National correspondent presents lecture on problems facing modern journalism

National correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly James Fallows spoke Thursday afternoon in Dodds Auditorium about the problems facing the modern journalism industry in the era of new media. His lecture, titled “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” was based on his April 2011 article in the Atlantic of the same name.

Fallows, who was also a former White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and former editor of US News & World Report, presented the evolution of American media as an ongoing “drama in five acts.”

Fallows called Act I the “pre-modern era”: When he was a teenager, a highly partisan press shifted to a more professionalized industry with the goal of objectivity, he said. In this era, network broadcasters such as Walter Cronkite presented a dignified, respectable voice for the news while journalists at Time and Newsweek’s worldwide bureaus lived glamorous lifestyles like “ambassadors.”

“There was a social air to it that was simultaneously respectable and raffish,” he said about this “Lost Eden” era.

During Act II, the mainstream media model felt an increasing tension between its “longtime, legitimate political function” of disseminating relevant information to the public and the temptation to indulge in entertainment. Fallows said that reporters became drawn to “sports commentary style” of news in which they spoke about the politics of an issue instead of the issue itself. For example, the focus on President Ronald Reagan’s attack on Libya in 1981 was his popularity polls rather than the foreign policy decision.

“Pure entertainment will always be more interesting than even the most riveting presentation of events,” he said.

But the media — now in Act III — has experienced a “real crisis” over the last 10 years, Fallows said. He argued that new technologies like the Internet and satellite forced new competition on the news cycle, which was pushed to move faster. Furthermore, he said, the circulation of newspapers fell and print display ads became less attractive.

“Newspapers could no longer tell you what happened yesterday because you already knew,” he said. “Every economic fundamental of my business was devastated in a way that very few industries have been in so profound a fashion in so short a time.”

But soon thereafter, media business models began to adapt in the short term in what Fallows termed Act IV, an era of “the glimmers of salvation.” Though news journalism is still searching for a market and has considered the possibility of online “pay walls” for news access, he argued that “there has steadily been a demand for more information.”

In Act V of “new media,” Fallows said that the landscape has settled enough to see what are advantages, disadvantages, strengths and weakness. For example, he noted that new expert voices and observers have emerged to cover events worldwide in real time.

“I would say that world understanding of developments in the Arab sphere was probably better in the past year and a half than any other comparable foreign event,” he said.

He acknowledged, however, the difficulty of overcoming the public knowledge problem is that in an era of abundant information “people are arguably stupider than before.” But he said he found hope that the journalism industry could pool its resources with the technology sector, universities, non-government organizations and public institutions to solve the challenges posed to mass media by new technologies.

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“The new media challenge of this time is of matching the information that we are going to be able to produce ... with a public,” he said. “This is a worthy challenge.”

This lecture was the first in the Wilson School’s new Media and Public Policy series.