And Now, the News

I think the whole problem is that the media purports to be that fair witness. What we need is for outlets to be honest about their own bias.

Too much slanting, too many editorials masked as articles.

I think there's two sides to this question--one is what kind of a product does the news media produce, and the other is about the economics and business model. The two aren't always directly related.

If one wants to find rigorously fact-based news, it's certainly possible. One can find pretty much any kind of news, on the Internet perhaps if not in a dead tree version. If you take the position that only rigorously fact-based news should be available, then it seems to me the problem is with market preferences--all that propaganda and those puff pieces exist because apparently it's what people are willing to pay for. Being a fair witness, unless it's subsidized by some non-market actor like a philanthropist or the government, probably isn't nearly as lucrative.

Having said that, a lot of the layoffs happening at newspapers aren't due to profitability as much as people might think. In fact many local newspapers can still break even, but in the last few years they've become favored targets of private equity firms and hedge funds, which buy them up, strip all their assets and sell them, and layoff the workforce. They do this not because the place is a big money loser, but simply because they need a big wad of cash and not a revenue stream, and they don't care at all about the human cost. I'd say it's of a piece with the larger trend of increasing financialization of the economy, where everything--student loans, home mortgages, etc.--is just an asset on a balance sheet to be leveraged for as much gain as possible, no matter any other consequences to society at large.

I have an in-law who works in the newsroom of a fairly large metropolitan paper, and he said, in accord with what Robert Musil said, the problem is not that the paper is losing money, it's a money-maker, but the owners have realized they can get by with fewer people and make those people work harder and longer. And then the product inevitably suffers, the paper will lose readers, and all will be downward spiral.

We should also remember that pure facts rarely make "good" news. Papers need to attract readers, both to sell advertising and to keep and gain readers. That means interesting stories, conflict and so on, with good writing, and thought-provoking editorials thrown in. It's always been that way.