One of my favorite podcasts is Slate’s Political Gabfest, a weekly show in which Slate writers discuss the week in politics. This week’s show [MP3] features Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and Newsday’s Jonathan Alter bashing Rupert Murdoch and wringing their hands over his takeover of the Wall Street Journal. Slate foreign editor June Thomas, who has what sounds like a British accent, responds by accusing Alter and Weisberg of snobbery and defending what Murdoch has done to the Times of London:
The Times was read by 100,000 old boffers, who mostly got it for the crossword… It was from another century—from the 19th Century, not the 20th Century. It didn’t have TV listings because it was too refined for that. Britain has changed. Britain is a more democratic country. You don’t need papers for the tofts any more. It’s not even the most conservative paper. It’s not the worst paper by any means. It’s not the worst of the broadsheets. I wouldn’t read it. But I think the fact that four times as many people read it now despite the way that newspaper circulation is declining everywhere in the world. He’s a good businessman. I think there is a lot of snobbery in the way that people are attacking him. I think that as long everyone is very vigilant about his interests—which are media interests, not armaments or supermarkets—I am not terribly worried about Rupert Murdoch.
I’m not sure what “boffers” and “tofts” are, but I think she makes a good point. One of the fundamental premises of the elitist argument Thomas is criticizing here is that there’s a fundamental tension between good business and good journalism—that the job of a newspapers owner (which Weisberg calls its public trust) is to forego maximizing profits in the name of good journalism. But this, it seems to me, demonstrates a myopic attitude toward business and a paternalistic attitude toward readers. Because it rests on the assumption that practicing good journalism is not a good business strategy. And the reason it’s not a good business strategy, presumably, is that readers don’t really want to read good journalism, but journalists must force-feed it to them like children eating their vegetables.
Now certainly, there are some papers that become successful by pursuing a less educated audience using dumbed-down, sensationalistic news coverage. But I don’t see how that would be a good business strategy for the Journal. The Journal has 2 million daily readers precisely because they produce the kind of in-depth, high-brow news coverage that the nation’s business elites demand. It’s not like the highly educated readers who pay almost a dollar a day for the paper aren’t going to notice if the paper’s quality starts to suffer as a result of cost-cutting.
More generally, I’m not sure I like the notion that the job of journalism is to force-feed readers information they otherwise wouldn’t be interested in. You can fill the newspapers with all the high-quality, in-depth reporting you like, but if a reader isn’t interested, he’s still going to flip to the sports section. So if dumbing the news down a little bit at least gets readers to read some news, I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.
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