By John Dineen
(One dog barking is an occasional column. John is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive whose observations I enjoy — and never more than during these crazy times. He also is my husband.)
It is hand-wringing season in large swaths of the country, places where citizens woke up the morning after the election to an outcome they had never anticipated.
Certainly few newsrooms anticipated the outcome, and consequently the mood in those venues has gone well past hand-wringing, to self-flagellation. The press got it wrong, and it felt exposed.
Surely, a big thing happened on Election Day. Its causes and implications are sprawling, impossible to digest in a single bite. So, let’s start our exploration, understanding that a few glib observations are a long way from definitive answers.
Let’s start with the media.
First, the election showed us, if we didn’t already know, that thinking of “the media” as a single entity is a mistake. In fact, it’s an intertwined group of industries and processes, and it’s in greater flux than at any time in memory. Reporters and editors are trying to navigate in those seas, and 2016 went badly.
Consider, first, just what the internet hath wrought.
“Never quarrel with a man who who buys ink by the barrel,” goes the quote. Now, “ink” is nearly free. With the barrier to entry virtually non-existent, Everyone Can Be a Publisher. So:
• The business model for the news business has broken. News organizations struggle to remain profitable, and the only reliable way they’ve found so far is layoffs. Television news, of course, is a different animal, with its focus on entertainment.
• The news coverage model has broken. In a distant past, editors were information gatekeepers; their organizations were the sole source of news. We are now awash in information. Some of it is authoritative. Some of it is egregiously erroneous — and some of that is disguised as news.
Consider, as well, the shifting political sands.
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts,” according to another bit of previously sage wisdom.
While we believed it, there’s always been a bit of the triumph of hope over experience in this quote — its mere existence tells us that. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” said William Randolph Hearst, who, by the way, bought ink by the barrel.
Tobacco and climate change taught us that moneyed interests could deny facts successfully — at least for a time (although, arguably, on climate change, the clock is still running).
But nothing prepared us for the onslaught on reality that Donald Trump has served up.
In this most challenging of environments, the press, its traditional business and coverage foundations crumbling, has foundered. And often the tools on which it has most depended are failing it.
This is the first part of a series looking at the press, politics and the election.
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