Welcome to the Dark Ages

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges is not happy about the recent sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for an eye-popping $315 million. He believes "Huffington's Plunder" is emblematic of the rapid decline of American journalism. In a compelling, passionate, well-written lament, he explains why. Read it here.

On the future of news, Hedges writes:

"[The newspaper] has been replaced by Internet creations that mimic journalism. Good reporters, like good copy editors or good photographers, who must be paid and trained for years while they learn the trade, are becoming as rare as blacksmiths. Stories on popular sites are judged not by the traditional standards of journalism but by how many hits they receive, how much Internet traffic they generate, and how much advertising they can attract. News is irrelevant. Facts mean little. Reporting is largely nonexistent. No one seems to have heard of the common good. Our television screens are filled with these new chattering celebrity journalists. They pop up one day as government spokespeople and appear the next as hosts on morning news shows. They deal in the currency of emotion, not truth. They speak in empty clichés, not ideas. They hyperventilate, with a spin from the left or the right, over every bit of gossip. And their corporate sponsors make these court jesters millionaires. We are entertained by these clowns as corporate predators ruthlessly strip us of our capacity to sustain a living, kill our ecosystem because of greed, gut civil liberties and turn us into serfs."

I'm not sure things are quite as bleak as Hedges paints them. Yet there's no denying that the state of journalism is dismal and getting worse. Though havens of great news reporting remain, the holdouts increasingly resemble Custer's Last Stand. And as Hedges argues, mash-ups like HuffPo and its imitators aren't helping matters. Still, my inner optimist senses that we're at a turbulent transition point as we leave Old Media behind. Though it has yet to emerge, something fresh and worthy of journalism is struggling to be born.

What passes for journalism today is not sustainable over the long term. The reason is simple: For every reader captured or retained by a news outlet, two or more abandon it. That's called a death spiral. Yet, pent-up demand for professional journalism and good storytelling remains. But it's going to take something novel (probably tied to technology) to captivate the public again. That, I think, is the thing that’s trying to birth itself now. Unless we get lucky (and we might), the newborn’s delivery will take time. So, our meanderings through journalism’s present Dark Ages could be lengthy.