I think like everything else in a democratic society we renew ourselves from the grass roots, and I think this coming generation of journalists really cares about what they do, they just have not had a chance to talk about it, discuss it, analyze it and think seriously about it. I feel pretty confident that they are going to begin to bring pressure on the system to do the kind of work they were born to do, and the public is going to help them. The biggest threat right now is the economic organization, which has put a lot of the most potent press instruments, namely broadcast and cable television, . . . into the hands for the first time in our history of ownership that has no basic interest in journalism. They happened to scoop up these journalistic organizations in acquiring other properties. I worry about their lack of any understanding of why journalism is a different kind of business.
Journalism is a business.
You have to make money in order to pay reporters and editors and to print newspapers and broadcast the news, but it is a business that has a personal and direct obligation to the citizen first and the stockholder second. We need an ownership that understands that. Democracy can't work without it. The biggest impact has been to create a whole new audience for information. There is a hunger for information out there and this new system provides instant information from all over the world.