Exorcising the Churnalism Curse

SANTA BARBARA—In this enclave of California good life, I fed eight quarters into a box for a “newspaper” best suited to wrap fish off the nearby boats. Then it hit me. This was where I first began watching American dailies abandon their vital mission.

In 2000, a rightwing socialite with big bucks and an ego to match bought the venerable Santa Barbara News-Press from the New York Times and gutted it like a sea bass. It was a limited cause célèbre at the time, but it foreshadowed what is now destroying America.

Nothing matters more to a democracy in a world on the brink than a daily dose of reliable news prioritized by skilled editors from their own staffs but also news agency correspondents near ground truth. Voters need to know how — and why — reality over the horizon shapes their lives.

In a single term, a sociopath miscreant let Covid run wild and gutted NATO as Russia plotted vicious potentially nuclear war. He made China a bitter foe. Defeated, he sent armed mobs to the Capitol bent on lynching the vice president. The world saw a pitifully weak and divided nation.

Yet a thumping majority of voters obsess on inflation caused almost entirely by Donald Trump’s folly. With no platform beyond their master’s voice, Republicans are likely to control Congress and state houses next year. If 2024 goes badly, expect the unimaginable.

A chief executive can do little against a stonewalling Senate and packed courts. Still, Biden gave American families back the $1.9 trillion Mitch McConnell squandered in tax cuts for the rich, who got richer during the pandemic. More people now have jobs than at Trump’s peak.

Presidents can’t move a fungible oil market, especially when Russia, trying to cripple the West, accounts for 12 percent of it. European inflation is near 10 percent – 80 in Turkey. Drivers pay around $10 a gallon in Europe, where families also heat with natural gas and oil.

Biden is finding ways to reduce gas prices, Yet politics forced him to fist bump the Saudi crown prince he labeled a murdering pariah. Now critics call him a hypocrite. Diplomacy demands theatrics; Biden could not have snubbed MBS in front of cameras. Hard talk in private is what matters.

Meantime, a West Virginia fossil-fuel baron and an Arizona whatever, mislabeled as Democrats, deadlock the Senate. Biden’s ambitious plans to wean America off coal and oil are blocked, and he gets the blame.

Abortion bans and limits on personal life choices trample the most basic human rights. Biden rails against them. But Trump and Mitch McConnell packed the courts with religious fundamentalists.

America’s greatest threats — climate collapse and China — are global. As Heather Cox Richardson says, Biden’s defense of democracy has accomplished more in foreign diplomacy than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And he is a decent man.

Newspapers worth the name, in print or online, explain these complexities in steady detailed increments. But a third of U.S. dailies and weeklies have folded in the past two decades. Profit-obsessed chains and smash-and-grab hedge funds have savaged many that survive.

Television cannot fill the gap. It relies heavily on newspaper reporters along with dispatches from Associated Press and Reuters. “Breaking news” is only that. Citizens can’t run a democracy without a grasp of historical and global context. Reporters need to gather facts at firsthand for editors who lay them out objectively.

A recent Mort Report — “The Daily Doormat” — focused on Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star, with a cost-cutting chain owner now in the sights of a far more rapacious larger one.  A group of concerned townsfolk is now exploring possibilities.

Public support lavishes millions on college sports and the arts. People who have made fortunes in real estate or, say, selling cars, can memorialize themselves by supporting a deep-digging daily to protect their children’s future.

New IRS rules allow nonprofits to run newspapers that make money if a clear line separates funders from editorial control, and earnings go into its operations. The challenge is adapting old tenets to modern times. We need to know what’s broke before we can fix it.

America now relies largely on churnalism, once a journalists’ slur for rehashed, unchecked stories written at a distance. My glint-eyed editor objects to a Santa Barbara dateline, and she’s right. We go back to an era when reporting had rules. I am now in France, months after my visit, and updating notes by phone. But, hey, in churnalism, anything goes.

The term is now mainstream, but definitions suggest people no longer understand how newsgathering works. Wikipedia calls churnalism “press releases, stories provided by news agencies and other forms of pre-packaged material.” Collins Dictionary defines it as “reusing existing material such as press releases and wire service reports.”

I sent lots of “wire service” dispatches for AP starting with 1960s African mayhem and Indochina wars. We joked that the nonprofit cooperative was “A&P,” then a major grocery chain. It supplied the beef – big stories – but also basic staples for a balanced diet. AP now accepts advertising and outside grants, and it takes shortcuts that once were anathema.

Agencies competed with midsize family-run dailies that maintained foreign bureaus. When reporters got things wrong, others set them straight. Knight-Ridder, among the best chains, was alone in exposing the false pretense for the 2003 Iraq invasion. Like others, it has since been bought up and sold off for parts.

AP supplied news to smaller papers that couldn’t afford correspondents. Its 1,800 or so members paid its budget deficit each year. The boss was a general manager, not a CEO, who began at the bottom and earned not much more than reporters.

Publishers expressed opinion on editorial pages, but news columns were sacrosanct. Some felt a public trust. Others just recognized that was good business. If readers saw slanted stories, they switched to a competitor.

When the Sulzbergers owned the News-Press, they focused only on newspapers, with regional dailies supervised from New York. The Times operated like the Yankees. Reporters excelled at a farm club before making it to The Show. Its bench was thick with seasoned editors.

Today, the Gray Lady is still America’s newspaper of record, committed to its creed: “All the news that’s fit to print.” But it now adds more features and fluff than anyone can wade through in a full workday.

For diversity, young people are hired barely out of school. It sometimes veers into advocacy. Its reporters spend working time on CNN and MSNBC panels, sometimes identified only as network contributors. The Times values objectivity, but TV gigs and tweets reveal attitude.

Although its news columns often scrutinize Biden harder than they did Trump, it is tagged as liberal because there is so much ugly truth to report about the latter. Republicans call that bias.

The Times and the Washington Post are essential reading. But Americans tend to vote about issues close to home. Local dailies need reporters to cover home news but also national and global stories that impact directly on their readers’ lives.

That Santa Barbara paper I picked up had a few small-bore local stories but nothing else, not even about Vladimir Putin’s month-long assault on Ukraine. But like others I’ve monitored since, it was thick with opinion from local self-proclaimed experts.

One scolded Congress for “clapping like seals…as (Volodymyr Zelensky) begs us to go war on his behalf.” Meantime, he said, lawmakers ignore war on the border. “Every second of every day, America is under attack from around the world with an endless stream of humans, drugs and guns.” Another gave Biden and “cackling Kamala” an F for reversing Trump’s successes.

The News-Press traces back to 1865. It won a Pulitzer in 1962 for editorials exposing the secretive rightwing John Birch Society. Wendy McCaw bought it for $100 million after 16 years under Times management.

Before long, much of the staff quit or was fired in a showdown over her dictates. She lost a defamation suit against the American Journalism Review. The National Labor Relations Board ordered her to pay $2 million to ex-employees for “flagrant” violations.

The Star in Tucson and many like it are decidedly worth saving, tightly edited into slimmer dailies for a print version for those willing to pay for it and an online replica so editors can apply a successful paper’s basic rule: Get good stories and put ‘em on the front page.

No paper can be better than the people who produce it. Good ones don’t come cheap. The current fashion is to pad staffs with interns still in school. But many journalism faculties focus on tools and technology rather than reporting skills and ethics. Supervised training is crucial.

Lee Enterprises bought the Star in 2005 and slowly, then more quickly, began whittling it down. It still provides excellent coverage of the nearby border, with a bureau in Mexico and steady coverage that belies Republican fear mongering and gross distortions.

Perla Treviso was the Arizona Newspaper Association’s journalist of the year in 2019 but then moved on the Houston Chronicle and ProPublica. Born in Ciudad Juarez and growing up El Paso, she knew the intricacies at first hand. On study trips to Africa and Europe, she saw why simply slamming doors to desperate people only worsens crises.

Today, like many chain-owned “properties,” the Star has no editorial voice. It excerpts comment from random papers, with a mix of local and syndicated op-eds. Its letters to the editor, run at length, range into ranting from a psychiatrist’s couch.

Here’s one: “Why is it that Democrat Socialists choose to ignore the absolute horror that Joe Biden is inflecting on, we the people. They, too, are living in Joe’s Hell Hole. But, I’m sure the Democrats enjoy the needless pain and suffering. You Go Joe! Screw Up America More!”

One ought to avoid labels, but I’ll go with Forrest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does. More than ever, we need to heed Edmund Burke’s centuries-old warning: Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.

Until 2000, newspapers mostly held their own against the internet. But as readers grew less interested in the outside world, publishers closed foreign bureaus. I expected a stunned nation to take notice of global threats after Islamist zealots’ sucker punch on 9/11. Instead, it has gone steadily more blind, deaf and, in the word’s alternate meaning, dumb.

Change will be an uphill struggle. In CBS’s “The Good Fight,” lawyers discussed ways to raise their boss’s profile for a presidential run. One young associate chimed in: “Oh, not newspapers, grandpa.”

A Reuters Institute survey asked Americans to name the nation’s top 10 journalists. All were TV hosts who at best briefly parachute into stories but otherwise interview actual reporters and then opine. Five of the 10 were from Fox. You can guess who topped the list.

Tucker Carlson first emerged as a smarmy prig in a bow tie. Bill Maher summed his know-it-all style neatly: “You just want to punch him in the face.” I watched the start of his week-long “reporting trip” to Brazil, a paean to Jair Bolsonaro, the tropical Trump.

Carlson’s crux: Everything is the conniving Democrats’ fault. Their show trial with dubious witnesses exploited that minor Jan. 6 incident last year. They obsess about a Russian leader in faraway Europe to distract from how Biden raised the price of gas.

Brian Stelter on CNN recently quizzed a panel on how newspapers can give readers more of what they want. The real challenge is to interest readers in what they didn’t know they need to want. Democracy in the short run — and human survival in the long run — depends on that.

“An idiot is an idiot,” Franz Kafka wrote, and America has plenty of useful ones for Trumplicans to exploit. Only months remain for voters to look up at what looms beyond America’s insulating oceans. That requires newspapers worth the name.