Media and Communications Policy : Media Policy & First Amendment Foundation : The Media Institute : Free Speech, Media Regulation, Content Controls

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We’ll know soon whether the proposed Google-Yahoo! advertising deal will be challenged by the Department of Justice. Certainly there are signs, most notably the hiring of antitrust litigator Sanford Litvack, that it may do so.

But figuring out what is, and is not, in restraint of trade is kind of tricky these days.  In 2002, antitrust concerns derailed the merger of DirecTV and Echostar, a union that would have reduced the number of satellite TV companies from two to one.  Yet just this summer, the two companies that comprise the whole of the satellite radio industry were allowed to merge.

So the opinions that follow aren’t informed by any special knowledge of what the DOJ will do, or even by the factors that will carry the greatest weight within that agency.  By whatever market analysis the DOJ employs, the deal that some refer to as GooglyHoo either will or will not be allowed to go forward.

The question being addressed here is narrower.  It is what the deal might mean to online publishers.  Because of the inherent uncertainties in a deal not yet consummated, much less experienced, we don’t have all the facts.  But there’s a difference, as someone once said, between a lack of complete knowledge and a complete lack of knowledge.  We don’t know everything about GooglyHoo, but we know enough to be worried.

Importantly lurking in the background of this matter is the parlous state of journalism and the legacy media.  In the introduction to its State of the News Media 2008, here is how the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) put it: “The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience.  It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising....  Online, the problem is that the revenue model is in search, not conventional, advertising -- and journalism sites are now already lagging behind other Internet sectors financially.”

In a Perspectives piece published by The Media Institute earlier this week, attorney Stephen Kinsella suggests a number of ways in which the Google-Yahoo! ad deal could harm the interests of publishers.  Most directly, he says the deal would mean that “online publishers will earn less revenue from their search syndication and contextual advertising deals.”

“Google and Yahoo!,” Kinsella notes, “are currently the two major players in syndicated search and contextual advertising, and compete with each other for these deals with online publishers.  This competition is what pushes both companies to offer more advantageous terms to online publishers.  A Google-Yahoo! agreement will weaken Yahoo!’s competitiveness in bidding for these deals, simply because Yahoo! will have fewer of its own ads to serve as advertisers increasingly migrate away from Yahoo!’s higher prices following the implementation of the deal.”

A similar argument was made by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN).  On Sept. 15, this umbrella organization for some 18,000 newspapers worldwide asked competition authorities in Europe and North America to block the deal, saying it would have a negative impact on the ad revenues that the search firms provide to newspapers.

Quoth the WAN: “The competition that currently exists between Google and Yahoo! is absolutely essential to ensuring that our member titles receive competitive returns for online advertising on their sites….  In our view, the proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo! would seriously weaken that competition, resulting in less revenues and higher prices for our members.”

Concerns about the prospective anti-competitive effects of the deal have also been expressed by the leading U.S. advertising association, the Association of  National Advertisers, and with less vigor by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

The concerns and objections raised by these individuals and organizations do not, of course, prove that the Google-Yahoo! ad deal would be ruinous to online publishers, or that the deal would mark the beginning of the end for Yahoo!.  But given the current state of the legacy media, and their future reliance -- if they have a future -- on online advertising, it is not surprising that this deal has alarmed many people.

Judging by some of its business practices and policy positions, as posted here in July, Google the company (as distinguished from Google the search engine) disappoints in many ways.  And at the end of the day this disappointment, if shared, may be a matter of some moment.  Because given the opacity and potential harm of this proposed deal, the question of support for it may come down to a matter of trust.  And the view from here is that Google hasn’t earned that trust.

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From Johannes Gutenberg to the dawn of the Internet, the press (or the media as we now call it) has been characterized by two things: It has been one-way, and it has flowed from the few to the many.  Comes now the Internet, where everyone’s a publisher/broadcaster, and all that has changed.

As we’re seeing already, tomorrow’s media will be two-way and many to the many.  (And a generation from now, when Virtual Reality is prevalent, many to the few as well.)

A change so fundamental poses real challenges to professional journalists, because in the age of user-generated content -- whether in the form of blogs, or social networking sites, or YouTubian video creations, or who knows what -- many of the “stars” are likely to be what we used to think of as the audience.

In this tumultuous new world, professional journalists will not only have to share the stage with amateurs, they will have to put up with their slings and arrows, and even to defer to them in those instances, which will be legion, where some amateur’s expertise or diligence on a given subject is greater than that of the professional journalist.

And there is one other thing.  As we see even now, all of the amateurs will have opinions, and some will be able to express them very well.

Given all of this, one might ask who will want to be a professional journalist, and what, exactly, will be the role of one?  Though no one knows for sure, the answer to that last question may lie in the advantages available to the professionals.

Because they have financial resources, whole departments of reporters, vast networks of contacts, and the best equipment, professional journalists have now, and will continue to have, something the amateurs don’t -- the ability to engage in the practice of gathering and reporting the news.

It follows from this that the media of the future may put a greater emphasis on thoroughness and objectivity, not necessarily out of high-mindedness or J-schoolish exhortations, but because this kind of reportage, unlike opinion and analysis, is something only they can do.

If this is in fact the future of journalism, it will mark a return to a journalistic standard that's lately  been honored more in the breach than the observance, and it will be another example of how great societal benefits often derive from the pursuit of self-interest.

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“Ladies and gentlemen, The Network News Hour with Sybil the Soothsayer ... Jim Levitt and his Almost Truth Department ... Ms. Madahare and her Skeletons in the Closet.... Tonight, another segment of Vox Populi....  And starring the mad prophet of the airwaves: Howard Beale!”  (From the movie “Network,” 1976)

Everyone of a certain age remembers the story of the unhinged anchorman, Howard (“I’m mad as hell and I won't take it any more”) Beale.  Examples abound that playwright Paddy Chayefsky was onto something.  Keith Olbermann comes to mind – and all the more so after MSNBC took the highly unusual step of removing him from his anchor post for being too far over the top.  Where journalism is untethered to standards of professionalism, and ratings are all, journalism suffers.

But the sullying effect of entertainment values on journalism is well understood.  The thing that’s less well understood, and a much more intractable problem, is the role of journalists in the decline of journalism.

From their tiny and parochial grasp of the speech clause of the First Amendment, to their growing embrace of opinion rather than objectivity, to their response to all things Internet, the performance of much of the national press corps these days seems – to borrow a phrase from Malcolm Muggeridge – like the antics of an exhausted stock.

Journalists’ knowledge of and support for the First Amendment can be measured by the things they promote and the things they do not. They favor access to government information, the right not to have to reveal their sources, and weak libel laws.  And leaving room for a little quibbling around the edges, all of these are good things.  But note the parochialism.  Journalists want access to information in the same way, and for the same reason, that fishermen want access to nets.  The point being that, whatever the intrinsic public good, and it’s manifest, access to information is a practical need of journalists.

But what about the speech needs of people who are not journalists?  Like the commercial speech of advertisers of legal products?  Or the speech of college students, circumscribed by campus speech codes?  Or the political speech of groups or individuals who, close to the date of federal elections, wish to make political arguments through issue ads?  Or, even within the industry, of the right of media companies not to have to yield to onerous and government-mandated “public interest” obligations?

On these and other First Amendment issues, far too many journalists are silent if, as with campaign finance reform, they aren't actually on the other side.

Controversy over media coverage of this year’s extraordinary presidential election campaign opens a window on another journalistic sore spot, the twinned issues of objectivity and media bias.  In an article dated 9/3, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post observed, without a hint of irony, that “denouncing the news media as biased plays well with many Republican voters.”

A similar observation was made the next day in an article in the New York Times. “If there is one mission Mr. McCain wants to accomplish at his convention,” it says, “it is to galvanize conservative voters who have shown signs of depression this year.  Traditionally, one surefire way to do that has been to attack the ‘elitist’ mainstream news media.”

But whether we're talking about conservatives, who represent maybe one-third of the country, or Republicans who, at least at election time, represent half, the obvious question is why do they feel this way?  Why is it that attacking the media is a “surefire” way to galvanize Republicans and conservatives?  In all the years that I’ve been watching presidential campaigns, I don't ever recall reading a similar line about Democrats, or about liberals for that matter.

It’s true, of course, that there are people to the left of liberals who are critical of the media.  But the great divide in American political life isn't between Republicans and conservatives on the one hand, and Marxists and leftists on the other. It’s between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals.  And thus, when journalists suggest, as they have for decades, that the existence of critics on the left as well as the right proves that their efforts are balanced, they miss the pregnant truth by a mile and persuade no one.

At what may be a tipping point for all of the professional media, isn’t this a problem that the industry should redress?  Is there any other industry that, upon hearing that half of their market feels they’re being dissed, wouldn't move to correct, or at least ameliorate, that problem?

Of course the media are different from other industries in another way too.  Owing to the “firewall” erected over time between the journalistic “product” and the management of the companies that own that product, the news industry is the only one in which corporate management exercises little control over what its writers, reporters, and editors produce – little control, in other words, over their very products.

So with management hamstrung by the firewall convention, who is willing and able to mind the store, so to speak?  Certainly not those institutions that exist to fund, study, promote, and chronicle contemporary journalism.

Of the handful of foundations – like the Knight Foundation – that routinely provide funding for journalism-related programs at universities and nonprofit organizations, all share a mindset, whatever their funding priorities, that can be characterized as Old Newspaper.  As such, they cling to journalistic notions that are outdated, uninformed, and fundamentally irrelevant.  And what is true of the foundations is true, and then some, of the rest of the journalism infrastructure: TV critics, media reporters, ombudsmen, and the journalism reviews.

If, as they say, war is too important to be left to generals, perhaps it’s not too much of a reach to say that journalism is too important to be left to journalists.

Next: The Internet and its growing impact on journalism.