FOURTH ESTATE:...The Press And Precisely Where We Are - And Aren't - With "News" In America...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

McALLEN, Texas | Wow! What a difference 10-15-20 years make in news reporting. I'm lost in the evolving reasons, for there are so many. Advances in technology is one. News moving at the speed of light. Nothing for the morning report these days. It's "up to the minute" in everything from fires, disasters, politics, sports and, well, school shootings.

The afternoon newspaper? It would never work today.

Now, the phrase is "news media" or "social media" for the emergence of even the tiniest of news. You can "Google" some small town in old Wyoming to see about that bank hold-up you heard about at the bar. You can see photos of "Deep Space" from wildly-expensive, but damned capable space telescopes. You can get the score of your favorite football team's game on your cellphone. Just ask "Google" to give it to you, at halftime or at game's end.

That's progress for you.

For the "old school" news business of network TV and morning newspapers, it's been just about the end of the road. When CBS icon Walter Cronkite signed off on March 6, 1981, who would've had an inkling that the day would come when an entire TV newsroom would also sign off. It's happened in small markets across the country.

The change has been a dizzying one.

Cable television news and talk shows have largely eclipse the network (ABC, NBC, CBS) news. Who watches the six o'clock news on TV anymore? It's Cable News Network (CNN), FOX News, MSNBC and a whole load of talk shows also availed by Sirius on your vehicle's dash radio, even. And, well, I'm not even mentioning the fringe ones, like OAN, Breitbart and Newsmax - all at the edge of the pier, all of those spewing material that does not in any way resemble "news" to be relied upon.

My trusted outlet is APNEWS.com, the website for The Associated Press, which is not owned by any one person or corporation, but by the membership collective; that is, the newspapers, radio and television stations that subscribe to its reporting service.

So, where are we with a stanchion of our government said to be necessary for the continued life of our Democracy, i.e., that "Republic" for which we stand?

It's bleak out there, is what I would say. Not quite resignedly, but almost. Get this: More than 360 newspapers have shut down since just before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, according to the New York Times. For the past "few" decades, the number from coast to coast nears 2,000 closures. Or, to use another statistic, about 2,500, a quarter of the country's overall total, since 2005. And that's not counting the newspapers that shut down their presses and went exclusively online.

It's an eye-opener.

When I started writing news in the early 1980s, at The Brownsville Herald, we were still using typewriters in the newsroom and not computers, which are ever-present these days. There, we had less than 10 reporters. When I worked for The Boston Globe, we had 200 reporters in the newsroom and The Globe also counted on correspondents in most of the world's major capitals.

Times have, indeed, changed.

Now, every aging stiff with a computer can be a "newsman," as if. What's lost is trust. So much misinformation and so many amateur reporters will lead to that, for sure.

Online websites, often one-person operations, stake their claim to knowing what is and isn't news. Most of them are untrained news journalists who merely mimic the Big Boys or go about copying & pasting material they cavalierly rip off other more-established organizations.

In a way, they do join the news noise immediately. Often, it is the average Joe & Jane who fall-in with a certain new "newsman," who then goes about ballyhooing the site's "growth," as if that's any sort of measure of his work.

Yeah, who knows what old Walter Cronkite would say about today's news business. Not much, I'd say. Not much that would be an appreciation or endorsement.

So, we beat on against the current, as writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a long time ago.

I bank on the following blurb to substantiate the value of a free press, regardless of the many, many amateurs now practicing the craft: In the book "On Heroes and Hero Worship," Thomas Carlyle attributes to Edmund Burke the following statement, "There were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."

That all-important Fourth Estate is our beloved press...

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