Maddowblog presents on their front page a YouTube of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in which John covers the precarious situation of newspapers in the country. The entire video is of interest, but what really caught my eye was 2009 opinions from David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire, as he discusses one of the results of the shrinking reach of newspapers at the Conference on the Future of Journalism and Newspapers:
The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day I’ll be confident that we’ve reached some sort of equilibrium. There’s no glory in that kind of journalism, but that is the bedrock of what keeps, you know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption, it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.
And in the last seven years we’ve seen political extremism & corruption creep into our political system from the conservative side of the spectrum. The shining of the light of the press has been a crucial part of the ongoing American experiment, and as that light has dimmed in the distorted glare of the Internet, we’ve seen the American political scene fragment and become less and less realistic. Between the absolutists for whom compromise is a sin, and opportunists who take advantage of the dimness (not only metaphorical, but the dimness of the extremists as well), we’re getting an object lesson in what happens when the free press is starved of funding. John Oliver makes a great point about how the Internet is critically dependent on newspapers, on journalists, and yet by its very presence it is crushing this critical source of information.
I certainly have that blood all over my hands. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in decades. (But I do subscribe to a several magazines.)
If there is a solid dependence of Internet news organizations on the dying newspapers and other traditional forms of journalism, at some point the Internet news organizations will be forced to either hire journalists themselves – or hire novelists to keep filling all those clicks.
Here’s the John Oliver video:
