Conservatives shouldn’t just complain about the media: They should start trying to change it.
The last few months have been rough for the journalism business. In a recent column for National Review, Becket Adams summarized the state of affairs:
The Los Angeles Times laid off 20 percent of its newsroom in January. At around the same time, NBC News and MSNBC fired a combined 75 employees. Time magazine fired 15 percent of its staff. The Messenger, which launched less than a year ago and quickly built up a staff of nearly 300, shuttered entirely. Sports Illustrated likewise laid off its entire staff. Though it appears to have avoided total extinction by signing a publishing deal this month with Minute Media, the sports magazine’s long-term outlook remains uncertain, to put it gently. Elsewhere, Vice announced plans to lay off hundreds of staffers while also ceasing publishing on Vice.com.
The turmoil has journalists and the journalist-sympathetic looking for solutions. Unsurprisingly, some in the left-leaning profession avoid considering its faults — its biases, its declining credibility, etc. — and instead seek nonsensical fixes. In the New York Times, a journalism-school professor advocated making journalism school free. And in socialist publication Jacobin, a journalist called for massive federal subsidies to the profession. Adams well captured the problems with these proposed fixes: The former would cause a journalistic glut; the latter would only accelerate journalism’s ongoing credibility crisis.
Can anything be done? In American Habits, Center Square reporter Anthony Hennen argues that conservatives can be part of a real solution. But they won’t do so just by harping on the media’s foibles, numerous and real though they are. “As cathartic as it may be, the conservative outrage over the state of journalism needs to end,” he writes.
What’s needed, instead, is “a journalistic revival pursued by right-wing types, a return to civic responsibility to provide the public with news about what the government and businesses are doing.” Hennen (with some help from a familiar voice) provides some idea of what that might look like. He also makes the case that journalism, however flawed it may be now, is necessary, especially at the local level. Otherwise, “the near future is one where towns and counties across America have no one watching what their governments are up to,” creating “a crisis for self-governance that very few political crusaders seem to worry about.”
Adams is right that, in the digital age, “the type of newsroom romanticized by Hollywood . . . will almost certainly go the way of the dodo.” But Hennen makes a convincing case that we still need journalists and that conservatives shouldn’t just complain about the media — they should start trying to change it.