PEORIA -- Here's an account of Todd Gitlin's talk at Bradley University on Oct. 21, by Burt Raabe.
Thanks, Burt!
Amazingly enough, apparently no mainstream media covered this event, even though it is about the media!
On
Wednesday night at Bradley’s Neumiller Hall, Todd Gitlin spoke to a full house,
most of whom were students. The subject
of his lecture was A Glut of Crises:
Journalism and the Prospects of Democracy.
Dr. Gitlin is the author of twelve books on culture, journalism and
politics. He is also presently the chair of the Ph.D program in Communications
at Columbia University.
Dr.
Gitlin began by saying that he realized that “crisis” is an overused word but
he felt that it was appropriate for this subject. He focused on the decline and possibly the
fall of print journalism and the effects that has on democracy.
Gitlin
cited six reasons for concern for print journalism:
1. Decline in circulation of newspapers.
2. Decline in advertising revenue.
3. Decline of news reporting.
4. Diffusion of attention.
5. Decline of authoritative reporting,
or decline of trust.
6. Journalists’ failure to penetrate the veil of obfuscation.
All of these can be intertwined. Decline in circulation leads to advertisers
being less willing to pay for ads. Less
revenue leads to reporters being laid off.
Fewer reporters lessen trust in reporting because of superficial stories.
Gitlin
noted that reporting staff in big papers has declined by 40 – 60% in last
twenty years. He also said that the
public’s reading habits are undergoing a “sea change” in that there are many
more sources for information than before, for instance cable news and the
internet. Therefore, a consumer can
select where their interest lays, say, sports or entertainment or national
politics, rather than leafing through a newspaper to find their interest. He believes that there is a “decline in
sequential text” because people now tend to “laterally cruise” when taking in
information. He claimed, or recognized,
that “multi tasking alters cognitive patterns.”
Maybe this is why we have to give Ritalin to kids.
With
the diffusion of attention and sources of information comes a decline of trust
in print which theory is reinforced every time journalists fail to see through
vested interests self promotion and misleading “facts.” Gitlin cited the lead up to the Iraq war and
the current financial crisis as failures of the media to display a healthy
skepticism with disastrous results.
Among the sources of these crises is a free market, profit motive business model for journalism. Short term profitability and a pursuit of the lowest common denominator combine to condemn the sector. Just as health care has reached a crisis under this for profit model, so has journalism.
Gitlin proposed some alternatives including publicly funded financial support for non profit news sources. In many European countries, publicly funded news sources are common because people realize it is essential to democracy. Italy was not mentioned among those countries and we see the consequences of their system.
The
capitalist system works very well in many sectors of the economy although it
could be argues that there are very few purely capitalist sectors. We subsidize innumerable industries and
activities that we believe are essential to the national interest. Print journalism is a special case because as
Gitlin noted “money and power depend on inattention and disinterest” and as we
allow money and power to reach its tentacles into journalism, they will
maintain the status quo.
-- Burton Raabe
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