We’ll just have to wait and see if he can, and will,
do the same thing in the marketplace of ideas — that equally combative zone
protected and preserved by the First Amendment’s provision for a free press.
The historic sale of The Washington Post to Bezos,
announced Aug. 5, is most noteworthy in that First Amendment sense, even beyond
the already-rising sea of speculation over how its new owner will move it from
traditional ink-on-paper distribution to the inevitable one involving
electrons.
The First Amendment’s protection for a free press
doesn’t identify any particular owners or even what kind of press gets shelter.
But what it does provide for is a news media that functions as the proverbial
watchdog on government, ultimately requiring it be a defender, informer and
surrogate for citizens who need information on how their government and public
officials are functioning.
The Washington Post, once a lightweight also-ran in
a long-lost, multi-newspaper era in D.C., built a reputation as one of the
nation’s foremost newspapers in the 80 years it was owned by the Graham family.
The Watergate scandal, which the Post uncovered and was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize, summons up a high point in national journalism in the last 50 years.
The paper’s leaders were leaders in the industry,
from the Grahams as outspoken and courageous publishers, to the inimitable Ben
Bradlee, that rare editor whose fame spread beyond the trade, to the unique
reporter-movie hero category inhabited only by a few and dominated for more
than a generation by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Certainly the newspaper had its critics, chief among
them being those who said it sacrificed objectivity for a liberal voice. And it
publicly stumbled at times — handing back a Pulitzer for a story it learned too
late was far more fiction than fact.
What made, and makes, the Post truly unique, even
with such strong competitors as The New York Times and the network news
operations, was, and is, that it held the government accountable on a daily basis
as only a local newspaper can. From relatively mundane matters affecting and
afflicting the federal bureaucracy, to the highest reaches of nationwide policy
and national security, those were hometown topics, with sources in
neighborhoods, as well as in Congress.
And that’s where Bezos’s highest challenge will be,
in terms of the 45 words that include freedom of the press. He’s free to take
the paper where he will — no government decree or legislation mandates his next
moves. Will he be noted for quality, quantity, or neither? Can he sustain that
intense focus on policy and process in an era of news as celebrity fluff and
pundit chatter?
On “CBS This Morning” Aug. 6, author and journalist
Ken Auletta said that one immediate tactic might be to make the Post available
for free on Amazon’s Kindle reader devices — a huge boost in potential readers
at no real cost. A story in The New York Times sounded a warning that Bezos,
whom it described as having “a sort of libertarian bent,” also “will now have a
microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing.”
Bezos does have a chance to be the landmark 21st
century owner: Someone with financial pockets deep enough to sustain the
quality of a major enterprise like the Post, while it and others search for a
long-term solution to lost revenues that fled online where Amazon is
preeminent. He touched on both areas — journalism and the future — in a note to
Post staffers:
“The values of The Post do not need changing. The
paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its
owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work
hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and
completely,” Bezos wrote, also noting that he will not run the paper on a
day-to-day basis.
As to what’s ahead, he told his staff, “The Internet
is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news
cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of
competition. … There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We
will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.”
Bezos’s success with Amazon came from taking an old
format — the mail-order catalog — and completely reshaping it to a new
on-demand era, setting the pace in how businesses market, sell, ship and
satisfy their customers.
The new owner also set out a similar plan for his
newest enterprise, and with no small irony, it, too, builds on an old idea:
“Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about —
government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses,
charities, governors, sports — and working backwards from there.”
Perhaps the key to revitalizing American
journalism’s economic base and editorial vigor is just that: going backward to
go forward.
About the author: Gene Policinski is senior vice
president of the First Amendment Center and COO of the Newseum Institute.
E-mail him at gpolicinski[at]newseum.org.
This article was published by the First Amendment
Center.
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