Book Review: Media Smackdown: Deconstructing the News and the Future of Journalism, by Abe Aamidor, Jim A. Kuypers, and Susan Wiesinger

Media Smackdown: Deconstructing the News and the Future of Journalism. Abe Aamidor, Jim A. Kuypers, and Susan Wiesinger. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 224 pp. $139.95 hbk. $38.95 pbk.Sometimes a bit of tough love is just what is needed-and Abe Aamidor, Jim A. Kuypers, and Susan Wiesinger deliver a healthy dose to the news industry. Despite the title and subtitle, they do not content themselves just with criticism of journalism, and offer a number of well-considered recommendations for self-reform of the news industry in the last chapter. But the bulk of the book is devoted to a detailed analysis of the trouble the news industry finds itself in, and it can be in places quite a bleak picture. Clearly, the authors care about the profession of journalism and believe the press has a vital role to play in democratic governance; it follows that if the press is to carry out its watchdog mission (i.e., acting as an agent of the public at large in its scru- tiny of the big institutions of the social system), then fair-minded but tough scrutiny of the press, its substructure, its practices, and its product is likewise vital.The preface succinctly lays out the authors' understanding of the problem: "Journalism is in crisis." The first chapter surveys the landscape. Staffing levels are declining in the mainstream outlets and bureaus are being closed, print outlets are disappearing, public trust in the news media as an institution remains at abysmally low levels, infotainment seems to be supplanting serious reportage, the divergence between the left and right on the proper functioning of the press grows ever more polarized, consolidation of ownership has left a burdensome level of debt, evolution of reporting practices led to a number of high- and low-profile failures, fueling alienation of the news audience. The chapter title reflects the authors' concern about the plight of the news industry: "Why Journalism Matters."They follow with a chapter summarizing the arc of the news media from the revo- lutionary era, through the expansion at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, to the contraction at the millennium mark. Tellingly, this brief history is titled "The Rise and Fall of the Newspaper Industry." Next, there is a simi- larly concise chapter on ways the rise of online media has disturbed the legacy media's equilibrium, then a chapter on the history of the federal government's involvement in the press; the latter is a useful summary of such things as the postal subsidy of print product, the origin of the FCC, the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, legislative attempts to preserve newspapers, and the familiar contemporary issues of fair use, cross-ownership of outlets, minority ownership, and net neutrality.The next chapter explores a variety of new business models outlets are trying, as ways of dealing with the pressing economic problems: decreasing advertising reve- nues, decreasing circulation, and burdensome debt. The analysis deals primarily with newspapers, but has application to broadcast outlets as well. Paid access to online content ("paywalls") has been tried a number of times, and succeeded only in certain cases of high-value content; it does not appear to hold much promise for local news- papers, for instance. Some outlets have converted to nonprofit organizations, and pur- sued revenue sources other than sales, such as grants. Public funding has long been advocated by some academicians, but does not appear palatable to the public. The industry has tried to cope by migrating to contract/freelance workers or buying content from outside firms, and there have been some successes with a local co-op (or commu- nity-owned) model. The illustrations provided in this chapter demonstrate there is no panacea.The next two chapters deal with the perennial issue of media bias. In the first, bias is taken as a given, based on rising public perception of bias measured by Pew Center polling. …