How to Free the Press

John Nichols

While most mainstream media outlets earned the scorn that has been heaped upon them for their stenographic reporting of the Bush Administration's prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one newspaper chain's Washington bureau was consistently--and, it turns out, correctly--skeptical of the White House. Before the war began, Knight Ridder's small but able team of reporters was the exception to a bad rule, producing a steady stream of now widely praised articles with headlines that referred to the "Failure to find weapons in Iraq" and "Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq."
But the war that might have been averted by more skeptical reporting from the rest of the media will outlast Knight Ridder. Pressed by investors who grumbled about the company's putting too much money into journalism and returning too little profit, Knight Ridder sold out to the California-based McClatchy chain, which paid $4.5 billion and then announced it would auction off, by summer, a dozen Knight Ridder papers, including eight represented by the Newspaper Guild. The end of Knight Ridder, whose thirty-two newspapers--including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal and the San Jose Mercury News--had earned a combined eighty-four Pulitzer Prizes, illustrates the peril of practicing the craft of journalism in times like these. No conspiracy took Knight Ridder down; it was Wall Street's line that profit margins of 19 or 20 percent--which the chain posted in recent years--no longer suffice.
Though McClatchy officials weren't saying as much, the decision to sell off newly acquired papers in Philadelphia and San Jose, which are rated among the best in the country, was an admission that doing journalism right in some of the nation's most diverse cities costs more than the new owners are ready to spend. And that makes this a scary moment for anyone who recognizes the role that strong daily newspapers still play in gathering news, promoting debate and--in the case of most of the editorial pages of Knight Ridder's dailies that are for sale--challenging the new orthodoxies of the right. Who buys these papers will matter, not just to the communities where they are located but to the political and social fabric of the states where they publish and to the national discourse.
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