Press Professionalization and Propaganda: The Rise of Journalisti ...

Just a few months earlier, the organization asked Americans if they read the daily paper regularly. Their survey revealed that, among Americans born since 1965, about an average of 14 percent said they had read the paper the day before.⁶ And, not surprisingly, as this book was being written in late 2009, seven newspaper companies—including the publishersof the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and Philadelphia Inquirer—have declared bankruptcy. In fact, according to the Web site Newspaper Death Watch, since 2007 twenty metropolitan dailies have ceased publication—leaving only ten two-newspaper towns. Major daily newspapers are struggling to come to terms with decreasing paid readership (nationwide, down over 10 percent for the six months ending in September 2009 alone) and cuts in news staffing and budgets.⁷ The Web site Paper Cuts had mapped more than fourteen thousand lost jobs at U.S. newspapers by late 2009.⁸ “The U.S. newspaper industry is suffering through what could be its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” Suzanne Kirchhoff of the Congressional Research Service declared in a July 2009 report. She cited a prediction that more than half of the country’s fourteen hundred dailies could fold by 2020.⁹

Clearly there is a stark gap between journalism’s belief that it delivers objective, fact-based stories and the public’s growing perception that it is receiving a product marred by inaccuracies. One wonders how there can be such a disconnect between the two views. After all, as one scholar noted,

This is a striking quotation, because testing this very presumption about the benefits of journalistic professionalism offers opportunities for exploring how the traditional press has “turned off ” news consumers. To be more specific, the work conventions of the professionalized press appear to have contributed to the public’s increasing disaffection with traditional news. This is a vital area to explore because today’s press critiques often gravitate toward two different, but often associated routes. Much of the