Newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees today than they had in 1990. There has been a 44 percent drop in full-time radio news employees since 1994. The number of TV network foreign bureaus is half what it was in the 1980’s. Sixty-eight percent of cable network news is repetition with no new information.
That is Bill Moyers quoting from the book Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering published by the Pew Charitable Trusts under the leadership of Gene Roberts, former managing editor of The New York Times,
His May 24 speech to the Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America was actually about government secrecy.
“The secrecy today is so thick as to be all but impenetrable,” he said. “In earlier times there were padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers as our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with blunt instruments of the law. Now, the classifier’s top secret stamp, used indescriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest.”
Check out the speech at TomPaine.com.