With the proximate sales of the Boston Globe and the Washington Post for significantly less than they once were worth (or once were thought to be worth), discourse on the challenges of print newspapers and the mainstream media permeated today’s daily reading.  The following three quotations, to which I’ve added emphasis, will give a sense of my opinion.

First an unsigned editorial in the Providence Journal:

In these days, people need newspapers more than ever for the unparalleled depth of information they provide and the forum they offer for rational discussion of matters of vital public interest, even if the shift from print to digital has made it harder to monetize that.

Then Matt Welch on Reason:

In the midst of a Luddite rant about how Bezos has “devastated the publishing industry,” MacGillis snorts out a six-word advertisement for journalistic closed-mindedness: “His politics are not visibly objectionable.”

Try to move past the fact that The New Republic is now owned by a Facebook billionaire who  used to run Barack Obama’s social media campaign, and instead focus on the underlying assertion here: Ideology and political activity outside the journalist-drawn boundaries must be objected to.

And finally, Michael Walsh, on National Review:

When I started at Time in 1981 under its last great managing editor, Ray Cave, it was commonly acknowledged that the Big Seven media outlets decided what was and was not news for the American public: the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the three broadcast networks. Today, not so much. In their place have come the small furry mammals of the Internet, harassing and ultimately supplanting the Manhattan- and Washington-bound dinosaurs. Somewhere along the line, Sousa’s Washington Post March turned into a march of the falsettos. The old media continued to bleat, but once they proudly jettisoned the outdated notion of at least nominally “objective” journalism in favor of “higher truth” and partisan cheerleading, their audience abandoned them. …

The irony is that many mainstream journalists spent the better parts of their careers striving to become opinion journalists and talking heads instead of grubby reporters, and all of a sudden they find themselves in a democratized world in which everybody is a talking head and opinion journalist.

As always in these discussions, I’m inclined to insist that there are two separate sides to this coin: politics and ideology.

On the first count, I highlighted the other day, with Congressman David Cicilline as the representation, that overt politics enters the mainstream media’s public image through the editorial handling of politicians and their issues (in both the news and commentary contexts) as well as the revolving door between the Democrat party and its causes and the news media.

Most folks, out in the great masses of the general public, don’t identify themselves in life primarily in terms of their political affiliation, and they don’t acknowledge the received wisdom of media gatekeepers and political insiders. At some point, it becomes obvious that the “forum for rational discussion” happens to be located within the headquarters of one, self-interested side.

This homogeneity is even more pervasive on the ideological front.  Without regard to whether a liberal Moderate or liberal Republican could match a Democrat for media affection, without regard to whether a unionized journalism department can offer unbiased coverage of its parent union’s political activism (while not disclosing the relationship), if the product that people seek from the news media is a fair summary of what’s going on in the world, an ideologically tilted news team will simply not be able to plausibly create that product.

There will be aspects to reality that are clearly present to the general public that a tilted news class will not see.  Over time, as alternative information sources emerge, people will come across perspectives of which they were entirely ignorant, and they’ll wonder how that could be.  Why pay a premium to folks to create a journal of the world, if their notes will be incomplete?

Frankly, I’m not optimistic that the mainstream media can move beyond its present challenges, because I’m not convinced that enough of its practitioners understand where the boundaries of “rational discussion” are.  Nobody would insist that any report on the weather should give due attention to a belief that rain drops are produced by water pixies, but that doesn’t mean that environmentalist boosterism captures the objectively definable world.

Some years ago, I emailed Peter Lord — the Projo’s environmental reporter, prior to his death in 2012 — to suggest that if he was having trouble finding people to express skepticism about the government’s buying up all sorts of land across the state, I’d fill the role.  He replied that he’d certainly be interested in knowing of any actual downsides, because he didn’t see them.  I can only infer from his silence that my response read to him as if I were suggesting that the government was just giving invisible trolls romping room to procreate.

But even obligatory, pro forma citations of opposition sources is insufficient.  Those are only a surface indication of what’s going on beneath.

Contrary to the self-image expressed in the Projo editorial above, the central value proposition of modern news media is not an “unparalleled depth of information.”  As a medium, there’s simply no parallel to the Internet for gathering information almost at any depth or shallow breadth one might care to pursue.  Rather, the value that professional news organizations provide is in culling that depth and breadth to its most important pieces in digestible format.

In a sense, they’re news aggregators, like the Drudge Report, but going beyond that to aggregate news from the real world, rather than just the Internet.  If they aren’t aggregating the news that people want — or in the way that people want — they won’t maintain an audience.

The other day, somebody pointed out to me that Jim Baron, of the Pawtucket Times, appears to have been unique in thinking it newsworthy amidst the flurry of same-sex marriages that the National Organization for Marriage is promising that it isn’t curling up and dying now that state legislators and Governor Chafee have redefined marriage.  It doesn’t take induction into the “extreme right wing fringe” to think the reason for the limited coverage may be that many in the media agree with same-sex-marriage activist Ray Sullivan that the issue is settled and lingering statements of opposition are so much “bluster” in the service of fundraising.

Sullivan’s is a mean-spirited, disrespectful, and dehumanizing assertion even coming from an activist, but I’d suggest that anybody wondering at the ascendance of talk radio, Fox News, and the rolling avalanche of online media sources at the apparent expense of the legacy players should question whether it’d be reasonable to doubt whether the publishers of, say, the Providence Journal would express the opinion much differently… assuming they were in the practice of disclosing that sort of thing.