| dc.description.abstract | Journalism in America has always had two warring halves. On the one side, it is a public service, armed with staunch principles about the people's right to know. On the other, it is a business, invigorated by hearty profits or by profits' allure. Its success has always depended on keeping both halves strong, because a wound to one side - principles or financial strength debilitates the other.
Yet, in the past 30 years or so, the business side of journalism has assumed an unyielding dominance. Newspapers across the country have been sold by families to corporations. Motivated by the medium's potential for profits, executives of these corporations have strived to make each quarter's earnings exceed the last. They have struggled to please shareholders. They have labored to make circulation figures meet their guarantees to advertisers, They have fretted about the cost of newsprint and delivery.
In more recent years, however, the executives, concerns have changed. Rather than worry about profitability, they have become anxious about their industry's very survival. The reasons for this shift are not hard to discern.
Recessions have undermined the stability of newspapers' advertising base. New sources of information and entertainment have drawn subscribers away. And, most ominously, a declining regard for the written word has eroded the habit of reading. Taken together, these trends seemed to raise the specter of newspapers, extinction. Without drastic reforms, newspaper executives have come to believe that their industry might well disappear.
What to do? Besieged by adverse social and economic trends and plagued by the profit demands of shareholders, newspaper executives began searching for a remedy. They have found a plausible one in a prescription offered by industry consultants: Use market research techniques to find out what readers want and then give it to them. The very same tools that brought prosperity to manufacturers of soap and automobiles - public-opinion surveys and focus groups-could restore the newspaper industry to health.
It has been up to editors to adopt this advice - editors who, at one time or another and to varying degrees, are likely to harbor lofty notions about the purpose of their profession. Like all journalists, they have been schooled in the traditions of free speech, and they know that this liberty they enjoy is preserved by the Constitution for one reason: Newspapers inform the citizenry, and in a democracy, citizens must be informed in order to fulfill the demands of self-governance.
In recent years, then, these editors have faced a need to reconcile two objectives, the fulfillment of their democratic function, and the assurance of their own survival. As a result, they have found strong journalistic justifications for using marketing techniques to shape the news.
In this essay, I will try to show how the reasoning of these journalists fails to rise above the level of mere rationalization; that, in fact, when their arguments are scrutinized it becomes clear that the goals of marketing are largely in conflict with the role that the press should play in a democracy. | en_US |
