This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 18, 2011 - "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations."
-- Joseph Pulitzer
in The North American Review, May 1904
Not so long ago in a media universe very different from today's, I worked where the quotation above greeted the staff in the lobby. We didn't always live up to its lofty standards. But the goal of public service was clear, there on the wall and in the priorities of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Recently, the scandal surrounding the News of the World has shown just how cynical, mercenary and demagogic some press can be. Combining old school greed with modern technology, Rupert Murdoch's enterprise hacked phones, bribed sources and hyped friends in pursuit of profit and influence. Could it happen in the U.S.? An FBI investigation will find out.
I hate the Murdoch empire's motivations and methods. I hate the suspicion that's been cast on all journalists. Yet I can't dismiss these excesses solely as an aberration. The sins of Murdoch's News Corp. arise from temptations that beset many media organizations. The challenge of sustaining a public-spirited press is much larger than simply cleaning up the Murdoch mess.
Murdoch's News of the World may have been an extreme example, but many newsrooms are similarly chasing eyeballs. Crime and celebrities occupy a growing share of news budgets while public-spirited coverage shrinks.
Like Murdoch's British tabloids, his Fox News operation caters to a particular point of view. This blurring of lines between opinion and reporting can be lucrative, and it's caught on. Even the New York Times in its newly redesigned Sunday Review intermingles columnists and reported analysis.
Many new media, too, offer a cornucopia of opinion but rely on others for the basic diet of facts that sustain public discourse. From experience, I know that simply declaring one's biases is no substitute for a journalistic commitment to report without prejudice and to seek many perspectives.
At the Beacon, we're charting a different path. Here, the public service mission comes first. Here, reporting is paramount and presents many points of view. But the Beacon and our nonprofit brethren, promising as we may be, are still young, still developing the business models that will sustain staffs large enough to meet the needs. The opportunity is exciting, but the challenges are perilous.
Perhaps it's coincidence that a press scandal is breaking just as Washington implodes over the debt ceiling. Our elected officials seem to be standing on the tracks debating whether they hear an approaching freight train. Pulitzer would no doubt call that kind of government a sham and a mockery.
The Beacon has covered several distinctive angles of the debt issue. Washington correspondent Rob Koenig explained what St. Louis area officials are doing. He reported Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's prediction that a compromise will be reached and analyzed what's keeping people apart. He interviewed former Sen. Alan Simpson, who scolds from a particularly informed perspective as co-author of a bipartisan plan to close the deficit. Political reporter Jo Mannies covered debt-related demonstrations here. And we posted a budget-balancing game that gives everyone the chance to try solving the problem.
Against the backdrop of press corruption and government impasse, the Beacon marshaled able, disinterested, public-spirited reporting. Never has it been more obvious why our commitment to News That Matters matters.