There has been a great deal of hand-wringing lately over the state of our nation’s newspapers with the forecast that “print journalism is dead” and that a hard copy newspaper is going the way of the Dodo bird. The reality is that times are tough in all sectors of our economy, including newspaper publishing, but the decline of mainstream newspapers was foretold a long time ago. It’s not any great surprise except for those who just woke up to the fact that monopoly capitalism is its own worse enemy.

Over the course of the last 35 years, the merging, closing and accumulation of newspapers and other media by the large corporations (and I don’t even have to mention them by name) have brought a veritable end to competition.  The leveraged buyouts of newspapers large and small with the accumulation of the “power of the press” in fewer and fewer hands has basically placed the process of journalism on the commodities market like pork bellies and soy beans––vulnerable to the whims of the market place.  The corporate raiders like Dean Singleton or Sam Zell who scoop up newspapers like so many pounds of beans and then parse them out, divide them up, and squash them down to squeeze out the last dollar of value––have in the end killed the cow that provides the milk.

As we have seen over the last several months, the corporations who operate on a strictly capital investment model are extremely vulnerable to corrections and corruptions in the market. The problem with newspapers and other media today is that they operate on exactly the same model––and it has stopped working for the same reasons.                  
Corporations like AIG forget that they are actually in the insurance business and start making risky investments with peoples life insurance or retirement plans. They have, in short, forgotten what core business they are in, not unlike the media corporations who have forgotten that they have a fiduciary responsibility to the public to publish the truth or some facsimile of it!

Contrary to the shrill voices of the national punditry or the horde that follows their public musings, the state of the fourth estate is in crisis because they, the mainstream media, have stopped doing their jobs. They have forgotten what their core business is and have bartered the public trust for unregulated capitalism. The great unabashed public, which is supposed to be so gullible, has stopped trusting them and with good reason.

They lied to the public about the war in Iraq; failed miserably to investigate the crimes of Bush and Cheney (400 by one estimate, and at lest 25 impeachable offenses as we detailed in story some years ago); backed down in the 2004 and 2000 presidential elections; never held Bush accountable for the failures of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans; and was implicated and compromised in the Valerie Plame affair.  On top of this, the number of reporters who have been caught recently getting paid to write favorable stories or to plant stories for the government or corporate clientele or who simply just made stuff up have only added to the demise of the public trust.

The calamity of the demise of the mainstream media is more like a suicide of a thousand self-inflicted cuts. It is not that the public has stopped desiring to know what’s going on– for as I was quoted recently in the hipster magazine, Swindle, “People are still horny for the truth.”  
 

Contrary to the demise theory of “print is dead,” this newspaper and I personally have, for the last 30 years, stood against the mainstream media’s myopic vision and its historic failures to just report the news. Unlike the corporate press, I believe that you the readers own this publication. And that without you reading and believing the information provided here, it would be cease to exist.  I am merely the people’s delegate who manages this public trust.

However, it is our role to make the news engaging, timely and reflective of the communities we serve, and thereby trustworthy.  This commitment to both the fundamentals of protecting free speech and service is quite different from the mainstream model. As a business model, we are not created to build publishing empires, to leverage capital to monopolize a market, or fluffing the news to kiss someone’s ass. We won’t sell the front page. we don’t sell articles and offer them up as news. We don’t have former editors on our cover schilling their latest films or the local councilwoman or an LAPD cop pretending to be journalists. You can buy an advertisement anytime if you want to say how great you are or promote your cause, but we can’t be bribed! That’s why this newspaper continues to be trusted even when the others are not.

When, for instance, was the last time you saw the publisher or even a senior editor of the L.A. Times or the Daily Breeze or the Press Telegram show up at a community meeting to listen to what you want?  Could you even imagine the CEOs of CBS, NBC or ABC holding a town hall meeting like President Obama did in Costa Mesa a few weeks ago to listen to your concerns?   I, on the other hand, can’t go out to lunch without hearing from somebody about something that we printed last week, good or bad. And we are the only paper that you read that doesn’t edit your letters to the editor.        

Finally for all of those who have asked about how RLN is weathering this storm, I thank you for your concerns and suggest two things: own a little bit more stock in your paper by subscribing to it and support our local advertisers. And tell them that you do so because they have the courage to appear in a newspaper that stands up for things you believe in. As for the mainstream media, tell them to print the truth or move over and let some one who will take charge!