When journalism’s light dims

The environment in which journalists and their communities operate seems to change daily in our present era. Lately, many such changes have left communities in a sort of growing darkness.

The purpose of journalism, good journalism, is to shed light. To illuminate the dark corners where things are hidden. To bring important information and sometimes unsightly details into the spotlight, where they can be examined by the people journalists serve.

When communities lose news sources — just as we recently, indefinitely, lost our neighboring paper, the Norwood News — or the reporters that give them life — just as so many local newspapers did amid the latest swath of McClatchy layoffs — some of those spotlights burn out.

What it always comes down to, we are told, is money. Running a news outlet in the current age, it seems, is a tricky and in many cases financially dismal pursuit. We have seen financial struggles shrink and snuff out local newsrooms across the Bronx and across the globe.

To use the McClatchy example, an internal email regarding the layoffs, which has by now been leaked widely across social media and other news outlets, cites an absence of subscriber support for the company’s investment in its journalism. In other words, the company’s leadership said, expenses remained flat while consumer revenue dropped.

The response, then, was to make deep cuts to the staff across the company’s many community newspapers — reportedly more than a third of editorial staff at some papers. These cuts, like the cuts to so many news organizations in so many communities, left many award-winning, passionate journalists, some with decades of reporting under their belts, without jobs. And they ultimately leave the communities those journalists served without their invaluable work and expertise.

Losses such as these are not occurring in a vacuum. This is not one company’s, one community’s, one nation’s issue. What we are witnessing is a global phenomenon, one that has been taking place for years, in which sentiments, and therefore investment, surrounding journalism have taken a marked turn.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post’s Freedom Desk — the paper’s press freedom initiative — CNN’s famously intrepid chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, described this moment as “open season on journalists.” She pointed to the “disdain and contempt” currently directed at journalism and journalists globally, not only from political forces, but from legions of people online as well. She called out what this means to journalists on the ground around the world — frightening fates as extreme as kidnapping, torture and death.

Importantly, Ward noted in the interview that whatever political perspective one’s contempt for journalism grows from, the end result remains the same. The devaluing, discrediting, othering of journalists ultimately makes it less safe for reporters around the world to do their work. Her response, she said, to some who espouse such sentiments toward journalists is “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone.”

For a growing number of communities worldwide, including some in our own borough, they’re already long gone.

When a news outlet dies, it rarely does so in a sensational way. Rather than going down in a blaze of glory, many community outlets slowly wear away, eroding under these pressures. Often, when it finally stops publishing, it has already been rendered a shadow of its former self. Staff a fraction of what it once was. Reporting not nearly as robust. In some communities, those an outlet served might feel their lives aren’t changed at all by its absence.

That feeling can be deceiving.

When journalists’ numbers dwindle in a community, the light they shine into the dark recesses of that community dims. In the darkness that remains, things grow. They fester, unchecked. When the people who once sat in on government meetings, dug through records and asked hard questions on behalf of their communities are no longer around to do so, an essential check on power is removed. Accountability, in this environment, becomes a flimsy thing. And history becomes only the stories told by those who hold the reins.

In this climate, when disdain for “the media” is popular, it is increasingly important to consider what would happen in its absence. Journalists, after all, are simply human beings. Human beings who, yes, make mistakes from time to time. But more vitally, human beings with a passion for telling stories, for bringing the truth to light and for using the power of words — or images, or audio — to promote justice.

Good journalists at reputable news organizations do not spend long hours building relationships, studying rhetoric, chasing leads or crafting the perfect paragraph because they aim to promote an agenda or distort the truth. They do it because they believe stubbornly, unfailingly, that by doing so, they might make the world just one degree better than it is.

On the other hand, those who doggedly set their sights on journalists, discrediting their work as “fake news” or describing them as less than human, often do so because they have something to hide. Those who most fervently aim to tear journalism down are those who would most benefit from its absence.

While the situation for global journalism is dire, it has not yet reached the point of no return. There are still many readers, listeners, viewers who believe in the power of good journalism, just as there are still reporters, veterans and rookies alike, who believe in it as well. There are plenty of people who understand that as attacks on the media grow worldwide, its importance only grows in tandem.

After all, if you are reading this, it means you picked up your local paper and paused for a moment to see what it had to say. If you are reading this, there is still hope.