Scott has a post up about this article from David Simon, creator of TV shows that, like Battlestar Galactica, really aren't very good (angry link bait!). Simon says, essentially, that city newspapers at one time provided an important democratic check on police power, and that now that city newspapers are swirling into the crapper, so much for that noise.
Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit -- these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn't trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that's the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
Oy, well, yes.
There's much to chew on here, but one point should be made. There's a lot of smug wanking going on about how newspapers have earned the slow death they're currently faced with. And there is a lot to that critique, sure.
But then consider the fate of a paper like, say, the NYC Newsday edition, which was very, very good in the early 1990s.
It’s been a jittery two weeks in Melville.
Over the next week, Newsday reporters and editors are expecting an announcement about job cuts. Even veterans of the Vlad the Impaler year of 1995, in which Times Mirror ordered the elimination of 800 jobs from a payroll of 3,200, contemplate the coming week with dread.
“To be honest with you, it’s really grim here,” said James Bernstein, a business reporter and 30-year-veteran.
“It’s very bleak, and everyone is totally absorbed in it,” said another reporter.
“It really wears you down,” said William Murphy, a reporter on the Long Island desk.
On Feb. 13 Sam Zell—who bought Newsday’s parent company for $8.2 billion in December—wrote in an e-mail that there would be job cuts at every Tribune paper. The L.A. Times made its announcement the next day—100 to 150 jobs would be lost—and the Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant put their estimates at about 45 jobs. Newsday has yet to make its decisions on job cuts.
Look, some good local papers are dying.
A lot more got taken out and shot.