New Haven Independent

It is not that there is less news, just fewer people collecting it and more individuals and companies relying on the news from someone and someplace else. Put it another way, there are more places to get the same stuff.

Newspapers are dying at every turn as people stop buying and advertising in them.. Radio stations have all but stopped doing local news and in many cases having anyone in the building at all. Many TV stations have more hours of local news with the same or less staff. Go figure.

There is little to no willingness to understand that someone, somewhere, has to actually pay those reporters, editors, writers, and anchors. Many seem to believe that news falls out of sky, magically landing as little pixels (or occasionally) ink spots on the printed page.

It takes money, boatloads of money to run a newspaper, radio or TV station. Amazingly enough, reporters, writers, editors, want to be able to “kinda” live on their paycheck. And — who’d of thunk it? — they want benefits too.

Paper, ink, telephones, cameras, editing suites, transmitters and sending reporters out to actually cover stories all cost money. But we are becoming a society that wants everything for nothing. “Fifty cents for a newspaper? Hah! I’ll just read it on the Internet for free.”

For now.

But if people don’t understand the cost of producing journalism, those of us in it have done a truly miserable job of pushing back against those who have demonized the “mainstream media.”

I don’t mind being the piñata for conservative politicians. Who can forget former Nixon Veep Sprio T. Agnew telling a 1970 audience in San Diego, in reference to reporters, “We have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism”?

But I get a little hot under the collar when Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter decry the “left wing establishment media.” Remind me of the last story they actually went out and covered. It’s easy to stand at the top of the pile and bellow. It is much harder to get down with the rest of us and shovel. But that would mean getting your hands dirty.

These folks are no better than what Spiro Agnew called a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one,” when he railed against the press.

And the so-called “Fair and Balanced” network isn’t much better. Just like all of the other “mainstream” media, I have no doubt Fox News subscribes to the Associated Press. Their editors, writers and producers look at the same “left wing media bias bile” as just about every other editor, writer and producer in every other newsroom in the U.S.

The reason? The “fair and balanced” network would have to spend millions to cover the world half as well as the AP. Since the “fair and balanced” network doesn’t want to spend money to actually go out and cover stories, it winds up turning to the “establishment media” to learn what is actually going on in the world.

Sure, some original news reporting outlets like The New Haven Independent have been born on the internet. But even with significantly fewer costs then their print brethren, only a small percentage have managed to stay afloat and even they are still working on how to really make money.

In the meanwhile, the next time you hear some politician or radio loudmouth rail against the “mainstream media,” ask yourself this: if all of the newspapers closed tomorrow and all of the television and radio stations fired all of their remaining news people, where would you get your news?

Now go buy a newspaper.