Head Strong: The high price of downsizing the news biz

Every election season seems to introduce us to a slew of new pundits, even if many have resumes that don't add up to the title on the screen underneath their television images.

Take, for example, Martin Eisenstadt, a self-described neoconservative who found his opinions in demand during the presidential campaign. Eisenstadt, identified on his blog "a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy," made waves by outing himself as the source of the rumor that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. That Eisenstadt would know such information would not seem unusual given that the "bio" section of his blog identifies him as "an expert on Near Eastern military and political affairs" who "works alongside Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign, offering advice and liaising with the Jewish community in particular."

And it wasn't the first time Eisenstadt had achieved mainstream recognition. A Los Angeles Times blog had picked up on his July comments after the McCain campaign's portrayal of Barack Obama as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton (Eisenstadt had blogged that "the phone was burning off the hook" at the McCain campaign thanks to angry calls from Hilton's grandfather).

There was just one problem: Eisenstadt is the Borat of the campaign season, a fictitious character created by a pair of aspiring filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish, in their quest to get a TV show. Now, plenty of media outlets have egg on their faces.

"I think we've learned that often in the 24-hour news cycle, bloggers and even mainstream media work so quickly that they don't really have the chance to check," Gorlin told me last week. "I think also where news has become entertainment . . . where I think political news is almost following, now, celebrity news . . . where it doesn't matter what you say about Britney Spears, as long as something was said. Basically, gossip posing as news."

This incident is bigger than Gorlin and Mirvish. It speaks to a larger problem of what happens in an age of newsroom downsizing. It reminded me of something I read months ago in the entertainment bible Variety about the "domino" nature of today's media.

There, columnist Brian Lowry observed: "Shrinking print coverage threatens to trigger a 'domino effect' as news operations downsize, feeding the strange Internet age conundrum where there's more information - courtesy of blogs and the Web - but less real news, especially as it pertains to backyard issues."

I am one such domino.

My day begins every morning at a local Wawa, where at 3:40 I greet a truck arriving to deliver The Inquirer and Daily News. Two hours, 20 minutes later, I begin a live, current-events-driven radio show that lasts three hours. Although about half of the content for my show is determined the day before, I will use those newspapers and a variety of other news sources available in the studio to plan the remainder of the morning. If something leads the local newspaper, it most certainly makes my broadcast. I always offer attribution, and I attempt to expand on a given story with personal opinion. As a radio or television talking head, I don't do reporting. I repeat. I analyze. I offer my opinion and I gauge the opinions of others. There are many like me in today's media world.

But what happens if we remove newspapers from that equation?

It seems like hardly a week goes by without a headline about a major publication trimming newsroom staff. Earlier this year, the New York Times succumbed to "growing financial strain" by cutting 100 newsroom jobs - despite reported earnings of $209 million last year. This month it was Time Inc. beginning the process of cutting 600 jobs across several magazines, including Time, Sports Illustrated and People.

Unfortunately, those who report the news are a dying breed, even in the Internet world. The dearth of hard news and investigative journalism leaves the always-expanding number of outlets - 24-hour cable networks, satellite radio stations, blogs, podcasts - scrambling for anything they can parrot to a hungry audience.

The result? People eager for the next piece of news are easily taken in by characters such as Martin Eisenstadt. And those bad habits will continue to inch their way into cash-strapped, understaffed traditional news-gathering outlets where legitimate reporting is falling by the wayside.