When Margaret Carlson picks up the newspaper from her stoop every morning, she basically knows what's going to be inside.
"I think it's yesterday's newspaper, because I've seen everything on my laptop already," says the Washington-based syndicated columnist and CNN analyst.
That's a reality newspapers face each day because of technology, and it has radically changed the way news is presented to the public, journalists and experts say.
Carlson will be talking about that change and others going on in the news and broadcast media Saturday at the Hotel du Pont as part of Forum USA Delaware's series. She will be one member of a panel taking part in an unscripted discussion and debate about "The Media in Our Lives."
Panelists will be Carlson, "CBS Evening News" anchor Bob Schieffer, investigative journalist Charles Lewis, and Michael Powell, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The moderator will be Ray Suarez, a senior correspondent with "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
'There is a crisis'
If Carlson can predict what she'll find in her morning paper, it's a wonder native Delawarean Charles Lewis is able to pick up his newspaper at all, burdened as it is with what he says is the weight of its corporate owners.
"There is a crisis," says Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity, the largest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the world. "What's happening is the 'golden age of journalism' ended some time ago."
This came about, he says, when family-owned newspapers began selling their businesses to conglomerates.
"There were owners of newspapers who believed in good journalism -- not just a profit but in an obligation to serve the public, and quality mattered," says Lewis, referring to The New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post's Watergate stories in the early 1970s.
Now, huge corporations, from Viacom and Time-Warner to Disney and Gannett (which owns The News Journal), run many of the newspapers once owned by families.
"Over time, these publications began to go public," Lewis says, "and as they went public, shareholders started demanding higher profits per quarter."
This has resulted in higher revenues through thinned out newsrooms and less investigative reporting, he says.
"My answer was to create a nonprofit alternative," he says. "There is an argument that the future of journalism and opportunities for journalists may be the nonprofit model, such as ours" and National Public Radio.
But corporate profits do not mean that the quality of journalism is any less, says John Sweeney, editorial page editor of The News Journal.
"The golden age of journalism is a myth," says Sweeney, who has been with The News Journal for 22 years, 16 of which he served as public editor.
During the so-called "golden age," he says, "it was news as broccoli." That is, readers were fed what they were told was important by the journalists themselves.
Thanks to technology that makes more and different news available as it happens, and to media owners who are more responsive to readers, newsrooms are "more diverse, and they appeal to readers more" because journalists spend more time discovering what people want, he says.
"[Journalists] were the gatekeepers of information, and [they were] elitist," Sweeney says of times past. "You can't be that way anymore, and that's a good thing."
Journalists definitely are responding to readers and viewers more, says Ralph Begleiter, University of Delaware professor of journalism and former CNN reporter. But he's not sure that's entirely a good thing, either.
"We say we're giving them what they want," he says. "But it's not what they need, and that's what worries me."
Technological advances
Even more to blame than corporations, Begleiter says, are advances in technology, which have given journalists and readers less time to digest the news and put it in context.
While Sweeney says that the news media are better today because technology provides "more options for people who consume news," Begleiter says that cripples analysis. Streaming news creates instant commentary by journalists and the public.
"If everything is flushed out through the sewer line of information, the responsibility to put it in context is to the public, but it doesn't have the background to make it," Begleiter says. "Journalists don't have it, either, but they are trained to find it out, by calling and interviewing people."
This cycle feeds upon itself, Begleiter says. "People are expecting the news faster and faster," and by the time any thoughtful analysis has been produced, "they've moved on."
Schieffer acknowledges the power of technology, but the greatest change in the media he's seen in his three decades in Washington, D.C., is the negatively charged transformation of political discourse.
"Politicians simply don't know each other anymore," he says. "When I first came up [to D.C. in the late 1960s], you had these great friendships that crossed party lines. At the end of the day, they all might have a drink together. It oiled the government and kept it running."
The professionalization of campaigns, as well as the eternal quest to raise money, has made politicians more dependent on special interests and given them less leeway for compromise, Schieffer says.
TV, and the media in general, reflect this hardening.
"It happened before I think we realized it happened," he says. "We've thrown common sense to the winds and lost our national sense of humor. We no longer listen to the people who haven't made up their minds. Theatrics sells, but as it sells, it hardens people in certain positions."
Begleiter sees the epitome of this hardening coming in the late 1990s, when the Fox News Channel began.
"They didn't have an international news-gathering organization yet, and they discovered they could make the same amount of money by putting articulate, lively and controversial people on the air talking, rather than smart, analytical people reporting and analyzing the news," he says.
But Schieffer does not think the news media are in crisis: "It's not a crisis, but we have to recognize that we're in the midst of an enormous change in communications, and we don't know where it's going."
TV's future not clear
The same uncertainty can be expressed about the future of the public airwaves.
Michael Powell's former role as head of the FCC put him in the spotlight when the agency fined CBS after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the halftime show at the 2004 Super Bowl. Powell's decision turned network heads at the time and has influenced broadcast television since.
"I think it was warranted under the law," Powell said recently in an e-mail. "The American people, through their Congress, are free to circumscribe such displays as long as those laws pass constitutional muster."
The current statute doesn't ban content, he said, but restricts it to times when children are more likely not to be watching.
"Broadcasting, in particular, has a higher public responsibility given that it utilizes the public airwaves," he said.
Because they reach the most people, the mainstream media have to keep asking the tough questions, no matter the content or the risks, Lewis says.
"Journalists have got to serve their communities, which means asking tough questions in town and city and county, and questioning those in power," Lewis says. "Stop spiking stories that are inconvenient to advertisers and powers that be. If the public thinks they're going to get the straight skinny, those readership rates might change."
But that has gotten tougher to do, says Begleiter, who now observes his former business from an academic perspective.
"Since the late 1980s, corporations that now own the news media no longer have journalism as a primary public service," he says. "Does the Disney Corporation [which owns ABC] have a responsibility to report about Abu Ghraib? It sounds absurd."
Not quite, Schieffer says.
"If I find out something that maybe Viacom [which owns CBS] didn't want me to report, they know I would report it," he said. "I've never had this happen, where they would tell us not to report. But if they did try to stop me, I could leak it to another organization. That's why these companies can't put those kind of pressures on reporters."
You can do everything better in journalism, Carlson says, and the best way to do that is through thorough and accurate reporting.
"I get physically ill when I make a mistake," she says. "The thought that the public might think we're not trying to get it right is so wrong."
Contact Victor Greto at 324-2832 or vgreto@delawareonline.com.
