Actual journalism costs more money because you actually have to invest the time to dig, and comes with the added cost of getting reduced access to senior government officials, which makes it even more expensive to keep up with the competition.

When the public appears to not care whether their news consists of parroted lines or actual journalism, there's little incentive for most of the press to dig, and many incentives not to.

My favourite recent example was when a Norwegian newspaper published documents from the Snowden files that appears to show extensive surveillance in Norway. This was underlined by the fact that others have admitted to surveillance based on the exact same documents.

What followed was surreal: Norway has two main security agencies, the Police Security Service, responsible for internal intelligence, and the Security Service (Etteretningstjenesten), which is external intelligence. The latter used to pretty much never talk to the press.

But after that article, they suddenly got chatty, and all of their own accord they invited to a press conference to "admit" that yes, they were responsible for the surveillance in question. Never mind that for all other countries that have made admissions the documents in question have indicated internal surveillance, and that the Security Service "admitted" that this was surveillance in Afghanistan, where Norway according to this admission are intercepting metadata for pretty much every call. But nowhere else.

At this point you'd think the press would have some questions, such as "why are you revealing to the press - and thus implicitly to Taliban etc. - that Norway is intercepting all calls in Afghanistan?" or "why would the numbers for Norway refer to interception in Afghanistan when there's a separate entry for Afghanistan in the same numbers?" and "why would the NSA depend on Norway for surveillance in Afghanistan?" and "how much money does this surveillance in Afghanistan cost us?" and "if we have the capability to conduct surveillance in Afghanistan on this scale, why is that the only place, we're conducting this kind of surveillance?"

Not least "why, when the article talked about internal Norwegian surveillance did you feel compelled to host a press conference to reveal details about your notoriously secretive operations instead of letting the Police Security Service deny the allegations". Heck, if it really was the Security Service that this document referred to, the Police Security Service could just state that they invite the parliamentary oversight committee to audit, and that they will naturally find no such surveillance.

You'd also expect they'd go back to the Police Security Service and ask them "why should we believe you're not doing this, when your predecessor in name, operated by most of the same people, were caught having conducted illegal political surveillance for several decades not that many years ago?"

Nothing. No follow up at all. Instead the single press conference was enough to make the paper that broke the story backtrack and apologise.

A few months later it became clear that the NSA were in fact recording most calls in Afghanistan, which makes the idea that the NSA would explicitly call out vast amounts of metadata collection by our Security Service as valuable even more silly.

Still no follow up from Norwegian press.

Basically they don't want to rock the boat. When they don't rock the boat, they get to get spoon fed information they'd otherwise have to work for and/or read about in the competitors papers. When they don't rock the boat they get exclusive interviews and photo ops.

It's a fantastic lesson in "soft" censorship: Don't outlaw publishing material you want to suppress. Instead make it economical and professional suicide. Make journalists that dig sacrifice their career by making sure everyone know they will never get any kind of inside access. Make papers or tv channels that publish too hard hitting stories know they'll lose any chance at access, interviews and photo ops. Soon enough, large parts of the press will self-regulate.

This is part of why we used to have a politically affiliated press, where political parties would fund papers that would be paid explicitly to provide viewpoints that weren't popular even if that viewpoint was unprofitable. Sure that have flaws too, but those flaws were counteracted by having a wide range of them publishing alternative viewpoints. That more and more media outlets have gone "independent" means more and more of them are no implicitly beholden to play to government interests, or at least staying not straying too far from the script, to be profitable.

(sorry for the long rant - the above story still makes me angry)