Reportage Medialog

Steve Lovelady has a good Editor’s note on CJR Daily about Time’s decision. He notes that Time Editor-in-chief is both a lawyer and a journalist:

Time Inc. is a vast enterprise, publishing Time, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, People, Entertainment Weekly and over 100 smaller magazines — yet, for all that, it is but one division of the megalith entertainment company Time Warner. As David Halberstam told the New York Times, Time Inc. “is a strange company and it’s a different company now, and it is really part of an entertainment complex. The journalism part is smaller and smaller. There is a great question out there: is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?”

Once media companies become part of larger conglomerates like Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, General Electric, those companies and the journalists they employ have sharply diverging obligations. And the top editors among them find themselves with one foot in each camp. Was Pearlstine, for example, acting as a journalist, or as a corporate executive?

This highlights the political context of this decision. It is harder and harder for company’s like Time Warner to maintain a discrete journalistic culture because the commercial and the journalistic are no longer producing a creative tension they have become very unequal partners in the game. Just as I was arguing that the decision sends a “bad message” on a world scale, Lovelady notes the potential ripple effect down the US media chain:

In the meantime, Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson told USA Today that Pearlstine’s decision sends a “bad message” to the rest of the news media, especially smaller outlets with less editorial clout than Time. “How is some local paper in a rural state going to find the courage to stand up to this kind of thing if Time doesn’t have the courage?” Levinson asked.

This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald carried a very brief report on Time’s capitulation in the Cooper/Miller case. As this is an American political scandal and an American constitutional issue this is understandable news judgment. But this is not just a local issue. Because of the developed body of free speech law in the US, legal decisions there influence the international standards of free speech legal discourse.

There is currently not much movement locally to campaign for better protections but when, perhaps in the context of a rejuvinated bill of rights discussion, it does bubble to the surface again, the inviolate American protections will no longer seem so strong an example.