When the Tribune Co. Filed for Chapter 11 Yesterday

it felt like something really big was happening in the news industry. Today it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't look like the Trib Co. filing is going to close any newspapers; instead, it will give the Co. leverage to bargain with its unions and creditors. It's more movement in the same direction, and not the tipping point--we're still waiting for that.

But here's the big story: Today the feds arrested Governor Rod Blagojevich, and reportedly the charges involve the Tribune Co. Also the appointment of Obama's successor, incidentally: he'd allegedly tried to "profit" from that appointment. But it's the Trib Co. angle that's really interesting. The allegation is that he withheld state support because of editorial policy.

Patrick Fitzgerald's press release cites recorded phone conversations in which the Governor instructs his top aide to tell the Trib that he would withhold support from the state (worth around $100 million to the Trib) for its sale of the Cubs unless two specific members of the editorial board were fired. He identified them as driving the Trib's support for his impeachment.

Now the news media have always been in a panic about the dangers of government support. That's why they mention a "bailout" for the news industry only to repudiate it. But here's what's becoming clear today. The big media are already deeply compromised by their business involvements. Blago got caught. How many people--smarter than Blago, for sure--don't get caught? What journalism needs is some secure form of support from The People, perhaps acting through Their Government, perhaps not, that will make it secure from the pressure of the powerful.

The Blagojevich arrest may be the financial equivalent of the Scooter Libby trial. Libby's trial pulled the veil off of the cozy relationships between DC reporters and powerful sources within the Bush administration. If we can focus on the money, the Blagojevich trial might provide an equally revealing cut into the ways that money entangles a media company. Remember, this is now a privately held company, albeit one with nearly $13 billion in debt.

Journalism Should Have an Important Role

to play in the debate we're about to have about the national health care system. If today's front-page article in the New York Times is any indication, it will serve to seriously distort that debate.

We know from the last time around that the health care providers and the health insurers will flood the media with their point of view. They'll do this by press release, by advertisement, and most of all by making their expertise available. Good journalists will pay attention to them skeptically and balance that agenda-driven subsidized information with stuff driven by other agendas or by academic (and therefore supposedly neutral) expertise (though who knows how many academic health economists, say, are really neutral).

The BEST journalists, though--the ones with the most initiative and the most resources--will try to set their own agenda. They'll do this by doing "enterprise" journalism. Last time around, that meant going to Canada and finding a story. That story will always be about a breakdown: long lines at hospital emergency rooms, denial of service to needy people, long waits for non-urgent procedures, people driving to Buffalo to get heart surgery, and so forth. Heaven knows there are enough stories to go around.

To an expert, all of that journalism will be "anecdotal evidence." So the BEST journalists, who want to pay serious attention to the experts, will contextualize their stories, maybe not in the first five paragraphs, but somewhere in the article. They'll do this by talking to experts. But the best journalists will carefully balance their experts, in order to represent BOTH legitimate points of view. I say "both" because two is the easiest number to balance, and because two fits the general mindset of professional journalism, which is oriented around the electoral process (the 2-party system) and the legislative process (you're either for it or agin' it). Because the initial story will be about a dysfunction, the two points of view will be "it matters" and "it doesn't matter." In the world of journalism, "it matters" always wins.

So the BEST journalists are going to produce a file of articles that cumulatively scare the public--or, more precisely, make the legislators believe the public has been scared--off from serious reform. That's what happened last time.

If you want serious reform, you'll have to hope that a movement for it appears, and that it drives the agenda. You can't expect journalism--especially the BEST journalism--to stand in for it.