People got used to NOT paying for journalism because advertising provided most of the revenue, but now that’s drastically reduced, particularly classified ads in print. I tell people they should support quality journalism now because one day they may regret it when it’s gone.
While New York Times v. Sullivan was hailed as a shield for bold journalism, its protection has increasingly been wielded by media corporations to dodge accountability -- and it shows. Public trust in the press, once near 70% in the 1970s, has declined to a mere 31–34% in recent Gallup polls. Pew research confirms that declining confidence in news has been steady and grinding for decades. In an industry where truth is the sole foundation for value, Sullivan (while advancing civil rights) toppled that foundation.
With journalism value in decline, corporate execs did what corporate execs do; they gutted newsrooms, while increasing their own pay. This industry-wide trend -- shrinking local news teams, growing corporate pay -- erodes both reporting capacity and the willingness to self-correct, reinforcing a cycle of mistrust and declining value.
Who is watching City Hall is a fair question. Who is watching journalism corporations is the scarier question.
We live with post-truth politics because Sullivan, in combination with Citizens United, has reset the rules to be that whoever tells the most and biggest lies fastest … wins.
I don’t understand the tie you’re making to Sullivan. What examples are there that Sullivan protected a media outlet that reported a substantially untrue story about a public figure? And have there been a significant number of such cases that it changed public confidence in the media? Corporate execs cut expenses because revenue fell off a cliff due to the internet. I’m not defending that, and I certainly agree corporate salaries are way too high, but the economic headwinds facing media are not the fault of owners.
Public confidence in media started declining, in my view, when Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine. That enabled poisonous talk radio with no balance, which led to Fox News, which led to all of us living in information silos. And having an American president call the media “enemies of the people” is much more responsible for a decline in public trust.
I will agree 100% about Citizens United. It has done untold damage to our country.
Craig was run out of Davenport thanks to b.s. "reporting" from a cabal at the QC Times that was bent out of shape about a new city website.
That said, I think he misplaces some of the blame by assigning it to Sullivan, when the corporate greed, private equity and relentless quest for "efficiency" rather than serving a public purpose are all bigger drivers of the decline, IMO.
When I moved to Des Moines in 2001 to work for DMEA, the Register had a full-time education reporter. It was much easier to develop a relationship with that person and was easier to get coverage of all things education related. Now, it seems like there is a revolving door or reporters who serve in a variety of roles. IPR actually does some of the best work on statewide reporting and does a very good job on education issues. Of course, Republicans want to defend them.
I'm certain you meant to say 'Defund' IPR. From my point of view, Republicans want to control all news that appears detrimental to their purp[ose, wich is total control of the population. Wealthy elites versus everyone else. MAGAs may think they have special status for their future; they don't-only their votes are currently necessary, and even that may be in question with machinations involving Starlink and Elon Musk's involvement.
I knew what you meant. Damned autocorrect. Yesterday, I emailed a guy named Luke and discovered afterward autocorrect had changed it to Like. Probably not the first time he’s seen that happen.
As usual, Dave - a very insightful message. Yes, it’s a very dangerous trend. An uninformed public will make bad voting decisions and politicians will never be accountable to anyone but themselves and their cronies Thanks for your reporting on this dilemma. Not a good trend.
I’ve mentioned this very topic to my coffee group several times and usually get an uninspired shrug or two. Most people simply have never understood the role of the media in a democracy. Beating up the media (enemy of the people) is a winning theme for Trump and a losing one for citizens who would shudder if they knew some of the shenanigans going on in their hometowns. If I’m an unethical pol, I welcome the news that the local paper is going under or the tv station is laying off the investigative reporter. Who needs watchdogs?
Exactly right. It’s obvious Trump wants to degrade trust in the media because they hold his feet to the fire. As they should with EVERY public official.
Absolutely right, Dave. Seems to me newsroom staffs, at least newspaper newsroom staffs - have been cut roughly 75 percent across the board - including the one I used to work in. While staffing has been cut, out of town corporate ownership has increased. When I was growing up all the news outlets in my hometown - the newspaper, TV station and multiple commercial radio outlets- were locally owned. Now it’s just one commercial radio radio station. And God bless Iowa Public Radio but their focus is primarily state versus local news. We also have a Black-format radio station striving mightily to revive itself.
And in the newspaper trade, the newsroom cuts don’t begin to count the job losses from the product being printed, laid out and delivered from central locations out of town. Of course that’s a result of more of us getting our news online. But a job’s a job. Locally owned operations ranging from the Storm Lake Times to the Minnesota Star-Tribune are making it work some way. And a faceless publicly traded remote corporate owner cares more about the next quarterly earnings report than the next council meeting, bond referendum or high school ball scores.
I’ve also seen local governments hiring their own communications staffs to deliver their messages and putting out their own message in print and over local public access television. I’ve been told broadcasts of council meetings over local government cable channels are the best watched shows in town. Not sure how impartial that government-conveyed message is or how well even the actions a council takes in real time are explained to the viewing public- especially when they pass something without discussion.
A local former mayor told me his city tried to replicate local news in the municipal utility newsletter after the town newspaper closed after 120 years, but they couldn’t come close.
Best thing the public can do is support their embattled but dedicated locally based journalists - their neighbors- any way they can because they’re the citizens’ eyes and ears.
On a side note, Pat, I saw this week that the newspaper in Columbia, Missouri, where I went to j-school, will now be printed at the Register plant in DSM and trucked down to Columbia. That plant also prints the KC Star. Tough on deadlines which is why it makes no sense for subscribers to take the print edition.
No kidding! The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier is printed at Lee Enterprises' facilities near Muscatine, two hours away. It is laid out at a Lee regional design center in Munster, Ind. east of Chicago. The Courier was printed by the Cedar Rapids Gazette's printing operation, Color Web Printers down by Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, from 2008 to 2018. We printed at the Gazette for a few days when we were flooded out of our building in June 2008 and that was probably the writing on the wall. All the Courier pressroom and mailroom employees were laid off (it was also concurrent with Lee's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing). The Dubuque Telegraph Herald also was printed at Color Web. Then the Gazette stopped printing newspapers and laid all those folks at Color Web off. I think the Gazette is printed at the Register now too and has cut back to three print days a week as the Courier and most Lee papers have except for their flagship paper the Quad City Times in Davenport. I also read Lee recently closed its printing operation for the Buffalo News and moved those operations to Cleveland, costing 160 folks their jobs.
One of my old Courier buddies is now managing editor of the KC Star. I can't imagine a big metro paper like that being printed 3 1/2 hours from its home base.
Our deadlines at the Courier were so ridiculous at one point I was walking to work past the bars when they were letting out after last call. A retired ad exec friend and ex Marine told me he only used to get up at that time to go home :)
I agree abolishing the Fairness Doctrine did not help, but there is no research showing trust in journalism was rising through the 70s and 80s until the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. As for cases, the Media Law Research Center’s Actual Malice Practice Guide has a cornucopia of them.
Seriously, if an industry’s bedrock value is truth, that industry can only be harmed by lowering legal standards to permit lies about matters in the public realm.
My city council publishes their agenda and minutes to every meeting. I can also watch the city council meeting remotely. Plus I can text the Mayor directly if I have an issue or a question. Very efficient.
Kurt, watching the livestream works a little better for us retired guys but I doubt most working folks have the time for it. Even so, reporters should do a lot more than report on meetings. They need to be talking to sources, getting info that doesn’t show up on agendas or at the council table. It’s great that you have those resources and that you take advantage of them, though!
I knew it was bad but not this bad. Even if we could revive an interest in journalism as a career; where would the jobs be? How do we get newspapers back in small towns and not have them own and operated by big conglomerates? America is found on the streets in small town America. It is the best picture we have of what's happening and how people feel about it. I saw so many small town papers eaten up by larger city papers but there were a few still fighting. Now Newspaper offices are more likely to be museums.
Me, too. People way smarter than me have been trying to figure it out for a decade or more. Nobody has found a wildly successful model. The wealthy benevolent owner worked for a while with Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos but not anymore. Nonprofits like Iowa Capital Dispatch are niche operations with small staffs. Public funding is subject to the political whims of those in power, as we’re seeing these days.
Controlling information; its content, accuracy, focus, frequency, editorial integrity, and quality is largely determined by a handful of organizations worldwide. Media manipulation was the primary determinant factor in the 2024 election. The loss of local investigative reporting has given elected officials the opportunity to ignore the will of constituents, consolidate power and corrupt the system through gerrymandering, donation influenced legislation and willful disregard of transparency.
As I was reading my Storm Lake Times Pilot yesterday, it brought back memories of how papers used to be. Who is really watching anything? That takes staff. As an 'old time' City of DMer, we sometimes picked which paper got the story--Register or Tribune.
Oh my heavens. To see these numbers in your column made me nauseous. Shocking and yet not surprising.
How do taxpayers know how local spending decisions are made, and who benefits or loses in these transactions?
They don’t! And even scarier, they stop caring about it because it falls off their radar screens.
This certainly insulates local decision makers from scrutiny, potentially leading to dishonesty and graft.
It does scare me. How do we convince people that paying for journalism is important?
People got used to NOT paying for journalism because advertising provided most of the revenue, but now that’s drastically reduced, particularly classified ads in print. I tell people they should support quality journalism now because one day they may regret it when it’s gone.
Who killed journalism? It was an inside job.
While New York Times v. Sullivan was hailed as a shield for bold journalism, its protection has increasingly been wielded by media corporations to dodge accountability -- and it shows. Public trust in the press, once near 70% in the 1970s, has declined to a mere 31–34% in recent Gallup polls. Pew research confirms that declining confidence in news has been steady and grinding for decades. In an industry where truth is the sole foundation for value, Sullivan (while advancing civil rights) toppled that foundation.
With journalism value in decline, corporate execs did what corporate execs do; they gutted newsrooms, while increasing their own pay. This industry-wide trend -- shrinking local news teams, growing corporate pay -- erodes both reporting capacity and the willingness to self-correct, reinforcing a cycle of mistrust and declining value.
Who is watching City Hall is a fair question. Who is watching journalism corporations is the scarier question.
We live with post-truth politics because Sullivan, in combination with Citizens United, has reset the rules to be that whoever tells the most and biggest lies fastest … wins.
I don’t understand the tie you’re making to Sullivan. What examples are there that Sullivan protected a media outlet that reported a substantially untrue story about a public figure? And have there been a significant number of such cases that it changed public confidence in the media? Corporate execs cut expenses because revenue fell off a cliff due to the internet. I’m not defending that, and I certainly agree corporate salaries are way too high, but the economic headwinds facing media are not the fault of owners.
Public confidence in media started declining, in my view, when Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine. That enabled poisonous talk radio with no balance, which led to Fox News, which led to all of us living in information silos. And having an American president call the media “enemies of the people” is much more responsible for a decline in public trust.
I will agree 100% about Citizens United. It has done untold damage to our country.
Craig was run out of Davenport thanks to b.s. "reporting" from a cabal at the QC Times that was bent out of shape about a new city website.
That said, I think he misplaces some of the blame by assigning it to Sullivan, when the corporate greed, private equity and relentless quest for "efficiency" rather than serving a public purpose are all bigger drivers of the decline, IMO.
Great article, Dave, and sobering.
Thanks, Doug.
When I moved to Des Moines in 2001 to work for DMEA, the Register had a full-time education reporter. It was much easier to develop a relationship with that person and was easier to get coverage of all things education related. Now, it seems like there is a revolving door or reporters who serve in a variety of roles. IPR actually does some of the best work on statewide reporting and does a very good job on education issues. Of course, Republicans want to defend them.
I'm certain you meant to say 'Defund' IPR. From my point of view, Republicans want to control all news that appears detrimental to their purp[ose, wich is total control of the population. Wealthy elites versus everyone else. MAGAs may think they have special status for their future; they don't-only their votes are currently necessary, and even that may be in question with machinations involving Starlink and Elon Musk's involvement.
Defund...not defend
I knew what you meant. Damned autocorrect. Yesterday, I emailed a guy named Luke and discovered afterward autocorrect had changed it to Like. Probably not the first time he’s seen that happen.
As usual, Dave - a very insightful message. Yes, it’s a very dangerous trend. An uninformed public will make bad voting decisions and politicians will never be accountable to anyone but themselves and their cronies Thanks for your reporting on this dilemma. Not a good trend.
I’ve mentioned this very topic to my coffee group several times and usually get an uninspired shrug or two. Most people simply have never understood the role of the media in a democracy. Beating up the media (enemy of the people) is a winning theme for Trump and a losing one for citizens who would shudder if they knew some of the shenanigans going on in their hometowns. If I’m an unethical pol, I welcome the news that the local paper is going under or the tv station is laying off the investigative reporter. Who needs watchdogs?
Exactly right. It’s obvious Trump wants to degrade trust in the media because they hold his feet to the fire. As they should with EVERY public official.
And be willing to pay. I support just a few but it's what keeps me sane 😂
Absolutely right, Dave. Seems to me newsroom staffs, at least newspaper newsroom staffs - have been cut roughly 75 percent across the board - including the one I used to work in. While staffing has been cut, out of town corporate ownership has increased. When I was growing up all the news outlets in my hometown - the newspaper, TV station and multiple commercial radio outlets- were locally owned. Now it’s just one commercial radio radio station. And God bless Iowa Public Radio but their focus is primarily state versus local news. We also have a Black-format radio station striving mightily to revive itself.
And in the newspaper trade, the newsroom cuts don’t begin to count the job losses from the product being printed, laid out and delivered from central locations out of town. Of course that’s a result of more of us getting our news online. But a job’s a job. Locally owned operations ranging from the Storm Lake Times to the Minnesota Star-Tribune are making it work some way. And a faceless publicly traded remote corporate owner cares more about the next quarterly earnings report than the next council meeting, bond referendum or high school ball scores.
I’ve also seen local governments hiring their own communications staffs to deliver their messages and putting out their own message in print and over local public access television. I’ve been told broadcasts of council meetings over local government cable channels are the best watched shows in town. Not sure how impartial that government-conveyed message is or how well even the actions a council takes in real time are explained to the viewing public- especially when they pass something without discussion.
A local former mayor told me his city tried to replicate local news in the municipal utility newsletter after the town newspaper closed after 120 years, but they couldn’t come close.
Best thing the public can do is support their embattled but dedicated locally based journalists - their neighbors- any way they can because they’re the citizens’ eyes and ears.
On a side note, Pat, I saw this week that the newspaper in Columbia, Missouri, where I went to j-school, will now be printed at the Register plant in DSM and trucked down to Columbia. That plant also prints the KC Star. Tough on deadlines which is why it makes no sense for subscribers to take the print edition.
No kidding! The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier is printed at Lee Enterprises' facilities near Muscatine, two hours away. It is laid out at a Lee regional design center in Munster, Ind. east of Chicago. The Courier was printed by the Cedar Rapids Gazette's printing operation, Color Web Printers down by Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, from 2008 to 2018. We printed at the Gazette for a few days when we were flooded out of our building in June 2008 and that was probably the writing on the wall. All the Courier pressroom and mailroom employees were laid off (it was also concurrent with Lee's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing). The Dubuque Telegraph Herald also was printed at Color Web. Then the Gazette stopped printing newspapers and laid all those folks at Color Web off. I think the Gazette is printed at the Register now too and has cut back to three print days a week as the Courier and most Lee papers have except for their flagship paper the Quad City Times in Davenport. I also read Lee recently closed its printing operation for the Buffalo News and moved those operations to Cleveland, costing 160 folks their jobs.
One of my old Courier buddies is now managing editor of the KC Star. I can't imagine a big metro paper like that being printed 3 1/2 hours from its home base.
Our deadlines at the Courier were so ridiculous at one point I was walking to work past the bars when they were letting out after last call. A retired ad exec friend and ex Marine told me he only used to get up at that time to go home :)
Great column, Dave. This is a sobering reminder of the current state of affairs.
I have a good solution for sober!
I agree abolishing the Fairness Doctrine did not help, but there is no research showing trust in journalism was rising through the 70s and 80s until the Fairness Doctrine was abolished. As for cases, the Media Law Research Center’s Actual Malice Practice Guide has a cornucopia of them.
Seriously, if an industry’s bedrock value is truth, that industry can only be harmed by lowering legal standards to permit lies about matters in the public realm.
My city council publishes their agenda and minutes to every meeting. I can also watch the city council meeting remotely. Plus I can text the Mayor directly if I have an issue or a question. Very efficient.
Kurt, watching the livestream works a little better for us retired guys but I doubt most working folks have the time for it. Even so, reporters should do a lot more than report on meetings. They need to be talking to sources, getting info that doesn’t show up on agendas or at the council table. It’s great that you have those resources and that you take advantage of them, though!
I knew it was bad but not this bad. Even if we could revive an interest in journalism as a career; where would the jobs be? How do we get newspapers back in small towns and not have them own and operated by big conglomerates? America is found on the streets in small town America. It is the best picture we have of what's happening and how people feel about it. I saw so many small town papers eaten up by larger city papers but there were a few still fighting. Now Newspaper offices are more likely to be museums.
Great column. Wish you had a good solution.
Me, too. People way smarter than me have been trying to figure it out for a decade or more. Nobody has found a wildly successful model. The wealthy benevolent owner worked for a while with Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos but not anymore. Nonprofits like Iowa Capital Dispatch are niche operations with small staffs. Public funding is subject to the political whims of those in power, as we’re seeing these days.
Controlling information; its content, accuracy, focus, frequency, editorial integrity, and quality is largely determined by a handful of organizations worldwide. Media manipulation was the primary determinant factor in the 2024 election. The loss of local investigative reporting has given elected officials the opportunity to ignore the will of constituents, consolidate power and corrupt the system through gerrymandering, donation influenced legislation and willful disregard of transparency.
As I was reading my Storm Lake Times Pilot yesterday, it brought back memories of how papers used to be. Who is really watching anything? That takes staff. As an 'old time' City of DMer, we sometimes picked which paper got the story--Register or Tribune.