Memo to Calbuzz: Hey, right back atcha!

To: (insert fun and in no way dated Communist Party reference here) Comrades Phil Trounstine and Roberts
From: Dave

I read with interest your dripping-with-contempt response to my criticism of your reports on the Parsky Commission. Actually, 4/5 of the article concerned the Commission itself and not you, but I am reminded of the words of Carly Simon:

You’re so vain
You probably think this song is about you

As a regular reader of Calbuzz, I admire your sources, if not your willingness to string an entire article together based on two politicians standing next to one another smiling, as well as an over-emphasis on horse-race politics and narratives. But clearly, you have a bit of an inflated view of your clear-eyed mission of “journalism,” and the assumed objectivity that goes with it.

Allow me to be blunt: Calitics has been writing about the Parsky Commission since December of 2008, before there was such a thing as Calbuzz. We have followed up time and again, in particular when two weeks ago, Susan Kennedy tipped the hand of how this commission will go by stating that “Our revenue stream is way too progressive.” So it was not exactly some kind of amazing scoop to report on a commission that has open meetings and presents all their material in public, which is why plenty of contemporaneous reports were written, based on the documents posted on the Internet that the Parsky Commission presented in anticipation of their open meeting.

Unlike you, I don’t pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission’s report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn’t help but notice clear language like...

the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell

...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn’t one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of “The Left”?

(How did pumping out that daily message for ol’ Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)

I mean, I’m very sorry for bringing up the inconvenient fact that so-called “objective” journalists can frame a story in such a way that they put their own thumbs on the ideological scale. You claim that your job is to “ferret out the facts” of the policymakers, you know, like hard-hitting reporting on an email to supporters and what one Republican said about another Republican in a press release, but it’s fairly clear from the above-mentioned article that you view flat taxes and eliminating corporate taxes as pretty sensible and down the middle, and it colored your coverage. I should probably just have shut up about it and gone back to my Communist Party self-criticism sessions, which by the way is a hilarious and timely joke. Here’s another one: In Soviet Russia, television watches you! You can use that!)

So this notion that I should just say thank you for illuminating a public document seems to be to be a bit too self-regarding, and your lashing out at me for pointing out the not-so-hidden biases in that particular article a bit to “the lady doth protest too much.” But of course, I have an infantile disorder.

Which brings us to this criticism about the Barbara Boxer press conference and certain bloggers clapping at the end of it, something of a hobby horse for you folks. I am not going to speak for anyone in the room but myself, but I know quite for certain that I didn’t clap, and I know what I asked. See, based on my notes (yes, I took them, just like a real live reporter) I know that I followed up a series of queries about torture (yours was some process question about how the Obama Administration "rolled out" the torture memos released a week before) with a specific question about a resolution before the state party seeking the impeachment of Jay Bybee for his role in authorizing torture, to which she answered “I’m very open to that,” reminding those assembled that she voted against Bybee’s confirmation as a federal judge. Now, at the time, I was involved in securing thousands of signatures from across the state endorsing this resolution, and when it came before the resolutions committee, I would argue that having Sen. Boxer’s agreement that calling for the impeachment of someone who helped authorize torture was a reasonable request actually helped get that resolution passed. In other words, it was a combination of what the netroots community does best – using citizen journalism and activism in tandem to effect progress on progressive issues.

Which I personally think is more of a relevant bit of work than asking a federal legislator about a state issue.

I’m just sayin’.

p.s. In the cited post, I used variations on the word “fetish” once, in a 1,400-word article. But it made for a smashing joke about therapists, so points for you!

Obama's Biggest Adversary Has a Camera And A Mike

I watched Obama's speech on the economy this morning, and I thought he laid out the scope of the problem and the consequences of inaction pretty well. He also cited the source of the crisis - "profound irresponsibility" and the final judgment on failed laissez-faire policies. And he's signaled that he's perfectly willing to let the package's total grow as it makes its way through Congress. You can read the whole speech here.

Republicans obviously have their own thoughts on this, and they'll try their best to derail the bill and increase the tax cuts relative to the fiscal spending. Whatever - they know nothing but obstruction. What's got me concerned is the gasbag reaction immediately following Obama's speech. On MSNBC, the first talking head pronounced that this was "the University of Chicago lawyer" Obama, not the soaring rhetoritician of the campaign. Non-Senator Tweety Matthews agreed that economic talk doesn't look good on TV because it's not "visual" enough. And Richard Wolffe, trying to sound knowledgeable, cited some of the specifics Obama offered as stimulus projects - moving to electronic medical records, weatherizing federal buildings - and intoned "it's not going to cost a trillion dollars to get electronic medical records."

Oh dear. This brings me back to a post that Jamison Foser cited this week by Niko Karvounis of the Century Foundation, about how the media's lack of expertise or even interest in policy matters could easily derail progressive initiatives by failing to offer a counter-balance to right-wing lies. Karvounis focuses on this question with respect to health care.

Right now, health care reform is an abstract goal that everyone wants -- excitement and anticipation are high. But as the substantive process of health care reform gets under way, two things will happen: first, ideas will be crafted into policies -- concrete plans of action and complex administrative measures, and second, politicians will become involved in the reform process. Policy can get pretty complicated; so the public will rely on the media to help it navigate the ins and outs of the issue. Once politics begins to shape policy discussions -- that is, once politicians enter the picture -- it's all the more important to keep the focus on policy, because it's at this point that policies have a real chance of being implemented. Americans should know their options.

Unfortunately, reporters aren't health care policy experts. In fact, they rarely ever talk about the issue. In a December report, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, out of 3,513 health news stories in newspapers, on TV and radio, and online between January 2007 and June 2008, health care policy made up less than 1 percent of news stories and just 27.4 percent of health-focused stories. Instead of talking about issues like coverage, prescription-drug care, costs or public programs, the media prefer to report on specific diseases and conditions (cancer, diabetes, obesity and heart disease) and potential epidemics (contaminated food and water, vaccines, binge drinking). Together, these two topics made up 72.6 percent of health coverage.

This is less than ideal. When Congress begins to talk about health reform in earnest, the important news that will affect all of us will be about policy and institutional changes. The media need to be good at covering this stuff -- yet as the Kaiser report shows, newscasters, reporters and editors have very little experience (or interest) in discussing such issues. Worse, history shows that when health care reform efforts are actually under way, the media ignore policy in favor of more sensational stories.

During President Bill Clinton's efforts at health care reform in the 1990s, for example, media reports disproportionately focused on politics rather than policy. In their 1998 book Politics, Power, and Policymaking: The Case of Health Care Reform in the 1990s, Missouri State University professors Mark Rushefsky and Kant Patel found that that in 1993 and 1994 -- the height of public debate over Clinton's plan -- the New York Times reported just 257 stories about policy considerations (proposed reforms and solutions, analyses of options) and a whopping 549 on politics (personalities, disagreement, partisanship). When the nation's health care system was at stake, spats received more coverage than substance.

It's very troubling and can be easily extrapolated to this stimulus package. The media will cover it as a wrestling match, with the twists and turns being entirely filtered through the lens of surface politics. The right will send its passel of spinners to talk about "pork-barrel spending" and "unnecessary" art museums and bike paths being built with the taxpayer's money, and the chattering class will glory to their front-row seat at the prizefight. But the truths and the falsehoods never get sorted out. That goes double for health care, where a host of right-wing myths crop up in almost any media report about the issue.

Karvounis is hopeful - more than he should be IMO - that the media can talk intelligently about these issues. I do think that the public has more access to intelligent analysis about the merits of policy, but that's nowhere to be found among mass media. And ultimately, that's still where most people get their news and where most editors and executives take their cues on what to report. This is an extremely important point:

But it's important that the media rise to the occasion. As Rushefsky and Patel put it, "the mass media may not tell us what to think, but they are very successful in telling us what to think about." News helps us figure out what's important and what's at stake. A dearth of good policy stories will mean that the public isn't understanding the challenges, trade-offs, compromises, etc., that really shape health care. The public will misunderstand the terms of the debate as purely a clash of parties and personality -- as a question of whether "ObamaCare" will succeed -- instead of story about structural changes and policy choices that will affect all of us. We shouldn't focus on how much we like or dislike the politicians involved in health care reform; the focus should be on the strengths and weaknesses of their proposals.

Traditional media has very set narratives for how they view policy fights, and they believe the public wants to view those fights along those lines. In the brawl, reality is subsumed in favor of the he-said/she-said approach. It's going to take a supreme communicator to break through that very ingrained structure. But it'll take more than that. The rot in our traditional media is very widespread.

Rigged

I hear a lot of people fretting about the latest USA Today/Gallup, and in particular they're saying that Obama is losing the messaging war and watching the election slip away. I think that Josh Marshall may be right that their messaging appears largely reactive (he's also right that messaging and the air war is far more visible than the ground game, where I think the Obama campaign has a serious advantage). But to the extent that he is right, he must also take into account how that narrative has been set by corporate-owned media.

Indeed Obama has run ads with their core messaging strategy of lashing McCain to Bush. They've released at least a half-dozen of them over the past two weeks. There was certainly an option for responsible media to notice this aggressive advertising strategy. They haven't. Instead, McCain "celebrity" ads and sneering attacks are given the top-line treatment. The Obama campaign ran with the "how many houses does McCain have" gaffe for a few days. They could and should keep doing so, but media allowed it to be overshadowed. In fact, they just banished a nominal liberal away from their political coverage after howls of attacks from Republicans, which still have the desired effect.

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel’s coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel’s perceived shift to the political left.

“The most disappointing shift is to see the partisan attitude move from prime time into what’s supposed to be straight news programming,” said Davidson Goldin, formerly the editorial director of MSNBC and a co-founder of the reputation management firm DolceGoldin.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, giant conglomerates which own major defense contractors are simply never going to be in the business of promoting liberalism. Olbermann is anti-Bush and mildly interested in protecting civil liberties but he's hardly echoing liberal positions on issues. Rachel Maddow's premiere tonight will be very interesting to watch, but that's of course one show.

What comes through here is a need to placate the right. And that absolutely seeps into coverage of the day-to-day of this Presidential campaign. McCain's people have worked the refs and the refs have responded. They conflate documented lies from Republicans with one statement that says McCain voted 95% of the time with Bush (true in 2007, and it was 100% in 2008 so they're being generous) when the lifetime score is 90%. This gives the impression that "everybody fibs" in political campaigns, which allows the GOP to continue lying because they're never called on it.

Back in 2000, the exit polls showed that among the 24 percent of the electorate who said it was very important to them to select an “honest and trustworthy” president, 80 percent voted for George W Bush. This, I assume, had something to do with the fact that the press repeatedly weaved through its coverage of Gore a narrative about Gore’s alleged difficulty telling the truth, even though most of the data points where Gore lied or “exaggerated” were actually made up by the press. McCain, by contrast, has not only been caught in several bald-faced lies, but in a few instances — this business with Palin and the bridge most notably — keeps on doing it in very high-profile contexts even though they’ve gotten called on it repeatedly. So where’s the narrative about how McCain’s key strategy introducing Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting lies at the heart of the presentation?

The extent to which Obama's campaign can change the messaging narrative is extremely limited and was always going to be extremely limited. The media is simply locked in to their preconceived notions of how Democrats and Republicans are viewed by them. They are uninterested in policy except where candidates, particularly the Democratic candidate, differ from ideological orthodoxy, but of course they never determine what that orthodoxy is, so all you end up hearing is a Democrat telling America what Republican plans they would adopt. They whine that the policy proposals are not fresh, but they are completely uninterested in hearing about them at all. They poll-watch and judge horse races and look at who's hitting who with what ad and who's fighting. And they already have written those scripts in triplicate.

If anyone has a clue how to beat this back, I'm all ears. I would say that ensuring that online media flourishes is paramount, and hoepfully less people will get their news from these "official" sources in the years to come.

...so HowardKurtz comes out and says that McCain's latest ad, claiming that Sarah Palin stopped the bridge to nowhere, is a lie. OK, but isn't it part of a pattern of lies? This is what the press did to Al Gore in 2000, and it's more warranted here. That would match the Obama campaign's comment:

"Despite being discredited over and over again by numerous news organizations, the McCain campaign continues to repeat the lie that Sarah Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere. John McCain has voted with George Bush 90% of the time and he and Sarah Palin will continue Bush's economic policies, his health care policy, his education policy, his energy policy, and his foreign policy. McCain and Palin will say or do anything to make people believe that they will change something besides the person sitting in the Oval Office. That's the kind of politics people are tired of, and it's anything but change."

If A Nose Grows In A Forest, And No One Is There To Hear It...

Last night, John McCain, he of the Pinocchio problem, retold the story for the Saddleback Church congregants about his time in the Hanoi Hilton (John McCain is very reluctant to talk about his POW experience), when a guard loosened his ropes and, later, on Christmas, drew a cross in the sand, in solidarity with McCain the prisoner, a simple expression of faith. The crowd loved it.

McCain has been telling this story since at least 1999, in his book "Faith of Our Fathers." In 2000 he told the story and it involved the guard drawing the cross with a sandal. I guess the stick was better for the visual of the ad that ran this year:



Now there's the revelation that the story of the cross is remarkably similar to a possibly apocryphal story attributed to the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. There are a number of Christian books that tell a similar tale about Solzhenitsyn's redemptive moment with a drawn cross. Here's one from 1997:

Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The intense suffering reduced him to a state of despair.

On one particular day, the hopelessness of his situation became too much for him. He saw no reason to continue his struggle, no reason to keep on living. His life made no difference in the world. So he gave up.

Leaving his shovel on the ground, he slowly walked to a crude bench and sat down. He knew that at any moment a guard would order him to stand up, and when he failed to respond, the guard would beat him to death, probably with his own shovel. He had seen it happen to other prisoners.

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.

As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible.

Solzhenitsyn slowly rose to his feet, picked up his shovel, and went back to work. Outwardly, nothing had changed. Inside, he had received hope.

[From Luke Veronis, "The Sign of the Cross"; Communion, issue 8, Pascha 1997.]

Here's the same story in a 2002 book. And here's another from a book in 1994, which could be the original source. It seems to have spread like an email forward, and most authors source it to Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago, though it's unclear whether the story actually appears there. But it was mentioned a number of times following Solzhenitsyn's death this month. I can't find McCain referring to this story before 1999's Faith of Our Fathers, not even in this incredibly detailed account of his POW experience for US News and World Report published in May 1973.

It's entirely possible that this type of scene happened at a prison camp more than once, and there are differences between the two stories (in McCain's telling, the drawing is performed by a guard; in Solzhenitsyn's, it's a fellow prisoner). The similarities could be entirely coincidental. This is not something you can prove or disprove.

That didn't matter in 2000. Al Gore said he invented the Internet and that he found Love Canal and that he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's what happened and there was no shaking anyone in the media off of that, and they were going to use those and other nuggets to build a story about Gore's serial exaggerations, and make that character issue far more important than any policy or point of difference between him and George W. Bush.

Here's my point. I don't actually care about stuff like this. I find it much more relevant and vital that McCain was quicker to begin the invasion of Iraq after 9-11 than even Bush and Cheney, or that he believes in his personal grandiosity so much that he imagines skirmishes on the Russo-Georgian border to be world-historical events that demand action, or that his health care plan would literally cover about 5% of those currently uninsured, or that he wants to continue Bush's policies of inequality by cutting taxes massively for the rich, or that he thinks anyone who makes less than $5 million a year isn't rich, and on and on. Stories about politicians embellishing parts of their personal biography for dramatic effect are fairly routine and show little more than that they're... ambitious politicians, looking to connect emotionally with voters to gain an advantage. Remember how Ronald Reagan convinced himself that he served in World War II? Hillary Clinton's "sniper fire" in Tuzla? Barack Obama's book actually admits that characters are invented and time compressed. So this is nothing new. And I wish ALL of it were ignored, because the thin strand connecting these gaffes and exaggerations to the actual character of the nominee is tenuous at best.

But the media goes ga-ga for this kind of stuff and offers little else, for the most part. I'm pleased that CBS is going to do 35 long segments on every aspect of the candidates' policies this fall, but let's face it, that isn't going to drive the debate of the chattering class. They are uniformly uninterested in the issues, and they would much rather obsess over minutiae and speculate about character, whether the candidates "look Presidential" or "have what it takes" to win. In the LA Times today, there are two articles that speak to this. One is a critical review of broadcast news by media critic Mary McNamara:

SO MUCH has been said about the media's handling of this campaign that it's almost embarrassing to address the topic. But after watching hours, days, weeks of it on television, the cry of anguish cannot be suppressed: For the love of all that is holy, how did one of the most important presidential races in history, between two men who embody such disparate political possibilities, wind up looking like a montage sequence in a Will Ferrell movie?

"Bias" has been the watchword, but watching the nightly news loops, it seems less like bias than just plain old fear. Fear of missing the moment, of boring the viewers, of relying on the old-model thinking -- who, what, when, why, where -- while everyone yawns and returns their collective attention to their new iPhones.

"No, no, wait," news outlets seem to shout like desperate screenwriters in a rapidly deteriorating pitch meeting. Nevermind those boring old proposed policies or the contradictory voting records or any of that stuff, look at this, you're going to love it, it's The Big Reveal.

Indeed, this is a major component of how the news media covers modern campaigns. The other way is through horse-race discussion, taking those gaffes and nuggets and bits of character effluvia and judging how they will "play" with core constituencies. The latest practitioner is Chuck Todd, and he comes out and admits that he's a sportscaster:

Less than an hour later, Todd sat in a third-floor studio for his only practice run anchoring on MSNBC before the conventions. It was his first time behind the desk, and he anxiously checked with the floor director throughout the hour to make sure he was getting his cues right. "This is big-boy TV now," he said.

The Miami native wasn't looking for a television career when he first arrived in this city as a student at George Washington University, already fascinated with politics. "I thought I wanted to manage a presidential campaign," he said. But after working on a few races, including Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin's 1992 presidential bid, he decided "it was more interesting to do it as a sport than trying to be a hired gun."

Here's the thing, though - in the case of the Village, it's more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys. The refs are always against his team and the other guys are always cheating. Their draft pick is forever the savior of the franchise and the free agent they let go was a bum anyway. They give you the "inside story" without ever being critical of the guys who write the paychecks.

If there was an even spread from the media of damaging stories or unfavorable narratives on both sides of the political divide that'd be one thing. But the idea of John McCain as a serial exaggerator in the way that they painted Al Gore would be unthinkable, despite the fact that the evidence is the same, and actually even more so in the case of McCain. So we get media types arguing that infidelity like that of John Edwards disqualifies someone for higher political office without applying that to McCain or indeed several of the GOP field this year. We get them defending Republican military veterans from attacks they deem scurrilous and baseless yet not Democrats of the same rank. We get the same paint-by-numbers narratives of Democrats as weak and feminine and Republicans as strong and patriarchal year after year no matter who the candidate, no matter what the policy, no matter what.

I'm focusing on this gross double-standard in the comparison between Gore and McCain because I think it's the most salient example and it shows to what extent their thumbs are on the scale. The influence is deeply felt by those who watch politics, especially those who see it more occasionally. And when there was a perception on the other side of the aisle that the media was too liberal, they mounted an effort to relentlessly criticize them to make sure their perspective was represented. I don't necessarily want a perspective represented; I'd like to see campaigns covered with a reliance on facts and not fiction, substance and not style. But if continuous, vigilant criticism is what's warranted, well... have laptop, will travel.

(incidentally, this is the third instance that I can remember of McCain possibly fudging his POW record, which he of course is extremely reluctant to talk about. The more extreme Rovian in me wonders whether or not McCain's handlers are just trolling for a response from the opposition, so they can freak out about people denigrating his military service. Hmm...)

And We Wonder Why Citizens Aren't More Well-Informed

Because political reporters are no better than failed sportswriters:



This is a chart from the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It follows the topics of Presidential campaign stories thus far in 2007. 63% of the stories were horse-race, or process, stories, and another 17% covered the candidates' personal backgrounds. Just 15% covered policy proposals. And iIt's actually worse than that:

The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

The common argument from the press is that they're simply giving the people what they want. Actually, that's completely untrue, too.

What Topics the Public Wants Covered

Candidates’ position on issues: 77% (want more), 17% (want less)
Candidate debates: 57% (more) 32% (less)
Candidates’ personal backgrounds and experiences: 55% (more), 36% (less)
The candidates who are not front runners: 55% (more), 37% (less)
Sources of candidates’ campaign money: 55% (more), 35% (less)
Which candidate in leading in the latest polls: 42% (more), 45% (less)

This is crystal clear. The press is completely failing at doing their jobs in helping the eletorate choose a candidate. Which is why the electorate is tuning them out in increasing numbers. I'm not someone who will ever call the media liberal or conservative. That's fundamentally the wrong question. They're LAZY. They have no interest in and little knowledge of public policy, and at the elite reporter level have no idea how those policies can affect or improve their lives. So they break it down to something they can easily understand, the meaningless "who's up/who's down" that you typically see in reports of box-office receipts.

There are dozens of examples of this, but the most recent one is the sudden decision to anoint Mike Huckabee as a "rock star," mainly on the basis of one speech in Washington and some funny interviews, without examining his policy record. For example, his image in the media is of a "populist" despite favoring the Fair Tax policy, the most regressive tax imaginable. It's completely at variance with actual events. And how the media frames Iowa after the Republican caucuses will have a significant impact on who wins the election. If they see Mitt Romney as the unchallenged winner in Iowa and Huckabee as a distant second, for example, Romney rolls into New Hampshire as a prohibitive favorite. If Huckabee is seen as pulling off a miracle in Iowa, EVEN IF THE NUMBERS BETWEEN HIM AND ROMNEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME, then Romney is wounded, Huckabee is ascendant, and probably Giuliani benefits. And those are the range of stories that we'll see, and you'll notice that none of them have anything to do with policy in any way.

The result of this study does not bode well for democracy. The Internet and alternative media simply aren't big enough yet for the entire country. Large sections will still get their news on the Presidential race from a process-obsessed media. They'll have a shallow understanding of civic engagement because the media demands nothing more from them than charting names on a list. It's not enough to rely on more people flocking elsewhere and leaving the press behind; that's not realistic. Traditional media itself must change.