The transformation of journalism into entertainment has been a steady, unstoppable, inevitable continuum. But the process that started last century - with Pulitzer's New York World or Murdoch's London Sun? - has taken on a new, desperate urgency. And that urgency is being driven by the most primal instinct of all: survival.
Almost every form of media is being forced to confront the possibility of its own form of creative destruction. Network television audiences are falling steadily, and a widely available device in the US called TiVo now enables viewers to skip the ads (which will destroy the television business model if the TV networks can't run TiVo out of business). Newspapers are losing readers at a spiralling rate, and in response are trying everything from free editions for "young people" to recasting 200-year-old broadsheets as tabloids. Popular magazines are locked in an ever-descending circulation war for which their only solution is to become trashier. Even the internet, the most modern mass medium of all, has been through several commercial iterations without yet finding one that works for shareholders.
But the real victim of this maelstrom is journalism. From top to bottom, from broadsheet to tabloid, from print to broadcast, journalism has become an almost innocent casualty in the fight for the commercial survival of the media species.
And we're not just talking about so-called serious journalism. In Britain, for example, popular newspapers have now transformed themselves into "organs of entertainment instead of organs of information," says Roy Greenslade in The Guardian. They have "forgotten what journalism is about," and have become so focused on being entertaining that celebrity is no longer "an aspect" of the popular paper agenda, it is now its "raison d'etre." In a critique that could apply equally to Australia's rash of weekly magazines (Woman's Day, New Idea, Who, NW, etc), Greenslade talks of how the media have been "subordinated by the fame game" because their survival depends on "satisfying the appetite they've stimulated so successfully among their audiences." They have become both the "drug pushers and the drug addicts" because, as perpetrator and victim, they "cannot stop the world and get off."
It's the same process through a different lens that Mark Day described in a scathing column in The Australian last year, in which he attacked Australia's mass-selling women's magazines for making up much of what they report as fact. "It's as if they have crossed the line between reporting factually and faithfully as news gatherers are meant to do, and the realm of pure entertainment," wrote Day. And while the owners of these magazines justify their actions on the grounds that their "pap sells" and they have "bottom lines to protect," Day says they should be ashamed of doing it by "abandoning any commitment to the truth."
At the opposite end of the very same spectrum, there's the New York Times Book Review, one of the "most hallowed institutions in the world of books," in the words of Paul Harris in last week's Observer (UK). The Sunday book review section of the estimable Times now stands accused of "dumbing down for the mass market," writes Harris. This follows a recent interview given by Bill Keller, the new executive editor of the NYT, who suggested that the Book Review needed to be taken in a new direction. He called for more non-fiction books to be reviewed, fewer literary works, and a "closer look at 'potboilers', for the benefit of people choosing books at airports." Reviews of authors' first books were also too long, said Keller - "why take up 800 words when a paragraph will do?" These comments "set off alarm bells among Manhattan's intellectuals," says Harris: readers and publishers reacted with "stunned horror," and Keller was "deluged with angry e-mails and letters."
Which only goes to show that the entertainment-for-journalism replacement process is going on at every strata of media business, with as much angst among the toffs as among the tabloids.
Republished with permission from The Reader, 13 February, 2004, No. 34
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ERIC BEECHER is Editor of The Reader
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Monday, February 23, 2004