendas. This has been going for many years; only the medium has changed. For example, consider America’s first blogger, Thomas Paine. Best known for his pro-revolutionary rants in pre-revolutionary times, he became well known and well read, blogging on the Internet of the day -- printed pamphlets distributed on street corners.

Paine suffered from a malady that afflicts many bloggers today: His rants went from completely logical to completely loony. In time he lost all credibility and disappeared altogether from the political scene. He was once described by historian Saul K. Padover as a “corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination.” That would also define many of today’s bloggers.

The early days of radio and television had their own versions of bloggers. How about Walter Winchell, the columnist and radio icon who made up most of the stuff he talked about and guessed at the rest. That was the format for many early broadcasters. And how about Fox News, whose commentators don’t really make up the news, but color it to their liking. (I don’t believe Fox owner Rupert Murdoch distorts the news for political reasons but rather for ratings to make more money.) Fox is just doing the same stuff that William Randolph Hearst did a century ago, though Hearst did it for money and power.

Given today’s information machine, how do we get quality news that is both straightforward and informative? Good question, but a better question might be how much information do you want? During the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, a third of the nation was mortified that the President of the United States could have done those things he was accused of, a third felt it was all lies, and a third were suffering from information overload and simply didn’t want to hear any more bad news. So that means two-thirds of the nation didn’t want to hear anything more about it. How can we hope to have an informed society with numbers like that?

Now we have a situation in which newspapers are failing because of poor business choices, broadcast entities are growing weak because they don’t provide much news in the few seconds you tune in, and countless bloggers on the Internet give you their take on issues that generally have little or no news content. Where do we turn?

I have a friend in Atlanta (another unemployed journalist) who tried to set up a not-for-profit operation that would rely on contributions to do investigative reporting and distribute it to local news outlets. The goal was noble but it was a financial bust. While journalists may know how to live poor, they still need to eat.

The St. Petersburg Times is one of the few bastions of good journalism still surviving, thanks in no small part to the largesse of its late owner, Nelson Poynter. He was a true newspaperman and never sold out to or created a newspaper chain. When he died in 1978, he left the paper to a nonprofit group, the Poynter Institute, which still owns it. He also left the paper pretty much debt-free.

In addition to operating a high-quality newspaper, the Poynter Institute serves as a kind of journalism think tank. Its website hosts numerous bloggers for journalism professionals. A separate project, staffed by the Times, is a wonderful website called PoltiFact (www.politifact.com), which rates the comments of politicians and pundits for truthfulness. It is a must-read, which is why it won a Pulitzer Prize last year. Too bad we don’t have something like that for Miami politicos.

The bottom line here is that if you, the public, don’t force accountability from our elected leaders through quality investigative reporting with widespread distribution, the work will be left to state and federal prosecutors. However, the sad reality is that prosecutors are always behind the corruption curve. Savvy political crooks know just how much they can steal before they catch the eye of law enforcers. We need to stop them much earlier than that by ensuring they’ll be in the public eye. That is the deterrent, but only if you want it to be.

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