This is a long read on the pressures the modern press has to confront and deal with. It is well worth reading it all if you are interested in freedom of the press: Yes, Peter Oborne, ads hurt press freedom. But the alternative is worse  Simon Jenkins A searing indictment of the Telegraph’s HSBC reporting underlines the critical balance between holding readers’ faith and staying in business  A Reporters Sans Fontières poster. ‘The only champion of a free press is not some regulator or commission or charter board. It is the free press itself. Plurality, rivalry, disclosure, exposure and sometimes fury are the best guardians.’ Photograph: Benoit Tessier/Reuters Wednesday 18 February 2015 19.22 GMT Last modified on Thursday 19 February 2015 02.11 GMT Newspapers are institutionalised hypocrisy. They excoriate yet they cringe. They speak truth to power and then sup at its table. They stick their moral noses in the air while their bottoms rest on festering heaps of deals, perks, bribes and ads, without which they would not exist. The most amazing thing is that this murky edifice has delivered Britain a remarkably robust and free-spirited press. A commentator on the Daily Telegraph, Peter Oborne, broke cover this week with a searing indictment of his paper’s evident reluctance to cover the HSBC tax evasion saga.(See Below) Newspapers tend to downplay the scoops of others, as many did the Guardian’s WikiLeaks and Snowden revelations of 2011 and 2013. But a big story trumps such rivalry, as the Telegraph found to its advantage with its MPs’ expenses exposé in 2009. Oborne’s charge – denied by the Telegraph – is that the newspaper was soft on the story not out of rivalry, nor even to its owners’ residency in a Channel Island tax haven, but from a fear of losing advertising revenue.  Telegraph's Peter Oborne resigns, saying HSBC coverage a 'fraud on readers' Read more HSBC had stopped advertising in the Telegraph in 2012 over a similar story to the Guardian’s, about tax evasion in Jersey, and the management was frantic to see revenues restored. In other words, HSBC was not just illegal and unethical but also a bully. The Guardian also recently had its HSBC ads “paused”, but declined to yield. That HSBC was chaired by an Anglican priest who took the government shilling as an ennobled minister merely illustrates the many-splendoured architecture of the British establishment. An American newspaper is said to have carried the ironic motto “As independent as resources permit”. Any student of the press knows what this means. A business page protocol ordains gentle treatment of proprietorial interests. Fashion pages would not exist without kickbacks, or travel pages without “contra” deals on hospitality and mentions. I remember perfume firms threatening to withdraw ads after stories on animal cruelty. There is no question standards are slipping. Page layouts are “bastardised” by wraparounds. Ill-shapen ads jut into editorial space, a once unthinkable concession to ad managers. I cringe when I see “sponsored content” supplements full of “advertorial”. I gather some titles now actively seek corporate sponsorship for columnists. Rupert Murdoch was robust in backing investigative reporting at Times Newspapers, especially on the Sunday Times. He did so to a fault in the case of the phone-hacking News of the World. But his Times undoubtedly restrained its China coverage when he was struggling for a media deal with Beijing. Even the Guardian cannot be regarded as immune from such pressures. In March 2007 Labour’s short-lived Pathfinder scheme, involving dire housing demolitions in the north, was inexplicably eulogised in a Guardian supplement in return for an undisclosed payment from the government. Today its “branded content partner zone” is occupied by Unilever, “whose sources of revenue allow us to explore, in more depth than editorial budgets would otherwise allow, topics that we hope are of interest”. Hence this week’s frothy promotion, under the Guardian masthead, of a “green sex sustainable” condom – though it’s also fair to point out that the Guardian columnist George Monbiot launched a withering attack on the partnership in these pages. Any loss-making journal is at the mercy of its paymasters, be they the state, commerce, philanthropy or individuals I have never come across anything as serious as Oborne’s accusations against the Telegraph and its “creative advertising solutions”. But financial necessity has become the mother of ethical invention, or at least corner-cutting. Any loss-making journal is at the mercy of its paymasters, be they the state, commerce, philanthropy or individuals. The worst newspapers are run by governments, be they the organs of authoritarian regimes or the limp newssheets issued by local councils following the collapse of a local press (aided by the BBC’s local radio). But if state ownership is journalistically barren, private ownership is a mess. It is a market dominated less by money than by power, influence and glamour. Most serious publications have for half a century depended on subsidy, which leaves them at the mercy of their boards and benefactors. The Independent struggles under the generosity of an oligarch. The Times depends on some rich man craving its ownership. The Telegraph survives through staff cuts and deals with advertisers. The Guardian’s security has been bought at the expense of years of closures and job losses at its media subsidiaries. The best guarantor of editorial integrity remains an organisation stable enough to protect its staff and their work from the tempests of the marketplace – including advertisers. Many such organisations exist. I don’t share the media commentator Clay Shirky’s forecast of an industry “going bankrupt gradually then suddenly”. Nor do I see the digital media, as does Andrew Keen, as a hell of virals, angries, trolls, click farms and “abrasive young men with personality defects … in which trust is the greatest casualty”. Newspapers and broadcasters still have the resources and skills to digest, process and transmit masses of information in such a way as to hold the faith of readers. That is a vital democratic construct. Peter Oborne may be a maverick but his Telegraph revelations are dynamite Roy Greenslade  Read more Oborne is a maverick. His works embrace such themes as The Rise of Political Lying, the Collapse of Public Standards and the achievements of Alastair Campbell. His veins run with the blood of scepticism. As such he is a corrective to any complacency on the part of what he derides as today’s “client journalists”. They are reporters who play safe, averting their eyes from such establishment outrages as the sale of peerages, corruption of politics by lobbyists, and appeasement of non-doms and tax evaders. Oborne has extended his charge sheet to venal advertisers. There is no question that the private sector is an insecure way of financing a free press that does not make money. But all other ways are worse. There are still as many daily newspapers published in Britain (nine) as there were 50 years ago, a continuous diversity available to no other western country. Online has not wiped out print. It has enhanced the penetration and prominence of both. In which case, we can only thank goodness for expediency. The only champion of a free press is not some regulator or commission or charter board. It is the free press itself. Plurality, rivalry, disclosure, exposure and sometimes fury are the best guardians. That is what we saw this week. One Oborne is worth 10 Levesons. • Press freedom • Newspapers • Newspapers & magazines • Telegraph Media Group • National newspapers • HSBC • *********************************** •  • openDemocracy • OurKingdom ◦ About ◦ Donate ◦ Debates ◦ OurNHS ◦ LocalismWatch ◦ OurBeeb ◦ Shine a light ◦ There is an Alternative • oDR • oD 50.50 • openSecurity • Transformation • More • Why I have resigned from the Telegraph • Peter Oborne 17 February 2015 • The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril. •  • Five years ago I was invited to become the chief political commentator of the Telegraph. It was a job I was very proud to accept. The Telegraph has long been the most important conservative-leaning newspaper in Britain, admired as much for its integrity as for its superb news coverage. When I joined the Telegraph had just broken the MPs’ expenses scandal, the most important political scoop of the 21st century. • I was very conscious that I was joining a formidable tradition of political commentary. I spent my summer holiday before taking up my duties as columnist reading the essays of the great Peter Utley, edited by Charles Moore and Simon Heffer, two other masters of the art. • No one has ever expressed quite as well as Utley the quiet decency and pragmatism of British conservatism. The Mail is raucous and populist, while the Times is proud to swing with the wind as the voice of the official class. The Telegraph stood in a different tradition. It is read by the nation as a whole, not just by the City and Westminster. It is confident of its own values. It has long been famous for the accuracy of its news reporting. I imagine its readers to be country solicitors, struggling small businessmen, harassed second secretaries in foreign embassies, schoolteachers, military folk, farmers—decent people with a stake in the country. • My grandfather, Lt Col Tom Oborne DSO, had been a Telegraph reader. He was also a churchwarden and played a role in the Petersfield Conservative Association. He had a special rack on the breakfast table and would read the paper carefully over his bacon and eggs, devoting special attention to the leaders. I often thought about my grandfather when I wrote my Telegraph columns. • ‘You don’t know what you are fucking talking about’ • Circulation was falling fast when I joined the paper in September 2010, and I suspect this panicked the owners. Waves of sackings started, and the management made it plain that it believed the future of the British press to be digital. Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive, invited me to lunch at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace, where Telegraph executives like to do their business. I urged him not to take the newspaper itself for granted, pointing out that it still had a very healthy circulation of more than half a million. I added that our readers were loyal, that the paper was still very profitable and that the owners had no right to destroy it. • The sackings continued. A little while later I met Mr MacLennan by chance in the queue of mourners outside Margaret Thatcher’s funeral and once again urged him not to take Telegraph readers for granted. He replied: “You don’t know what you are fucking talking about.” • Events at the Telegraph became more and more dismaying. In January 2014 the editor, Tony Gallagher, was fired. He had been an excellent editor, well respected by staff. Mr Gallagher was replaced by an American called Jason Seiken, who took up a position called ‘Head of Content.’ In the 81 years between 1923 and 2004 the Telegraph had six editors, all of them towering figures: Arthur Watson, Colin Coote, Maurice Green, Bill Deedes, Max Hastings and Charles Moore. Since the Barclay Brothers purchased the paper 11 years ago there have been roughly six more, though it is hard to be certain since with the arrival of Mr Seiken the title of editor was abolished, then replaced by a Head of Content (Monday to Friday). There were three editors (or Heads of Content) in 2014 alone. • For the last 12 months matters have got much, much worse. The foreign desk—magnificent under the leadership of David Munk and David Wastell—has been decimated. As all reporters are aware, no newspaper can operate without skilled sub-editors. Half of these have been sacked, and the chief sub, Richard Oliver, has left. • Solecisms, unthinkable until very recently, are now commonplace. Recently readers were introduced to someone called the Duke of Wessex. Prince Edward is the Earl of Wessex. There was a front page story about deer-hunting. It was actually about deer-stalking, a completely different activity. Obviously the management don’t care about nice distinctions like this. But the readers do, and the Telegraph took great care to get these things right until very recently. • The arrival of Mr Seiken coincided with the arrival of the click culture. Stories seemed no longer judged by their importance, accuracy or appeal to those who actually bought the paper. The more important measure appeared to be the number of online visits. On 22 September Telegraph online ran a story about a woman with three breasts. One despairing executive told me that it was known this was false even before the story was published. I have no doubt it was published in order to generate online traffic, at which it may have succeeded. I am not saying that online traffic is unimportant, but over the long term, however, such episodes inflict incalculable damage on the reputation of the paper. • Open for business? • With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed. • Late last year I set to work on a story about the international banking giant HSBC. Well-known British Muslims had received letters out of the blue from HSBC informing them that their accounts had been closed. No reason was given, and it was made plain that there was no possibility of appeal. "It’s like having your water cut off," one victim told me. • When I submitted it for publication on the Telegraph website, I was at first told there would be no problem. When it was not published I made enquiries. I was fobbed off with excuses, then told there was a legal problem. When I asked the legal department, the lawyers were unaware of any difficulty. When I pushed the point, an executive took me aside and said that "there is a bit of an issue" with HSBC. Eventually I gave up in despair and offered the article to openDemocracy. It can be read here. • I researched the newspaper’s coverage of HSBC. I learnt that Harry Wilson, the admirable banking correspondent of the Telegraph, had published an online story about HSBC based on a report from a Hong Kong analyst who had claimed there was a ‘black hole’ in the HSBC accounts. This story was swiftly removed from the Telegraph website, even though there were no legal problems. When I asked HSBC whether the bank had complained about Wilson's article, or played any role in the decision to remove it, the bank declined to comment. Mr Wilson’s contemporaneous tweets referring to the story can be found here. The story itself, however, is no longer available on the website, as anybody trying to follow through the link can discover. Mr Wilson rather bravely raised this issue publicly at the ‘town hall meeting’ when Jason Seiken introduced himself to staff. He has since left the paper. • Then, on 4 November 2014, a number of papers reported a blow to HSBC profits as the bank set aside more than £1 billion for customer compensation and an investigation into the rigging of currency markets. This story was the city splash in the Times, Guardian and Mail, making a page lead in the Independent. I inspected the Telegraph coverage. It generated five paragraphs in total on page 5 of the business section. • The reporting of HSBC is part of a wider problem. On 10 May last year the Telegraph ran a long feature on Cunard’s Queen Mary II liner on the news review page. This episode looked to many like a plug for an advertiser on a page normally dedicated to serious news analysis. I again checked and certainly Telegraph competitors did not view Cunard’s liner as a major news story. Cunard is an important Telegraph advertiser. • The paper’s comment on last year’s protests in Hong Kong was bizarre. One would have expected theTelegraph of all papers to have taken a keen interest and adopted a robust position. Yet (in sharp contrast to competitors like the Times)I could not find a single leader on the subject. • At the start of December the Financial Times, the Times and the Guardian all wrote powerful leaders on the refusal by the Chinese government to allow a committee of British MPs into Hong Kong. The Telegraph remained silent. I can think of few subjects which anger and concern Telegraph readers more. • On 15 September the Telegraph published a commentary by the Chinese ambassador, just before the lucrative China Watch supplement. The headline of the ambassador’s article was beyond parody: ‘Let’s not allow Hong Kong to come between us’. On 17 September there was a four-page fashion pull-out in the middle of the news run, granted more coverage than the Scottish referendum. The Tesco false accounting story on 23 September was covered only in the business section. By contrast it was the splash, inside spread and leader in the Mail. Not that the Telegraph is short of Tesco coverage. Tesco pledging £10m to fight cancer, an inside peak at Tesco’s £35m jet and ‘Meet the cat that has lived in Tesco for 4 years’ were all deemed newsworthy. • There are other very troubling cases, many of them set out in Private Eye, which has been a major source of information for Telegraph journalists wanting to understand what is happening on their paper. There was no avoiding the impression that something had gone awry with the Telegraph’s news judgment. At this point I wrote a long letter to Murdoch MacLennan setting out all my concerns about the newspaper, and handing in my notice. I copied this letter to the Telegraph chairman, Aidan Barclay. • I received a cursory response from Mr Barclay. He wrote that he hoped I could resolve my differences with Murdoch MacLennan. I duly went to see the chief executive in mid-December. He was civil, served me tea and asked me to take off my jacket. He said that I was a valued writer, and said that he wanted me to stay. • I expressed all of my concerns about the direction of the paper. I told him that I was not leaving to join another paper. I was resigning as a matter of conscience. Mr MacLennan agreed that advertising was allowed to affect editorial, but was unapologetic, saying that “it was not as bad as all that” and adding that there was a long history of this sort of thing at the Telegraph. • I have since consulted Charles Moore, the last editor of the Telegraph before the Barclays bought the paper in 2004. Mr Moore confessed that the published accounts of Hollinger Inc, then the holding company for the Telegraph, did not receive the scrutiny they deserved. But no newspaper in history has ever given an unfavourable gloss on its owner’s accounts. Beyond that, Mr Moore told me, there had been no advertising influence on the paper’s news coverage.   • After my meeting with Mr MacLennan I received a letter from the Telegraph saying that the paper had accepted my letter of resignation, but welcomed my offer to work out my six-month notice period. However in mid January I was asked to meet a Telegraph executive, this time over tea at the Goring Hotel. He told me that my weekly column would be discontinued and there had been a "parting of the ways". • He stressed, however, that the Telegraph would continue to honour my contract until it ran out in May. For my part I said that I would leave quietly. I had no desire to damage the newspaper. For all its problems it continues to employ a large number of very fine writers. They have mortgages and families. They are doing a fine job in very trying circumstances. I prepared myself mentally for the alluring prospect of several months paid gardening leave. • Story, what story? • That was how matters stood when, on Monday of last week, BBC Panorama ran its story about HSBC and its Swiss banking arm, alleging a wide-scale tax evasion scheme, while the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published their 'HSBC files'. All newspapers realised at once that this was a major event. The FT splashed on it for two days in a row, while the Times and the Mail gave it solid coverage spread over several pages. • You needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday. The Telegraph’s reporting only looked up when the story turned into claims that there might be questions about the tax affairs of people connected to the Labour party. • After a lot of agony I have come to the conclusion that I have a duty to make all this public. There are two powerful reasons. The first concerns the future of the Telegraph under the Barclay Brothers. It might sound a pompous thing to say, but I believe the newspaper is a significant part of Britain’s civic architecture. It is the most important public voice of civilised, sceptical conservatism. • Telegraph readers are intelligent, sensible, well-informed people. They buy the newspaper because they feel that they can trust it. If advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments, how can readers continue to feel this trust? The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers. There is only one word to describe this situation: terrible. Imagine if the BBC—so often the object of Telegraph attack—had conducted itself in this way. The Telegraph would have been contemptuous. It would have insisted that heads should roll, and rightly so. • This brings me to a second and even more important point that bears not just on the fate of one newspaper but on public life as a whole. A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth. • It is not only the Telegraph that is at fault here. The past few years have seen the rise of shadowy executives who determine what truths can and what truths can’t be conveyed across the mainstream media. The criminality of News International newspapers during the phone hacking years was a particularly grotesque example of this wholly malign phenomenon. All the newspaper groups, bar the magnificent exception of the Guardian, maintained a culture of omerta around phone-hacking, even if (like the Telegraph) they had not themselves been involved. One of the consequences of this conspiracy of silence was the appointment of Andy Coulson, who has since been jailed and now faces further charges of perjury, as director of communications in 10 Downing Street. • Urgent questions to answer • Last week I made another discovery. Three years ago the Telegraph investigations team—the same lot who carried out the superb MPs’ expenses investigation—received a tip off about accounts held with HSBC in Jersey. Essentially this investigation was similar to the Panorama investigation into the Swiss banking arm of HSBC. After three months research the Telegraph resolved to publish. Six articles on this subject can now be found online, between 8 and 15 November 2012, although three are not available to view. • Thereafter no fresh reports appeared. Reporters were ordered to destroy all emails, reports and documents related to the HSBC investigation. I have now learnt, in a remarkable departure from normal practice, that at this stage lawyers for the Barclay brothers became closely involved. When I asked the Telegraph why the Barclay brothers were involved, it declined to comment. • This was the pivotal moment. From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged. HSBC suspended its advertising with the Telegraph. Its account, I have been told by an extremely well informed insider, was extremely valuable. HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend”. HSBC today refused to comment when I asked whether the bank's decision to stop advertising with the Telegraph was connected in any way with the paper's investigation into the Jersey accounts.  • Winning back the HSBC advertising account became an urgent priority. It was eventually restored after approximately 12 months. Executives say that Murdoch MacLennan was determined not to allow any criticism of the international bank. “He would express concern about headlines even on minor stories,” says one former Telegraph journalist. “Anything that mentioned money-laundering was just banned, even though the bank was on a final warning from the US authorities. This interference was happening on an industrial scale. • “An editorial operation that is clearly influenced by advertising is classic appeasement. Once a very powerful body know they can exert influence they know they can come back and threaten you. It totally changes the relationship you have with them. You know that even if you are robust you won’t be supported and will be undermined.” • When I sent detailed questions to the Telegraph this afternoon about its connections with advertisers, the paper gave the following response. "Your questions are full of inaccuracies, and we do not therefore intend to respond to them. More generally, like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary." • The evidence suggests otherwise, and the consequences of the Telegraph’s recent soft coverage of HSBC may have been profound. Would Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have been much more energetic in its own recent investigations into wide-scale tax avoidance, had the Telegraph continued to hold HSBC to account after its 2012 investigation? There are great issues here. They go to the heart of our democracy, and can no longer be ignored. • • OskarMatzerath • 2 days ago • Wow. A hearty 'well done' to you, sir. • • 
 
pretty_polly OskarMatzerath • a day ago 
Surely this is just massive hypocrisy by PO because he sweeps under the carpet anything he dislikes.......
Immigration related subjects in particular.

 
Mike Donnellan pretty_polly • a day ago 
I know what you mean and he does have his ups and downs but surely you can concede it takes a lot of courage to do what he's done? I see from the Guardian site that HSBC has put its advertising with them 'on pause', presumably in way of discouraging them from taking on Oborne like they have his former - and very waffly - colleague Matt D'Ancona so he's now effectively blacklisted himself.
I'm no great fan but I do hope he can find a highly visible home on another journal where his loyalty to his craft as a journalist means he can continue to 'out' these normally hidden, evil influences.

 
drgrumpy Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
I trust the grawn will go tell the corrupt and corrupting hsbc to go **** off.
 


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Mike Donnellan drgrumpy • a day ago 
I most certainly hope so!
Edit: and credit where credit's due, the Guardian was on HSBC's case as well. Though it sticks in my throat to say it, I might have to start perusing their rag as well :)
 
 
W.S.Becket Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
I think they are in a state worse than the Telegraph.

 
Seriously Spain W.S.Becket • a day ago 
LOL, No, they're not, Their online readership is through the roof. So much so, they've been expanding for the last couple of years.
 
 
Theraveda Seriously Spain • a day ago 
The Guardian is only kept afloat by revenues from Exchange & Mart,

 
Hemedal Theraveda • 16 hours ago 
The Guardian Media Group does not own E&M.
 
 
W.S.Becket Seriously Spain • a day ago 
So why have they just had to ask readers to stump of £500 (or was it £850) to keep the thing going. On-line readership counts for very little.
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Christopher Mooney W.S.Becket • a day ago 
Guardian makes tons from online traffic. Like the Daily Mail.
They'd both go out of business, on their print-only revenue
 


Rojo1972 Christopher Mooney • a day ago 
Are you mad? Have you actually seen the figures? The Guardian is bleeding money and the Mail online only makes a minute fraction of the profits of the print operation.
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Ben Good Rojo1972 • 18 hours ago 
What? "The Mail online only makes a minute fraction of the profits of the print operation" you are joking right? The Mail Online is one of the top WORLDWIDE websites in traffic and advertising revenue. The paper is just a bit of dust in the corner. *rolls eyes*
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James Eyre Rojo1972 • 12 hours ago 
Where are these figures?
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William Ashbless Christopher Mooney • 21 hours ago 
The Guardian used to have a reputation for journalism. It's now trash. They often print reports they know to be untrue.

 
John William Ashbless • 21 hours ago 
Such as?
 
 
Hemedal William Ashbless • 16 hours ago 
Which Guardian reports can you cite which a) were untrue and b) you can show the Guardian knew to be untrue?

 
Max Hodges Hemedal • 3 hours ago 
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Instead, the 52-year-old resident of Changwon city ended up being the victim of what many believe is a peek into a dystopian future in which supposedly benign robots turn against their human masters.
Justin surely knows that not "many" believe that.
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marqueemoons William Ashbless • 4 hours ago 
Still better than the Telegraph, then.
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abbadabbadoo Christopher Mooney • 17 hours ago 
Hay, I noted my mobile ad space is so stupid these days. They used to pick up on things I typed in otro outlets' silos and offer me coupons on Sheeba just for keystroking "MEOW!" Now the ad space seems more tuned to the topic of the story, not my latest shoe gallery. Who is that? GCHQ standing down or Google stepping up? Still sucks, TalkTalk.
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abbadabbadoo abbadabbadoo • 17 hours ago 
Seriously, admobsters, can you be more transparent? Need parental controls so you can claim you never intended to shame our nations by stealing peeks at our clicks? Verizon is claiming to increase road security...right. And now everyone wants to offer encryption services, Sorry, Two Lips, I keep mine shut. Go sell that racket to cheese land.
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abbadabbadoo Seriously Spain • 18 hours ago 
Been with them since the 2009 hacking scandal; they are starting to suck trying to pander to the digital market. Spinning on it is not my kind of advancement. Their media section, once an example to which I often pointed, looks and sounds much like the rest, now. Roy needs a rest.
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Christopher Mooney W.S.Becket • a day ago 
Oh behave
Guardian are so open, they publish Conservative leaning articles! Have you never read "comment is free"?
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chaswarnertoo Christopher Mooney • a day ago 
Aka comment macht frei. I'm proud to have been banned.
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chaswarnertoo Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
It's ok to peruse, just don't accept/ believe.😉
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abbadabbadoo Mike Donnellan • 18 hours ago 
Just when Roy's moral compass has lost its needle. He's still covering for the UK covering for Murdoch's violation of the FCPA which would have got the bum DEPORTED like Lucky Luciano, and thus without a US citizenship, Murdoch could not own FOX Broadcasting. He'd have to sell the network.
TheFisherman, he's one serious gladiator. Roy has gone to seed. He farms for Murdoch's cow because ALL telephony media outlets have bribed foreign governments and he thinks that's just ginchy, the grinch. Corruption, the essential ingredient to most media and banking these days.
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Hemedal Mike Donnellan • 16 hours ago 
"As well"? They broke the story.
 

 
Jingleballix drgrumpy • a day ago 
The Graun - doesn't need HSBC advertising because its own ad revenues are also corrupted.....
..........ever wonder why the BBC only advertise in Guardian? What about all the local and national governmental jobs? New Labour gave them a virtual monopoly. Want a teaching job? Buy the Guardian.
Guardian is receiving millions of public money - with a virtual monopoly on BBC and public sector job adverts.
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drgrumpy Jingleballix • a day ago 
The Grawn receives so much public sector spend because ... it delivers a sizeable public sector readership [and media readership] to those who wish to reach it. It's hard business on both sides. Whether or not there is also a concomitant signal of "political" alliance in the decision making process [about where to advertise jobs] I don't know.
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Ben Skipp Jingleballix • a day ago 
Actually the main source of teaching jobs isThe Times Educational Supplement and had been for decades 


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Robert Ireland Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
buahahahahaha hidden influences? try well over 40,000 years the same bloodlines running and owning all of us. Want to rot out the evil of this world, find them, exterminate them, before they exterminate US ALL.This man is principled in the education system which is only a brainwashing system to teach us what to think, with the real truth in writing hidden from us. Very, very few are even capable of seeing outside the Matrix. Fools. All of you bloody fools. Watch Television, film, listen to music, read the books they allow and you are completely theirs. The cord is not plugged into the back of our skulls, it's our own two eyes and two ears, since before we're even born. Good luck everyone thinking this man did any of us real service. He only stopped doing them theirs. roflol Every single reaction I have seen to this story is completely in keeping inside the box. Every single one. Pathetic.
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Mike Donnellan Robert Ireland • a day ago 
Out on day release from Broadmore? Your minder wants a bollocking for letting you get near a computer.
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Robert Ireland Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
too moronic to even comprehend that your emotional outburst is a direct consequence of your entire life being brainwashed into> YOU actually believing that was just your own thought. roflmao smh
 
 
Robert Ireland Robert Ireland • a day ago 
pathetic!
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oliraison Robert Ireland • a day ago 
Love the fact that you've just responded to your own comment with the word pathetic.
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Robert Ireland oliraison • a day ago 
love the fact you made my case for me and so far 23 others with you, roflol. 

 
silentstan Robert Ireland • a day ago 
indeed you are
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eric hardcastle Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
it's just another example of how Care in The Community has failed.
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Mignonette eric hardcastle • a day ago 
Please.....as a former MH professional, this kind of racist shit has little to do with mental illness and makes the lives of those with such problems even harder. I know people find it funny but could you consider not drawing such close parallels between the two in future?
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sungeipatani Mignonette • 20 hours ago 
Racist?
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Frankly Speaking Mignonette • 17 hours ago 
How is his comment racist?
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Robert Ireland eric hardcastle • a day ago 
funny thing happens when you turn off the Boob Tube, shred the paper into toilet sheets and read and research 8 or more hours daily instead of sitting in front of a box being told what you want and need. roflol You awaken to see yourself surrounded by literally millions of brainwashed people. Here's a prime example for you all. I will bet bottom dollar most of you still believe cannabis is 1. a narcotic and 2. kills brain cells. Fact, delta-9 Tetrahyrdocannibinol that so called dangerous narcotic has been found in several scientific studies to produce undifferentiated glial stem cells which are then turned into 3 different types of brain cells. YEAH, I bet this rag of a paper kept you well informed about that one and the fact it is the living Biblical Tree of Life. That it extends life in near perfect health. Taken through the food chain people are living well into their 90s with virtually zero disease factors throughout life and their communities, micro-communities. In one particular community, where they consume only the seeds directly, the community's members live well into their 110s and even into their 120s with, again, virtually zero disease factors throughout their lives. Never mind, it is now showing to cure most of our worst nightmare diseases and was already know by Queen Victoria's doctor to cure both gonorrhea and rabies, not just menstrual cramps. yeah, so much for your informing media. That acre for acre it produces over 1800 gallons of fuel grade oil which burns no carbon. while alive it absorbs over 4 times more CO2 ans SO2, while releasing over 4 times more O2 than a forest the same size. It produces a superior quality fiber than cotton, a composite 12 times stronger and lighter than steel. It effectively means to end of big oil, forestry, pharma, medicine and more. Yeah call me crazy, but you are all still brianwashed and pathetic. In another five years each and every detractor here will be eating their own words. I will still be laughing and waiting for you morons to catch up with real facts, which thus far not one single detractor has bothered to present on contra-pose. Instead relying on ad hominems. What form. Each and every social and environmental issue being debated today has its roots in a trail of money, leading to the bloody retarded and psychopathic rich and you do their bidding for them, earning not one red cent for the effort while they work YOU to death and laugh all the way to the banks they own and through which they own every single one of you, lock stock and barrel, mind, body and soul. want to know who is crazy? Look up. Look up into your own sky and see the trails for which over 53 contracts were negotiated to spray down on us. look at your food that is 1/2 as nutritious as it was in 1950, before they sold everyone on petrochemical and radioactive farming. look at your schools and the idiots it created in you. Does any of you know what happens with the now being pushed Omega Fats? Omega 3 is the precursor of anandamide, the endocannabinoid which d-9 THC mimimics and is active on every one of the thus far 15 cannabinoid specific receptors discovered on the 210 cell types each of our bodies have. You fools haven't a clue you are even being lied to on such a massive scale it is incredulous once you see it and will take you literally years, if not your entire lives to undo. smh Your insults all only lend credence to my message. Moronic and pathetic slaves. oh, the racist comment, really? You might have want of a dictionary. No one spoke of race, save yourself. every continent has on average a 200 mile submerged ancient coast line, the very place earlier civilizations are being found, as well as pyramids on every continent, most numbering far in excess of what is found in Egypt. Dating alone in Bosnia proves many of the structures were built over 30,000 years ago, at least 22,000 years before their first claimed civilizations. Seemingly the earlier the build, the larger and more exotic the materials. Not one mummy has been found inside them and tunnels connecting them all, indicating they were being used for something we have not either discovered or is also not being told. yeah, keep believing the news services and keep believing your government schools. roflol Pathetic. Has any of you read Dr. Julian Jayne's dissertation titled, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind? I highly doubt most of you could sit through it. Stupid always points at intelligence as crazy. Always. Enlightened ones always intimidate the minds that are weak. I am used to this behavior as I am at their eating crow with months to a few years and looks like you are all next as notches on my bed post, roflmao I can give you a list of well over 500 diseases and disorders whole plant cannabis oil extract (decarboxylated) can already cure. Has this rag informed you of that? NO. It is coming and you will remember it was said by a man you chose to insult. Here for you is a prophecy given me. It was written there were 4 and after the flood only 3 remained. It is here, waiting to be found, you only need seek it and it will be discovered, soon. In it is longevity of 1,000 years. 1,000 years in near perfect health. Prove me wrong. In cannabis are over 400 more compounds already in certain scientific communities being hailed as essential nutrients, 10 times more than you have been told and still get diseased for want of. Nutrients in at least two distinctly new classes and vitamins A, C (a terpene), D2, E and K1 and K2, all now being reclassified as cannabinoids themselves. Yeah, this informative truthful rag is just another government operation. now taken over by american operatives. Prove me wrong on any of this, on the merits or just stfu and go home and accept you are completely brainwashed until brain dead. roflmao DUH.
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ebsln Robert Ireland • 19 hours ago 
"That acre for acre it produces over 1800 gallons of fuel grade oil which burns no carbon. while alive it absorbs over 4 times more CO2 ans SO2, while releasing over 4 times more O2 than a forest the same size." I don't understand how a plant that absorbs carbon dioxide (as of course they all do) would not release that carbon when burned.
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Rhys ebsln • 18 hours ago 
"I don't understand how a plant that absorbs carbon dioxide (as of course they all do) would not release that carbon when burned."
Plants have a 'net zero carbon footprint' (or are carbon neutral) when burned as the only carbon dioxide they release is carbon dioxide they've already absorbed. Fossil fuels just produce more carbon when burned and add to the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
GCSE Science
Rob's a raving loony, but he's right on that one.
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Robert Ireland Rhys • 16 hours ago 
even after proving me right, you STILL went to the emotion you were taught to connect it to. I discovered this quite by happenstance one day at a friends when their son was watching old reruns of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series. The dialog was so rife with adult language and themes, from violence to sexual assault, literally, when Boris tied Natasha to the rail tracks stating what he wanted to do to her. We watched these as children, unknowningly learning emotional reactions to real life situations at the most innocent time of our lives. This language meant nothing to the child, it didn't understand the double meanings. I froze in place when I realized many of the exact phrases I would use in a similar situation were learned from that show when I was 2, 3 and 4 years old. Back then we were only allowed about 3 hours of television, if we had one at all, Today it is non-stop. Then I decided to look at more cartoons, looney toons predominantly, and again the very same things. I was floored. Immediately comprehending what I was seeing happening.
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trentender Robert Ireland • 10 hours ago 
anyone else not at all surprised that the guy who wrote the essay about the benefits of cannabis (on a thread related to HSBC and the Telegraph?!?!) is apparently suffering from the advanced stages of weed psychosis?
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CaptDMO Rhys • 14 hours ago 
Gosh, where did the carbon in those fossil fuels come from? 
Same "net zero", it's just an exponential time lag over 
plants harvested yesterday.
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Frankly Speaking Robert Ireland • 17 hours ago 
Can you calm down a bit and explain in layman's terms your comment, and it's implication that -
"Does any of you know what happens with the now being pushed Omega Fats? Omega 3 is the precursor of anandamide, the endocannabinoid which d-9 THC mimimics and is active on every one of the thus far 15 cannabinoid 
specific receptors discovered on the 210 cell types each of our bodies have"
Thank you.
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Templar Robert Ireland • 15 hours ago 
I like weed too.
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MC73 Mike Donnellan • a day ago 
Better a computer than something pointy though, eh?


Here's something every journalist need reminding of: The Breaking News Consumer's Handbook Friday, September 20, 2013 - 11:55 AM By Alex Goldman This week's shooting at the DC Navy Yard was the latest in a long string of breaking news reporting to get many of the essential facts wrong. In fact, the rampant misreporting that follows shootings like this is so predictable that OTM has unintentionally developed a formula for covering them. We look at how all the bad information came out. We suggest ways that the news media could better report breaking news. This time, we're doing something different. This is our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook. Rather than counting on news outlets to get it right, we're looking at the other end. Below are some tips for how, in the wake of a big, tragic story, you can sort good information from bad. We've even made a handy, printable PDF that you can tape to your wall the next time you encounter a big news event. 1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. Everyone we talked to made this point. Details on the ground will be sketchy, a shooter may still be active, all the dead may not be accounted for. "whatever you might hear in the first couple of hours after a major news event, you should probably take it all with a grain of salt," says Andy Carvin, senior strategist on NPR's Digital Desk. "It’s quite possible that what you hear as the news stories the next morning – what they focus on might be quite different than the day before." 2. Don't trust anonymous sources. Often, news outlets will cite "sources," or a "law enforcement official." "I think you need to be very careful," says Ian Fisher, assistant managing editor for digital operations at the New York Times. "[law enforcement official] could be anything from the FBI to a cop in a car. So you just don’t know and you shouldn’t really trust that." 3. Don't trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of the information. "Also be wary of organizations that blindly quote other organizations without solid sourcing," says Fisher. "They aren’t taking a very big chance in doing that. They can always say 'oh, that was them, not us.' So I think that they are a lot less choosy and careful than they would be if their own reporting was attached to it." 4. There's almost never a second shooter. In the case of the DC Navy Yard shooting, the Sandy Hook shooting, and many others, initial reports included possible second and third shooters. “There’s pretty much never another one,” says Fisher. “So if you hear that, you can almost always discount." 5. Pay attention to the language the media uses. Whether you realize it or not, the language the media uses tells you how reliable it is. Here's a helpful glossary: "We are receiving reports" - sources are claiming something has happened, but it has not been confirmed. "We are seeking confirmation" - the news outlet is confident, but still can't confirm. "We can confirm" - information has come from multiple sources, and the news outlet feels confident that it can claim something as an actual fact. "We have learned" - how a news outlet declares it has a scoop. As Andy Carvin says "on the one hand, it could mean that they’re the first ones to confirm something. Or they’re going out on a limb and reporting something that no one else has felt comfortable reporting yet." 6. Look for news outlets close to the incident. "What you want to do is ask yourself who is close enough to this situation," says Craig Silverman of Poynter's Regret the Error column. "In an incident of terrorism or shooting or even when it’s sort of weather focused in a specific area, that’s always your preferred source. Have they actually seen it with their own eyes? Are they actually there, and do they know the area? Really, really, important." 7. Compare multiple sources. "If a news organization says 'we can confirm that such and such has happened,' pay attention to what the other networks are saying." says Andy Carvin. "Because ideally you can triangulate that information and get to some nugget of truth. But the fewer examples you have of entities claiming that something has happened, the more wary you should be about it." 8. Big news brings out the fakers. And Photoshoppers. "There are lots of hoaxsters who know that in this moment people are just grabbing onto any images they can find," says Craig Silverman. "So they might Photoshop something and send it out. Or images that were taken previously find their way to be presented as if they're new. If it’s somebody who’s sharing a photo on twitter, it’s very possible that that photo isn’t one they actually took themselves. You also need to kind of triangulate and see, well, 'has anyone else shared that, and are they giving me a link that I can go to, to actually learn more about this?'" 9. Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, you are a repeater and reporter of information, both good and bad. It is up to you to apply scrutiny to the information you encounter to avoid passing amplifying the same bad information you hope to filter out.

Here is a good summary of the state of the news in America by the Brooking Institute (you can see the original story here with pictures and graphs> http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/bad-news<: newspaper reader on train © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos Published 10/16/2014 n 1998, Ralph Terkowitz, a vice president of The Washington Post Co., got to know Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who were looking for backers. Terkowitz remembers paying a visit to the garage where they were working and keeping his car and driver waiting outside while he had a meeting with them about the idea that eventually became Google. An early investment in Google might have transformed the Post's financial condition, which became dire a dozen years later, by which time Google was a multi-billion dollar company. But nothing happened. “We kicked it around,” Terkowitz recalled, but the then-fat Post Co. had other irons in other fires. Thomas Jefferson Quotation Such missteps are not surprising. People living through a time of revolutionary change usually fail to grasp what is going on around them. The American news business would get a C minus or worse from any fair-minded professor evaluating its performance in the first phase of the Digital Age. Big, slow-moving organizations steeped in their traditional ways of doing business could not accurately foresee the next stages of a technological whirlwind. Obviously, new technologies are radically altering the ways in which we learn, teach, communicate, and are entertained. It is impossible to know today where these upheavals may lead, but where they take us matters profoundly. How the digital revolution plays out over time will be particularly important for journalism, and therefore to the United States, because journalism is the craft that provides the lifeblood of a free, democratic society. The Founding Fathers knew this. They believed that their experiment in self-governance would require active participation by an informed public, which could only be possible if people had unfettered access to information. James Madison, author of the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech and of the press, summarized the proposition succinctly: “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” Thomas Jefferson explained to his French friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed.” American journalists cherish another of Jefferson's remarks: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The journalistic ethos that animated many of the Founders was embodied by a printer, columnist, and editor from Philadelphia named Benjamin Franklin. The printing press, which afforded Franklin his livelihood, remained the engine of American democracy for more than two centuries. But then, in the second half of the 20th century, new technologies began to undermine long-established means of sharing information. First television and then the computer and the Internet transformed the way people got their news. Nonetheless, even at the end of the century, the business of providing news and analysis was still a profitable enough undertaking that it could support large organizations of professional reporters and editors in print and broadcast media. Now, however, in the first years of the 21st century, accelerating technological transformation has undermined the business models that kept American news media afloat, raising the possibility that the great institutions on which we have depended for news of the world around us may not survive. Pulse news reader Pulse news aggregator app. source: alphonsolabs.com These are painful words to write for someone who spent 50 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. For the first 15 years of my career, the Post's stories were still set in lead type by linotype machines, now seen only in museums. We first began writing on computers in the late 1970s, which seemed like an unequivocally good thing until the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. Then, gradually, the ground began to shift beneath us. By the time I retired earlier this year, the Graham family had sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, for $250 million, a small fraction of its worth just a few years before. Donald Graham, the chief executive at the time, admitted that he did not know how to save the newspaper. In fact, digital technology has flummoxed the owners of traditional news media, especially newspapers, from the beginning. For example, in 1983, in the early years of computerized production of newspapers when almost no one knew what was coming, The New York Times almost committed digital suicide. The Times decided it only needed to retain the rights to the electronic versions of its stories for 24 hours after publication. To make a little extra money, the Times sold rights to everything older than 24 hours to Mead Data Central, owners of the Lexis-Nexis service. Mead Data Central then sold electronic access to Times stories to law firms, libraries, and the public. By the early 1990s, as the Internet was becoming functional and popular, this arrangement was a big and growing problem: newspapers, including the Times, were planning “online,” computerized editions, but the Times had sold control of its own product to Mead Data. Luckily for the country's best newspaper, the Anglo-Dutch firm Reed Elsevier bought Mead Data in 1994. The sale triggered a provision in the original Times-Mead contract that allowed the Times to reclaim the electronic rights to its own stories. That enabled the Times to put its journalism online in 1995. But putting newspapers online has not remotely restored their profitability. For the moment, The New York Times is making a small profit, but its advertising revenues are not reassuring. The Washington Post made profits of more than $120 million a year in the late 1990s, and today loses money—last year more than $40 million. Newsweek magazine failed, and Time magazine is teetering. Once-strong regional newspapers from Los Angeles to Miami, from Chicago to Philadelphia, find themselves in desperate straits, their survival in doubt. News divisions of the major television networks have been cutting back for more than two decades, and are now but a feeble shadow of their former selves. google ad revenue chart Overall the economic devastation would be difficult to exaggerate. One statistic conveys its dimensions: the advertising revenue of all America's newspapers fell from $63.5 billion in 2000 to about $23 billion in 2013, and is still falling. Traditional news organizations' financial well-being depended on the willingness of advertisers to pay to reach the mass audiences they attracted. Advertisers were happy to pay because no other advertising medium was as effective. But in the digital era, which has made it relatively simple to target advertising in very specific ways, a big metropolitan or national newspaper has much less appeal. Internet companies like Google and Facebook are able to sort audiences by the most specific criteria, and thus to offer advertisers the possibility of spending their money only on ads they know will reach only people interested in what they are selling. So Google, the master of targeted advertising, can provide a retailer selling sheets and towels an audience existing exclusively of people who have gone online in the last month to shop for sheets and towels. This explains why even as newspaper revenues have plummeted, the ad revenue of Google has leapt upward year after year—from $70 million in 2001 to an astonishing $50.6 billion in 2013. That is more than two times the combined advertising revenue of every newspaper in America last year. And the situation for proprietors of newspapers and magazines is likely to get worse. One alarming set of statistics: Americans spend about 5 percent of the time they devote to media of all kinds to magazines and newspapers. But nearly 20 percent of advertising dollars still go to print media. So print media today are getting billions more than they probably deserve from advertisers who, governed by the inertia so common in human affairs, continue to buy space in publications that are steadily losing audience, especially among the young. When those advertisers wake up, revenues will plummet still further. Newspaper Closings King County Journal -January 2007 Union City Register Tribune -November 2007 Kentucky Post -December 2007 Cincinnati Post -December 2007 Halifax Daily News -February 2008 Albuquerque Tribune -February 2008 San Juan Star -August 2008 Tucson Citizen -May 16, 2009 Rocky Mountain News -February 2009 Baltimore Examiner -February 2009 View sources News organizations have tried to adapt to the new realities. As the Internet became more popular and more important in the first decade of the 21st century, newspaper proprietors dreamed of paying for their newsrooms by mimicking their traditional business model in the online world. Their hope was to create mass followings for their websites that would appeal to advertisers the way their ink-on-paper versions once did. But that’s not what happened. The news organizations with the most popular websites did attract lots of eyeballs, but general advertising on their sites did not produce compelling results for advertisers, so they did not buy as much of it as the papers had hoped. And the price they paid for it steadily declined, because as the Internet grew, the number of sites offering advertising opportunities assured that “supply” outstripped “demand.” Advertising revenues for the major news sites never amounted to even a significant fraction of the revenues generated by printed newspapers in the golden age. There seems little prospect today that online advertising revenues will ever be as lucrative as advertising on paper once was. The other online innovation that has devastated newspapers is Craigslist, the free provider of what the newspapers call “classified advertising,” the small items in small print used by individuals and businesses for generations to buy and sell real estate and merchandise, and to hire workers. Twenty years ago classifieds provided more than a third of the revenue of The Washington Post. Craigslist has destroyed that business for the Post and every major paper in the country. Philadelphia Inquirer Building The Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News headquarters building on Broad Street in Philadelphia, October 6, 2005. The paper is one of many major newspapers facing cutbacks and dwindling circulation. Reuters/Tim Shaffer espite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Serious readers of America's most substantial news media may find this description at odds with their daily experience. After all, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post still provide rich offerings of good journalism every morning, and they have been joined by numerous online providers of both opinion and news—even of classic investigative reporting. Digital publications employ thousands of reporters and editors in new and sometimes promising journalistic enterprises. Is this a disaster? how people get their news Of course not—yet. But today's situation is probably misleading. The laws of economics cannot be ignored or repealed. Nor can the actuarial tables. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today's readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today's young people skitter around the Internet like ice skaters, exercising their short attention spans by looking for fun and, occasionally, seeking out serious information. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided, which included national, foreign and local news, business news, cultural news and criticism, editorials and opinion columns, sports and obituaries, lifestyle features, and science news. Alas for those who continue to want access to that kind of product, there is no right to reliable, intelligent, comprehensive journalism. We only get it when someone provides it. And if it doesn’t pay someone a profit, it’s not likely to be produced. Walter Cronkite New York City. 1959. TV news anchorman Walter Cronkite. © Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos efore digital technology changed the world, the news was quite orderly and predictable. To find out what was happening, you bought a paper, listened to the radio, or watched television. Most people relied on one or two sources for all their news—a newspaper and a TV network, for example. A few institutions and a few individuals dominated the provision of news: Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor; The New York Times and The Washington Post; Time and Newsweek. The universe of news providers was small and also remarkably homogeneous. David Brinkley could move from NBC to ABC without causing much of a stir. When Roone Arledge, whose first big accomplishment was to make ABC the leading network for sports, was empowered to build a new ABC News, he did it by raiding the staffs of NBC and CBS. Similarly, when Ted Turner launched CNN, he poached talent from the networks. This small, nearly-closed world rarely provided any surprises. Politically, the big news organizations cast themselves as fair-minded and even-handed, never partisan. Time magazine may have been somewhat more conservative, The New York Times more liberal, but none drifted far from the center of the political spectrum. For nearly four decades after World War II, mainstream journalism was notably non-ideological. At the height of their success, all the best news organizations shared two important qualities: a strong sense of responsibility about their roles as providers of news and analysis, and plenty of money to spend on those missions. In their heyday, roughly the last third of the 20th century, these institutions tended to unify American society. News anchors like Cronkite, Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings were reassuring, avuncular figures with whom millions of Americans shared the dramas of the day. All the mainstream print and broadcast media sought to provide an information supermarket whose aisles—from sports to business to politics, foreign affairs, entertainment news, and gossip—would hopefully attract mass audiences across all classes of society. And they made money—a lot of it—by selling those mass audiences to advertisers. TV news anchors NBC NIGHTLY NEWS -- Pictured: (l-r) John Chancellor, Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung, Garrick Utley. NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images The money allowed for an extravagant approach to news. Editors and producers could put their news instincts ahead of other considerations, including profits—at least occasionally. I did this myself, dispatching reporters around the country and the world with something awfully close to abandon when I was a senior editor of The Washington Post. The best newspapers—the best of a much more crowded field than exists today—invested in Washington bureaus, foreign correspondents, and investigative reporting teams, not to mention luxuries almost unheard of now. For years, for example, no reporter for the Los Angeles Times had to suffer the indignity of flying in coach; business or first class was the norm. The broadcast media enjoyed even more extravagance. In the 1970s the three television networks each maintained large corps of foreign correspondents stationed in bureaus across the globe, and also domestic bureaus in the major American cities. They all did serious documentaries and showed them in prime time. Editors and producers pursued stories that interested them, without much concern for how readers or viewers might react to the journalism that resulted. Members of this tribe of journalists shared a sense of what “the news” was. The most influential of them were the editors and reporters on the best newspapers, whose decisions were systematically embraced and echoed by other editors and writers, as well as by the producers of television news. As many have noted now that their power has declined, these news executives were gatekeepers of a kind, deciding which stories got the most attention. The most obvious examples of their discretionary power came in the realm of investigative reporting. One of the cardinal events of this era was Walter Cronkite's decision in late October 1972 to report in detail on the CBS Evening News the findings of two young Washington Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, on the developing Watergate scandal. Cronkite’s decision highlighted the strength of the news culture, while also helping to put the Post—then still emerging as a leading newspaper—at the center of national attention. Walter Cronkite Joseph N. Welch (left) being questioned by Senator Joseph McCarthy (right), June 9, 1954. Wikimedida Commons This was a golden era in journalism, a time when a prosperous and widely-respected press demonstrated an unprecedented willingness to confront a sitting president. Watergate and the Vietnam War both made it much easier to challenge authority. Newspapers especially began to show increasing self-confidence—sometimes it felt like arrogance—by moving away from reactive journalism that focused on the events of the previous day and devoting more space and energy to “enterprise” journalism, which included not just in-depth investigations, but stories about trends in society, profiles, and feature stories. Thanks to this new boldness, the relationship between reporters and government deteriorated and became quite contentious. Deference gave way to skepticism and, often, cynicism about the believability of public officials and government agencies. One of the great symbolic moments of this era was the decision by the Nixon administration to seek a court order to stop The New York Times from publishing details of a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war that a disgruntled official had leaked to the paper. Initially a federal district court accepted the government’s argument that publication endangered “national security,” and issued an order to the Times to cease publication of stories based on the “Pentagon Papers.” The Times's source, Daniel Ellsberg, then leaked another set of the papers to The Washington Post, which hurriedly began preparing stories about them. The government sought court action to block the Post as well. The Supreme Court agreed to take the case. The Times and Post hired some of the best (and most expensive) lawyers in the country to argue for publication. The court quickly decided in favor of the newspapers' right to publish. Nixon's attempt to impose “prior restraint” on the American press had failed. Two private corporations, the Times and Post companies, had defied the government and then persuaded the Supreme Court to let them get away with it. Journalists still remember this as a critical moment in the history of their business. Since the late 19th century, American journalists have used their craft to call government and corporations to account for wrongdoing, secret practices, and even corruption, often sparking public outcry and reform. Listed here are ten noteworthy moments in U.S. investigative journalism. It is neither a top ten list nor a ranking of any sort; many well-qualified media outlets have assembled their own excellent lists. It also focuses on print journalism, though many great episodes of the form have appeared on television. As well, this investigative journalism is but one facet of the vital profession that reports the news. 1902-03:Ida Tarbell profiles John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company The progressive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a time of social activism as Americans and their president, Theodore Roosevelt, fought corruption and monopolistic practices in government and industry. Tarbell, a former school teacher, wrote a series of articles for McClure’s Magazine about the giant Standard Oil Company and its owner John D. Rockefeller. The series was published in book form in 1904, and in 1911 the U.S. Supreme Court found the company to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, causing its breakup. Ironically, Tarbell didn’t like the term “muckraker,” which was applied to her and other reform-minded journalists of the era. Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio (1899). Standard Oil Refinery No. 1 in Cleveland, Ohio (1899) Wikimedia Commons 1906:Upton Sinclair exposes conditions in Chicago's meatpacking plants Chicago was America’s center of meat processing and packing around the turn of the century in 1900. Although Sinclair’s famous 1906 work, The Jungle, was a novel, he based it on seven weeks in disguise working in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. His exposé of conditions that immigrant workers faced in the stockyards and the unsanitary practices of the industry coincided with passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Sinclair later focused on American journalism itself, calling attention in 1920 to the practice of “yellow journalism” in his book The Brass Check. stockyards Chicago's Union stockyards cattle pens c. 1909. Wikimedia Commons 1953:Murrey Marder dogs Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt In February 1950, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy declared that more than 200 Communists were working at the U.S. State Department. After his re-election in 1952, McCarthy conducted a series of hearings on the matter and implicated Army personnel in espionage. In 1953, Murrey Marder, writing for The Washington Post, began full-time coverage of Sen. McCarthy and his hearings. Marder investigated the senator's accusations against Army personnel stationed at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, finding that the senator's charges against them were all false. Marder later opened the London bureau of the The Post, and after his retirement, helped create the Nieman Watchdog Project. McCarthy Sen. Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney Roy Cohn during Senate Subcommittee hearings on the McCarthy-Army dispute. Wikimedia Commons 1962-64:David Halberstam calls foul on the U.S. military's rosy Vietnam claims In October 1963, President John F. Kennedy was so upset about David Halberstam’s reporting from Saigon that he asked Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, to transfer David Halberstam out of Vietnam. Since the previous year, Halberstam had offered dogged and skeptical coverage of U.S. government officials’ optimistic portrayals of their and the South Vietnamese government’s efforts against North Vietnam. “The job of the reporters in Vietnam,” Halberstam wrote in 1965, “was to report the news, whether or not the news was good for America.” In 1964, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting. David Halberstam Reporters David Halberstam of the New York Times, AP Saigon correspondent Malcolm Brown and Neil Sheehan of UPI, chat beside a helicopter in Vietnam. AP 1969:Seymour Hersh exposes the My Lai massacre and cover-up In March 1968, U.S. Army soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians in My Lai, a South Vietnamese village. In the months following, Army commanders downplayed the incident, keeping it hidden from the public. However, due to pressure on the chain-of-command from a soldier in the infantry company involved, Lieutenant William Calley, Jr. was court martialed in September 1969 for his role. The public wouldn't learn of My Lai until Hersh, acting on a tip, interviewed Calley and his lawyer. Hersh's story was published by Dispatch, a small news agency with a tiny staff, and then picked up nationally. Calley was the only soldier convicted in relation to the massacre. Hersh won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. Seymour Hersh New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh talks on the telephone at his New York Times Washington Bureau office June 14, 1972. © Wally McNamee/CORBIS 1971:The Pentagon Papers leaked and published In 1971, with the Vietnam War still going after almost a decade, a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked a seven-thousand page history of U.S.-Vietnam relations that had been prepared for internal use by the Pentagon. Lengthy sections of these “Pentagon Papers” were published in The Washington Post and The New York Times, revealing the covert origins of a war that was exceedingly unpopular at home. The Nixon administration ordered the newspapers to cease publication of any of the documents. This led to a Supreme Court case (New York Times Co. v. United States) that eventually ruled in favor of the press. Daniel Ellsberg Daniel Ellsberg (l) talks to reporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles, Ca. on Jan. 17 1973. His co-defendant, Anthony Russo is on the right. AP Photo/stf 1972:Woodward and Bernstein expose the Watergate break in In June 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC. Two young reporters at The Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were intrigued that one of the burglars was on the payroll of President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee and began digging further. Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a series of political crimes and “dirty tricks” that connected the burglary back to the White House. Their reporting led to indictments of 40 administration officials and the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The paper won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for the investigative reporting. Nixon departs Richard Nixon departs from the White House , August 9 1974 after resigning the presidency. Reuters 1992:Florence Graves reveals sexual misconduct in Congress In 1992, shortly after the Anita Hill controversy, Florence Graves, founder of Common Cause magazine, began an investigation into sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. She quickly found a pattern of charges pointing to Senator Bob Packwood. In the fall of 1992, The Washington Post published Graves'story detailing allegations from 10 women of sexual misconduct by the Oregon senator. The story not only led to the first-ever Senate Ethics Committee investigation of sexual misconduct and the eventual resignation of Senator Packwood, but also to the passage of the landmark Congressional Accountability Act, subjecting Congress to the same discrimination laws as the rest of the nation. Packwood Sen. Bob Packwood leaves his Senate office after he announced his resignation September 7, 1995. The Senate Ethics Committee had recommended Packwood's expulsion on sexual and official misconduct charges. Reuters 2010:Dana Priest and William Arkin detail secret government organizations On July 19, 2010, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin published “Top Secret America,” a series of investigative articles revealing the massive and what they characterized as mismanaged post-9/11 growth of the U.S. intelligence community. The series, benefiting from the work of more than a dozen other journalists at The Post, compiled hundreds of thousands of records over two years, identifying 45 government organizations (1,271 sub-units) and 1,931 private companies engaged in top-secret intelligence work. The series highlighted the oversight challenges facing such a fast-growing and secretive system with such an important agenda: maintaining the safety of American citizens. CIA U.S. President George W. Bush (r) and Porter Goss, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), walk to make remarks in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Reuters/Jason Reed JIR 2013:The Washington Post and The Guardian report on NSA surveillance In early June 2013, The Post and The Guardian broke nearly-simultaneous stories about National Security Agency surveillance activities being conducted on U.S. citizens and foreign officials. Both sets of articles, led by Barton Gellman at The Post and Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, along with Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill, initially relied on a confidential source who was a former NSA analyst and then-employee at a private sector consulting firm. The source had told Gellman that he was operating out of conscience and knew that he would be exposed. That person was Edward Snowden. Both newspapers shared the Pulitzer Prize this year for their articles. CIA The Guardian's NSA Files: Decoded theguardian.com click a date dot to explore the timeline 1903 1906 1953 1963 1969 1971 1972 1992 2010 2013 Fred Dews and Thomas Young contributed to this presentation. View sources coverimg Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein (center) and Bob Woodward (left), the team who broke the Watergate story. Washington, D.C., 1974. © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos he golden era had its shortcomings, to be sure. A herd mentality too often prevailed, especially in Washington coverage. Self-important journalists were too common. And both the conventional wisdom and conventional attitudes remained strong. So, for example, when confronted by a story like the AIDS epidemic, the great news organizations reacted slowly and clumsily. Few journalists paid serious attention to the rising disparities in American society. Toward the end of the era, in the first years of the 21st century, the news media succumbed to the national anxieties produced by the 9/11 attacks and failed to challenge effectively the Bush administration's rush to war in Iraq. Many journalists joined the rush. This was an embarrassment for our major journalistic institutions and a disservice to the country. Quotation Nevertheless, America's best news organizations have proved their value again and again, even in recent years, as their fortunes have declined. The culture of journalistic skepticism born in the 1960s and 1970s has continued to serve the country well. Repeatedly, journalists have broken significant news stories that government officials hoped would never be revealed, from accounts of Americans torturing terror suspects to revelations of the systematic mistreatment of veterans at Walter Reed Hospital; from accounts of the government's eavesdropping programs to descriptions of its vast, post-9/11 intelligence apparatus. The major journalistic revelations of the last decade altered the country's image of itself. They mattered. And society has benefited in less tangible ways, too. “How would this look on the front page of The Washington Post?” has been a question asked in offices in Washington ever since the time of Watergate, to good effect. Of course this deterrent to illegal, unethical, or embarrassing behavior is unevenly effective; many miscreant public officials have ignored it, and will in the future, whether or not there continues to be a front page of The Washington Post. But this sense of accountability has had a salutary effect. Iraq satellite image A slide from Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN asserting WMD manufacturing capabilites in Iraq and a link between Saddam Hussein and alQaeda. state.gov The best journalism has most often been produced by those news organizations that have both the resources and the courage to defend their best work when it offends or alarms powerful institutions and individuals. The public may perceive journalism as an individualistic enterprise carried out by lone rangers of rectitude, but this is rarely the case. The best work is usually done by a team that has the backing of an organization committed to maintaining the highest standards of seriousness and integrity, and to nurturing talented reporters and editors. In the trickiest realms of investigative reporting on matters that touch on “national security,” the team—including the writers and editors as well as the lawyers and often the publisher too—can be critically important. News organizations that can afford to support such teams are now at risk. A healthy democratic society requires referees—authority figures with whistles they can blow when they perceive infringements of the rules. Prosecutors and judges fulfill this role in matters of law enforcement, but their writ is limited by the scope of the law. “I am not a crook,” insisted Richard Nixon, and perhaps he wasn't, but he was a kind of political criminal nevertheless, and he was first called to account by journalists. Will such whistle blowers be on the job to confront the next Nixon? Paul Starr, the distinguished Princeton scholar, has put the matter succinctly: “By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger that confronts us.” Stewart and O'Reilley Bill O'Reilly vs. Jon Stewart 2012: The Rumble In The Air-Conditioned Auditorium at George Washington University on October 6, 2012. Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for The Rumble 2012 entitled to opinions quote f today's providers of the best journalism—often referred to these days, somewhat ominously, as “legacy media,” meaning the old stuff—cannot survive their continuing tribulations, what will take their place? Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but some trends are clear. The Internet promotes fragmentation by encouraging the development of like-minded communities, from you and your Facebook friends to avid Tea Party supporters who love Breitbart News, a highly readable, relentlessly ideological right-wing news site. Surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press show that increasing numbers of American get their “news” from ideologically congenial sources. The news media are fragmenting just as American society is fragmenting—by class, by region, by religious inclination, by generation, by ethnic identity, by politics and more. trust in news sources chart The rise of the fragmented news media is quite a recent phenomenon. It really became significant after the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009. President Obama came into the White House in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. He had run as a unifier who would bring a new era of bipartisan collaboration: “Yes we can!” But no, he couldn't. Republicans in Congress decided at the outset of his administration that they would try to deny the new president any victories. Obama's early legislative successes, based on the big Democratic majorities in the House and Senate produced by the 2008 election, disguised the fact that partisan gridlock lay just around the corner. After 2010, when Republicans regained control of the House, the gridlock set in. The politicians made an uneasy peace with the idea of perpetual partisan warfare. Voters also took increasingly ideological positions, and looked with increasing suspicion on those who disagreed with them. demise of expectations quote Today's politicians, especially on the right, communicate to “their” voters through “their” media, most notably, of course, Fox News. Similarly, liberal Democrats like to appear on MSNBC. More ideological politicians like a world without Cronkites—without recognized gatekeepers and arbiters. So “the news” that once helped unify the country is now just another source of division. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to argue that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” No longer. Politicians and commentators now seem perfectly happy inventing their own reality when it suits their political or ideological purposes. Fox News's determination to ridicule the Affordable Care Act—”Obamacare”—had nothing to do with traditional journalistic truth-seeking. Rather, it was part of a propaganda campaign. The MSNBC cable network, part of NBC, which used to be a serious news organization, saw a business opportunity in making itself a liberal alternative to Fox, the most profitable cable news network, and now unabashedly propagates a liberal view of the news. Fox and MSNBC have both decided to cater to their audiences not with original reporting of the news (which is expensive), but with commentary on the news interspersed with broadcasts of set-piece events like presidential news conferences. Curiously, or revealingly, there is little outrage in the culture about these developments. We seem to have adapted to the demise of the old expectations about accuracy, fairness, and reporting without much of a fight. Decline in newspaper employees graphic Some of the new online products produce interesting and informative journalism, but none has the ambitions or the sense of responsibility of the best publications. They couldn't afford those luxuries. A great news organization is expensive. The newsroom of The New York Times costs about $230 million a year. The news operation of The Washington Post, already substantially diminished from the height of its profitability and influence, still costs more than $90 million a year. Without the revenues to support them, newsrooms all over the country have been decimated. Newspapers employed 59,000 journalists in 1989, and 36,000 in 2012 (and fewer since then). Once-formidable institutions including The Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and Miami Herald are vastly diminished. Others have gone out of business altogether. Quotation The significant news organizations that have survived are under terrific pressure now. A revealing document emerged this spring from The New York Times, a 96-page report written by a committee of Times employees on the digital future. Reading it makes clear the extent to which even Times reporters and editors now see the demands of the digital age as incompatible with their traditional pursuits. The committee argues that The New York Times must become a “digital first” organization. “That means aggressively questioning many of our print-based traditions and their demands on our time, and determining which can be abandoned to free up resources for digital work.” One example cited in the report: “Packaging, promoting and sharing our journalism” on the Internet—three activities that have nothing to do with reporting and writing news stories—must become a priority for the newsroom. Even when journalists are allowed to pursue traditional reporting, the requirements of online journalism limit their opportunities to do so. Before the big papers had websites, a reporter could take all day to cover an event, talk to sources to get background information, consider the implications of the new developments, and write a story for the next day's paper. Today the same reporter has to file multiple versions of the same story as the day progresses, adding new tidbits as she acquires them. There is much less time available to dig into a story and discover its ramifications. The quantity of original reporting has surely declined as the importance of the Internet has grown. time spent on media chart One immediate effect of all these changes and cutbacks is that there's no paper in America today that can offer the same coverage of its city, suburbs, and state that it provided 20 or even 10 years ago, and scores of city halls and state legislatures get virtually no coverage by any substantive news organizations. Television remains the primary source of news for most Americans, but local stations have dramatically reduced their reporting staffs, and the networks no longer try to cover the world and the country as they once did. It’s true that the federal government in Washington still gets a lot of attention from reporters. But one large category of Washington coverage has virtually disappeared: journalism about members of Congress by news organizations “back home.” A generation ago scores of local newspapers and television stations employed Washington correspondents who kept an eye on the members of the House and Senate from their cities and states. Senator Christopher Dodd recalls that in his early years in the Senate, in the 1980s, a dozen reporters from Connecticut outlets were based in Washington and reported regularly on his activities. By the time he retired in 2010, that number had fallen to zero. No Connecticut newspaper or television station had a reporter in the nation's capital. Newseum exterior Facade of The Newseum, incorporating the text of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. David Monack/Wikimedia Commons re there no grounds for optimism, or even hope? Of course there are. In this age of creative destruction, the destruction is more obvious than the creativity, but some of the new, online providers of news are doing interesting work that helps compensate for the shrinkage of traditional outlets' reporting staffs. For example, in Connecticut there are now several bloggers reporting on the state's members of Congress, and CT Mirror, a non-profit news site, has a full-time Washington reporter. Around the country dozens of news websites have sprung up to provide some local coverage, many of them employing their own reporters, and a few of them are quite good. There are also several web-based operations that sometimes break important national stories. The very best of them is ProPublica, a non-profit organization founded by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, that is devoted to investigative reporting, an expensive specialty that has suffered in the era of disappearing newspaper profits. ProPublica provides pro bono journalism of the highest quality, as good as the investigative projects of the major newspapers. Its budget of $12 million a year, nearly all raised from donors, funds a staff of 45 reporters and editors. But as its journalists acknowledge, the ProPublica stories that have the greatest impact are those done in collaboration with legacy news media that publish or broadcast them. Its own excellent website has a relatively small audience. Chris Hamby Pulitzer Chris Hamby, right, of the Center for Public Integrity, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, poses for a photo with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger during the awards ceremony at Columbia University's Low Library, May 28, 2014, in New York. AP Photo/Jason DeCrow Other non-profit organizations are also providing reporting at a level that only the major news organizations used to offer. The winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, a non-profit watchdog organization that maintains vast electronic files tracing the flow of money into our politics. Marcus Brauchli, who has served as the senior editor of both The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, observed recently that thanks to Internet offerings, the quantity of American journalism has never been greater. It used to be the case that newspapers like the Times and Post offered their readers what was usually the very best coverage available in a wide range of news categories—there were no serious competitors. Today there are competitors in every one: ESPN in sports, Politico in Washington coverage, BuzzFeed in the world of popular culture, and so on. We at the Post used to have a corner on the market in Washington—no competitor could challenge us in any of our major categories. No corners are available now. coverimg New York Times Building Jleon/ Wikimedia Commons f there is some good news, it's hardly enough to be reassuring. Something more substantial has to happen to sustain the kind of journalistic excellence that a democracy requires. Of course there can be technological surprises. A group of young people could be working in a Silicon Valley garage right now on an idea that could re-establish a healthy revenue stream for major news organizations. I certainly hope so. Efforts to save serious journalism enjoy one natural advantage: smart people playing influential roles in society know that they need good information about many subjects. It is conceivable that these citizens, who are a significant audience albeit a small fraction of the total population, will be willing to pay the full cost of the journalism they consume. At first blush this may sound painfully obvious. Don't people usually pay for the services they use? Not the news. Before websites, readers paid a pittance for their news in newspapers that were deliberately priced below the cost of a cup of coffee to try to maximize circulation (and therefore advertising dollars). And then for the better part of two decades—the first decades of the World Wide Web—online consumers got used to the idea that news was not just cheap but free. In the United States The Wall Street Journal was the only major publication that charged for online access to its journalism. Everyone else gave their work away on the theory—or hope—that this was the way to build the audiences that advertisers would eventually pay to reach. Iraq satellite image New York Times paywall. Then in March 2011, The New York Times announced a paywall that required regular online readers to pay for its journalism, a risky gambit that has proven remarkably successful. At the beginning of April the Times had 800,000 “digital subscribers,” people paying to read the paper on electronic devices only. (The daily ink-on-paper Times is bought by 680,000 people, and 1.2 million on Sundays.) Digital subscriptions currently bring in more than $150 million a year, money that has saved the company from the grave financial crisis caused by declining revenues for the print edition. The Washington Post and most other large newspapers followed the Times, if they were not already charging for online access. Though none of the others has had as much success signing up digital subscribers as the Times, the newspaper’s ability to persuade online readers to pay is heartening. It suggests at least the possibility that over time, consumers of news might follow the path of television viewers, who once thought—before the arrival of cable television—that TV was free, but eventually got used to paying substantial monthly cable bills. Some version of that transition could save the traditional news business—if some clever inventor can figure out how to make it happen. Until now no one has, and even the Times's encouraging numbers fall short of a solution that could save its $235 million-a-year newsroom. Sale of Washington Post A morning edition of the Washington Post- August 6, 2013. Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper in a surprise deal that ended the Graham family's 80 years of ownership. Reuters/Gary Cameron “Design the electronic classifieds now.” “Design the world’s first electronic newspaper.” Kaiser Memo see the full memo KaiserQuote ast fall, when he met the staff of The Washington Post soon after buying the paper, Jeff Bezos of Amazon spoke about the importance of “the bundle,” as he called the variety of news, opinion, useful information, and entertainment that the Post offers each day. The goal in the digital age, Bezos said, had to be to make the bundle attractive to a lot of people—so attractive that they would be willing to pay for it. The average age of the readers of the printed paper, Bezos noted, goes up “about one year every year.” It's no secret where that leads, he quipped. Quotation Now that he owns the money-losing Post, Bezos faces the challenge of how to sell that bundle. Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, one of the country's most successful venture capitalists, summarized the problem: “How [can] an Internet property, dedicated to broad-based news and information, ever generate a lot of money? Without solving that riddle, there is no path to prosperity.” For Further Reading Good News About the Future of News Literacy July 2014, Jonathan Rauch Nudging News Producers and Consumers Toward More Thoughtful, Less Polarized Discourse February 2014, Darrell West and Beth Stone A Retrospect of Journalism: What Happened to the Washington Reporters? August 2012, Stephen Hess Of course, a large organization offering “broad-based news and information” is not the only conceivable model. Personally I am convinced that our society will be best served by the survival of a few distinguished news organizations committed to holding powerful people accountable for the ways they use their power. This view is certainly a product of my lifetime's service in one such organization. But there are other possibilities. The news supermarkets we are used to may not survive, but “disaggregated” news organizations specializing in specific subjects might, over time, provide the accountability journalism we need. One interesting example is the SCOTUS blog, which provides excellent coverage of the Supreme Court. It makes no profit, but is supported by Bloomberg. Politico's coverage of Washington and politics, though uneven, is better than that of any but the very best news organizations. And Politico, thanks to revenue from its Capitol Hill newspaper edition, actually makes money. It is also possible that “prosperity” won't be necessary. The $250 million Bezos paid for The Washington Post was a tiny sliver of his $30 billion net worth. For him to cover the Post's losses now costs the equivalent of lunch money for an ordinary mortal—something Bezos could easily afford for decades to come, if he chooses to play the angel's role indefinitely. The money-losing Boston Globe, sold at a huge loss by The New York Times in 2013, has a deep-pocketed new owner in John Henry, principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, who similarly could keep the paper afloat indefinitely if he wants to. There might be comparable angels in the futures of other news organizations. New Yorkers have speculated for years that their former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, worth $34 billion, might play that role some day for The New York Times. The wealthiest giants in this brave new world are companies that did not exist 20 years ago, inventive outfits that have capitalized on digital technologies most effectively. Facebook and Google, for example, bestride the globe like modern-day King Kongs, catering to billions of people and earning scores of billions of dollars. Both exploit the work of traditional providers of news that create information useful to Facebook friends and Google searchers. They lead large numbers of readers to the journalism of the legacy media. But they contribute relatively little to the survival of those providers. Robert G. Kaiser portrait Lucian Perkins Robert G. Kaiser Robert G. Kaiser spent more than half a century as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post before retiring early this year. He covered local politics, served as a correspondent in London, Moscow and Saigon, covered Congress and national politics, and spent sixteen years as a senior editor, seven of them (1991-98) as managing editor. He is the author or co-author of eight books, including The News About The News, American Journalism in Peril, written with Leonard Downie Jr. These firms were created by a new generation of young people whose self-interest may lead them either to realize the importance of the legacy institutions, or figure out how to create new ways to do what the old news organizations did in the past. Financially, it would be easy for Google to rescue The New York Times. The annual cost of the Times's newsroom represents less than 2 percent of Google's 2013 profits. Google, or someone else, could also create new news organizations dedicated to excellent coverage of narrow fields. The future, in Mort Sahl's wise words, lies ahead—but remains invisible. News as we know it is at risk. So is democratic governance, which depends on an effective watchdog news media. Both have been undermined by changes in society wrought by digital technologies—among the most powerful forces ever unleashed by mankind. We have barely begun the Digital Age, and there is no point in trying to predict just where it will take us. News certainly has a future, but what that will be is unclear. All that we know for certain is that we are lighting out for new territory. Join the conversation on Twitter using #BrookingsEssay or share this on Facebook . This Essay is also available as an eBook from these online retailers: Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Google Play, and on Kobo. Like other products of the Institution, The Brookings Essay is intended to contribute to discussion and stimulate debate on important issues. The views are solely those of the author. Graphic Design: Marcia Underwood and Jessica Pavone Research: Fred Dews, Thomas Young, Jessica Pavone, Kevin Hawkins Editorial: Beth Rashbaum and Fred Dews Web Development: Marcia Underwood

The Decline of Journalism from Watergate to 'Dark Alliance'

Sad but true that some of the only real journalism is coming from not national news sources but independent international one. For example:OPINION(LEFT) PAUL ANDREW HAWTHORNE / WIREIMAGE / GETTY IMAGES (RT) PAUL ANDREW HAWTHORNE / WIREIMAGE / GETTY IMAGES The decline of journalism from Watergate to 'Dark Alliance' What if Ben Bradlee had overseen Gary Webb's investigation into the CIA, Contras and crack cocaine? October 25, 2014 2:00AM ET by Nick Schou @NickSchou There’s a great scene at the end of “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 Hollywood version of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s years-long unraveling of the Watergate scandal. It features a teletype machine cranking out headline after headline, with the last one reporting the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The ceaseless tapping hammers home an unspoken message in the movie, which ends two years before Nixon stepped down, with editor Ben Bradlee famously telling his reporters to “rest up 15 minutes, then get your asses back in gear.” The work of a watchdog never ends. The fragility of the whole investigation into the break-in and the subsequent cover-up shows how much the veracity of the news depends on the guts not only of reporters but also of their editors and publishers. “Woodstein,” as Woodward and Bernstein were jokingly known, never would have nailed Nixon had they not had the support of an editor with an iron backbone willing to stand up to the White House, which used both anonymous leaks and on-the-record denials to try to kill the story. That editor, Bradlee, passed away on Oct. 21 at the age of 93, which is too bad, because America needs the type of journalistic guts he embodied, now more than ever. A case in point involves another movie now in theaters, “Kill the Messenger,” which is based in part on my 2006 biography of investigative reporter Gary Webb. In 1996, Webb unloaded a three-part series for The San Jose Mercury-News alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency helped spark America’s crack cocaine epidemic by enabling drug traffickers tied to the Nicaraguan Contras to ship into the country and use the proceeds to fund their insurgency against the Sandinista government. Published on the Mercury-News’ website, thereby making it available to all, the series, “Dark Alliance,” became one of the first viral news pieces of the Internet era. As with Watergate, the story led to furious denials from anonymous government sources — only this time The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post rallied strenuously to defend the feds. All three papers published lengthy rebuttals to Webb’s stories, dismissing them as the work of an irresponsible journalist who bent the facts to fit his thesis, thus empowering conspiracy theorists, particularly in the African-American community, which long suspected the U.S. government of complicity in the crack trade. Never mind that a subsequent report released by the CIA at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal admitted to much wider collaboration with agency-affiliated Contra-sympathizing coke peddlers than Webb ever claimed. “Kill the Messenger,” which stars Jeremy Renner as Webb, depicts the withering media attacks that forced Webb from journalism and may have contributed to his eventual suicide in 2004. In response to the film, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times recently published stories acknowledging that, in hindsight, their attacks on Webb were overkill and that history had vindicated his basic premise. The Washington Post, on the other hand, published a scathing op-ed asserting that Webb was a fraud and commending his editor at the time, Jerry Ceppos, as “courageous” for pulling Webb off the CIA beat and authoring a letter to readers backing off the story. We are trying to follow in Gary Webb's footsteps not only because the reporting he did was so important and fearless, but how vindictive the way the CIA and media reacted underscores how urgent it is to shine a light on what they are doing. Glenn Greenwald Journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept As a reporter who covered Webb’s story and the controversy that followed, I happened to be in a position to investigate the drug ring he exposed. One of its members was Ronald Lister, a cop-turned-arms-merchant who sold guns to crack dealers who flew to Central America at the behest of ex-CIA agents, who hired him to provide security services to the Salvadoran military and death squad founder Roberto D’Aubuisson. One of Lister’s business partners at the time was Bill Nelson, a retired CIA deputy director of operations. I had to go to court to force the agency to hand over files on Nelson’s relationship to Lister, most of which remain classified to protect U.S. national security. And that was just the findings of one reporter working for a small alt weekly in Southern California. Imagine what even three of the 17 reporters The Los Angeles Times assigned to destroy Webb could have done. It gives cause to wonder what would have happened if Bradlee rather than Ceppos had been Webb’s editor. For one thing, most of the flak Webb caught involved hyperbole that had been aided and abetted by his editors — chief among them the story’s logo, which featured the image of a crack smoker superimposed on the CIA’s official seal. Had Ceppos stood by Webb and permitted him to continue his work and had other newspapers objectively worked to advance his reporting, the true flaw of “Dark Alliance” — that it radically understated the extent of the CIA’s ties to Contra drug traffickers —wouldn’t have come out only when the CIA decided to confess its sins. But of course, Ceppos, who somehow managed to win an ethics in journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists for throwing Webb under the bus, was no Bradlee. Investigative reporting is difficult, dangerous work, and it has become something of a lost art form in mainstream American reporting, which is why whistleblowers such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden don’t trust American media institutions to report their secrets. Instead, Snowden looked abroad to find a reliably gutsy journalist, then–Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, to help bring to light what he knew. I recently reached Greenwald by telephone (after four mysterious click-click-click disconnections) at his home in Brazil to ask him if he saw a similarity between what happened to Webb and more recent media attacks on whistleblowers like Snowden and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame who came under fire from U.S. officials for sharing government secrets. “The established media in the U.S. is extremely close to the government and will react the same way the government does,” he told me. In the wake of Greenwald’s reporting on Snowden’s revelations, he, like Webb, was subjected to scathing personal attacks in the press, most notably from The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, who authored the most egregious assaults on Webb’s credibility after “Dark Alliance.” “The government doesn’t even have to carry out the attacks, because the media will do that for them,” Greenwald told me. “You saw that with Gary Webb — going after him personally and ganging up on him — and you see the same thing happening today.” Greenwald recently co-founded The Intercept, an independently funded investigative reporting enterprise. Webb is an “inspiration” for a new generation of whistleblowers and muckraking reporters, according to Greenwald. “We are trying to follow in his footsteps not only because the reporting he did was so important and fearless,” he says, “but how vindictive the way the CIA and media reacted underscores how urgent it is to shine a light on what they are doing.” Unfortunately, America cannot afford to depend on anarchist hackers like Assange or the occasional disillusioned spook such as Snowden to protect our democracy from corruption or abuse. Instead we need a well-functioning and -funded press that employs journalists as fearless as Webb and editors like Bradlee who are willing to carry water for their reporters rather than for the government. Nick Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist whose articles have resulted in the release from prison of wrongly convicted individuals; and in the federal indictment, conviction, and imprisonment of a Huntington Beach, California mayor. He is the managing editor of OC Weekly, the alternative news publication for California's Orange County and Long Beach communities. He is also the author of "Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack Cocaine Epidemic Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb." The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.