Talkradio host Rush Limbaugh has characterized news as something that happens. Pretty much anybody who witnesses it knows about it and can talk or write about it. Dissemination of that information can happen lots of ways these days – many of them digital.
That’s fine for car wrecks and such. But what about things that certain people want to keep secret? Government corruption, for instance.
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It’s not so much that Dalglish is worried about the traditional press, but more about what has happened to the First Amendment. She is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a voluntary, unincorporated association of reporters and news editors based in Arlington, Va. She was in Tucson for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual convention at the end of June.
When the nation’s founders wrote “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...” Dalglish said it wasn’t “because our founders thought that those who publish the news and their own opinions were special people. They’re not.”
Instead, she argues, it was so our system of democracy could operate on the confidence of independent truthful information to make informed decisions.
Not everyone has the time to personally investigate issues, but they have right to know about them, Dalglish said. That’s where the media has successfully played a role in opening up government.
Among other things, she cited open meeting and open records laws, allowing most court cases to be open to the public and protecting whistleblowers.
But those kinds of things are now threatened with the media industry on the ropes, financially. News outlets are cutting back on staffs and expenses.
She noted the politically conservative Copley Newspapers in San Diego fought hard to open the federal criminal case last year that hid the prosecution of a major figure in the case involving corruption of former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif. In March of this year, Copley sold its only remaining newspaper, the flagship San Diego Union-Tribune to a private equity group.
But now government lawyers are increasingly blocking access to documents with less fear that media outlets will challenge them in court.
“In days past, journalists could back a threat of litigation with an occasional lawsuit and even a fee recovery from time to time,” Dalglish said. “We had a balance of power because editors and news directors could muster a budget for fighting the right fights or tackling the bigger issues. That balance is rapidly eroding with shrinking media revenues.”
She cited one instance she knew of where a newspaper was facing the potential of legal fees in the range of $50,000 to $75,000 to hire her firm but decided against it to save a staff position for another year.
While she doesn’t argue the decision, there are societal costs as a result. “Access in that instance was lost. Misconduct went unchallenged, openness and accountability were illusory and readers were deprived of important information.”
Back to the point about what’s news and who reports it, Dalglish says online news amalgamator websites will be left without material, which is something people seem to be forgetting.
Dalglish told the story of a friend of hers, Laura Frank, a reporter at Denver’s Rocky Mountain News until it shutdown in February this year. Frank said friends and sources tried to console her by saying, “We’re sorry your newspaper folded, but don’t worry, we’ll still read your stories on the Internet.”
She then quoted a line she heard from Bruce Wallace, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, who spoke a couple of months ago in Long Beach, Calif., to a group of about 700 college students and said “In all my years as a foreign correspondent, I never ran into a correspondent from Google.”
Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237. Inside Tucson Media appears weekly.
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