I learned quite a bit about what life had been like in Chicago in 1957, but I may have learned even more about the state of local journalism in what was then the nation’s second-largest city. I learned that with very few exceptions the page-one stories about the city’s politics and government were incremental additions to what had been offered the day before, with little perspective on what it was all about. If you were coming to the paper without much background knowledge, as I was, you had a hard time making sense of it. It wasn’t exactly a news desert, but it wasn’t a lush garden of juicy journalistic fruit, either.
The one partial exception was the Defender. It offered lots of background and stories about the major players, but only when they related to civil rights or race relations in general. It was the best you could get, but for just one aspect of city affairs.
I’ve thought about this old experiment of mine in the past few years as I’ve pondered the disappearance of newspapers and the decline in coverage of local government that this has created. The atrophy of local newspapers is a story nearly all of us have heard, and I don’t want to use up all my space describing it. But it’s useful to provide a few numbers to set the scene, most of them provided by the rigorous annual survey from the Local News Initiative of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
In the last two decades, Medill’s researchers report, nearly 40 percent of American newspapers have gone out of business, most of them in small towns, but a few in big cities where newspaper competition once thrived. More than 210 counties don’t have a newspaper at all; in 1,525 counties there is just one paper, nearly always a weekly. The Local News Initiative estimates that as many as 50 million Americans have “limited or no access to a reliable source of local news.”
I trust the figures from Medill, and I share the conviction that American journalism has a serious problem on its hands, especially in rural and small-town America. But rather than just mourning the losses, I want to step back and ponder just what sort of product we have lost, and what newer forms of expression are coming to replace it.
THE BIG-CITY DAILIES were reasonably healthy and profitable in the postwar years — at least the morning ones were. When it came to local government, they produced reasonable stories about what had happened the day before. But there was little perspective on what it all meant, and, most important, it didn’t tell you much of anything about the relationships among the players. It’s the relationships that most often explain politics.
This isn’t just a condition of modern American government. The British historian Lewis Namier established conclusively almost a century ago that when you study a legislative body, the crucial piece of evidence isn’t what the members say, it’s who they are. What backgrounds do they come from? Who is personally close to whom?
Namier isn’t a household name by any means, and he was writing about Britain’s Parliament, but I found him invaluable in the 1980s when I covered Congress for a daily newspaper. I eventually realized I could learn more by noticing which members sat next to each other than by listening to the speeches they delivered. The place ran on relationships. The reporters of the 1950s didn’t have a clue about that.
When we think about the daily journalism of a generation or more ago, we tend to rhapsodize about the columnists who used their verbal skills to tell us important things about what was going on in politics. We had Mike Royko in Chicago, Jimmy Breslin in New York and a handful of others I won’t stop to mention. But most big-city papers had political writers whose columns left the readers as puzzled when they finished them as when they started.
Reporting about politics in states around the country, I soon discovered that most political writers knew quite a bit about what was behind the daily events — they just didn’t put it in the paper. You had to call them up, promise to stay off the record, and then they would talk freely. Why didn’t they get more political reality into print? I had to conclude that they were so close to the political players that they didn’t want to dish on them in public. So the average reader had a hard job — or sometimes an impossible job — getting to the truth.
What was true about the daily papers was even more true of television news. There were some superb politics commentators on television — Len O’Connor in Chicago is perhaps the greatest example — but most cities didn’t have them. The TV news presenters were fixated on the public statements of the players even more than the newspapers were.
In smaller cities, the link between editors and political players was even closer. In many medium-sized towns, the editors met the elected officials for private conversation over breakfast in a downtown café. The papers were part of a bias toward the existing political power structure that existed in every region of the country. This was hard to break through, and it’s fair to say that the street reporters made little or no effort to break through it. They quite likely would have lost their jobs if they had.
The fundamental truth is that the level of knowledge that exists at a given time isn’t primarily a function of the amount of news readers are getting. It’s a function of the quality of that news and the willingness of the journalists who supply it to crack the cordon of pretense that public officials at all levels are all too willing to erect.
IT MAY SEEM THAT I AM MAGNIFYING THE FAULTS of mid-century journalism and failing to appreciate the world we have lost. That’s not my intention at all. I concede that a lot of mediocre newspapers are more valuable than a much smaller collection of mediocre newspapers. My only contrarian point is that we needn’t engage in nostalgia. We are better off looking at the state and local journalism we have now and thinking about ways it might evolve into something better.
From my living room at home, I can watch continuous coverage of the doings of the Virginia legislature and the Arlington County Board. That is true for state legislatures and local government bodies in most large cities in the country. You can watch to your heart’s content. I realize that very few people do this, and that those who do are vulnerable to the same myopia as readers of the local newspapers of my childhood. They aren’t getting much perspective; the videos alone don’t provide the background that would help them understand the events they are seeing. But for the true political aficionado, they are a treasure chest.
So, in a different way, are the websites that have emerged to comment on local politics and state legislative doings. In my medium-size state there are nearly a dozen of these, ranging from far left to centrist to far right. They are nearly all biased in one way or another, but they also offer insights about the players that nobody got from the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times in the 1950s. Nearly all the states, including the smallest ones, have several of these.
Then, finally, there are the nonprofit newspapers and news websites that the past few decades have generated. At the click of a mouse button, and without paying a cent, I can access the Texas Tribune, MinnPost in Minnesota, Mississippi Today, Voice of San Diego and dozens of others. They are far from perfect, but it seems to me they eclipse what existed in urban America during my childhood.
It’s true that these papers and websites have far smaller circulations that the papers of half a century ago. Most ordinary citizens don’t want to dig into the details of state and local political life, fascinating as they invariably are. That’s unfortunate. But it’s reality. We have to live with it and work around it.
The truth is that for those with an intense interest in politics, this is a journalistic golden age. For those who don’t care about politics very much, which is most people, it is a time of information drought. But that drought isn’t so new in the society we inhabit. We can do things to fight it. We are already doing some of them.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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