Journalism is essential to democracy ... or is it?

Reading Eagle columnist Dan Kelly makes fun of the alarmists who say that the end of the U.S. as we know it is here because of the socialist President Barack Obama, but he also says, "If the end of our nation is near, it won't be due to an imaginary historical clock. But because too many of us seem to think we can survive without newspapers and the protection they afford us."

As newspapers across the country as slashing staffs, losing ad revenue and losing readers to the Internet, some wonder if they'll survive the economic crisis and this shift in the business model.

And if newspapers don't survive will democracy?

And others ask do we really need the mainstream media agenda setting for us when we can find our own news, the kind of news we want to read/watch all over the Internet?

A recent Pew Center poll even shows that only 43 percent of Americans believe that losing their local community newspaper would hurt civic life a lot.

But these everyday Americans are forgetting the reason that freedom of the press is enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Felix Frankfurter said, “Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society."

According to this picture from the Newseum in Washington, D.C., President Thomas Jefferson said, "Were it left to me decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or a newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter."




(I saw this and I heard there was a video of you there, but I didn't get to see that.)

Both Chicago newspapers have declared bankruptcy. There are rumors that by the end of the summer the Chicago Sun-Times will fold completely or turn into online only. Can you imagine? Chicago it's really a one newspaper kinda town, but we might be soon.


The oldest newspaper in Colorado, The Rocky Mountain News, has closed along with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.



The lose of newspapers will hurt democracy because people will not be exposed to diverse views instead they will seek out only what they want to see and hear: the idea of the Daily Me, which is Nicholas Negroponte's idea of a virtual daily newspaper customized for an individual's tastes. We find this Daily me by seeking out the opinions and news stories that we agree with online not by consuming the hopefully objective news of the mainstream media.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote in a recent column, "The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays."

Not to mention the extremely important role that newspapers play as the fourth estate and the watchdogs of the government.

The importance of investigative journalism in the public interest is widely accepted, but not that many people seem to be worried about what will happen when newspapers are no longer around to provide this important public service.

ProPublica, (where I once I applied for an internship) an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, was created to offset the decline in real investigative journalism across the country.

So will there come a day when the federal government acknowledges the role of newspapers in keeping themselves in check. Perhaps.

Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin proposed legistlation that would allow struggling local papers to declare themselves non-profits so that they could stay afloat. My first thought was, "Finally, someone came up with some idea of how to help newspapers because I don't honestly haven't seen them doing much to help themselves."

Yet as a journalists it's difficult to imagine taking a government handout and still being able to be an effective watchdog.

Helena Deards of the Editors Weblog questioned the effect such subsidies would have on the media. "A newspaper may hesitate to contradict or criticise a body upon which it is financially dependent, and that small hesitation could amount to a large flaw in the democratic ideal of an independent media. In the same vein, dependent on how subsidies were distributed, they could have no effect at all upon the editorial line of a publication," she wrote.


Finally, there are those who are willing to stoke the fire burning beneath newspapers until the whole establishment burns down. Jack Shafer wrote in Slate, an online magazine, that it's time to kill the idea that newspapers are essential to democracy.

"The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people," Jack Shafer wrote.

OK, I'm not going to lie. This is probably true, but I think that's what most frustrating sometimes is that people don't realize what important work we do.

The Daily Me and the lack of investigative journalism will hurt democracy in America, and every American citizen should be concerned about the decline of the newspaper industry.