A mixed media year

For media companies and their newspapers 2010 was a year of contradictions and mixed signals. The launch of the iPad in April was hailed as the great white hope for media corporations desperate to find a profitable niche in an online world in which readers of news have come to expect free access to news. In July Rupert Murdoch's Times began charging readers to read articles on its website and other Murdoch papers are to follow. Many other newspapers have continued the race to the bottom as they retreat from any role as bastions of serious journalism in the public interest. Investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the mainstream media. Instead, newspapers have become hardly distinguishable from junk mail advertising brochures and lifestyle magazines.

In response we have seen a further growth in the importance of bloggers and other "independent" players the most famous of which is now Wikileaks. It is indicative of the current media landscape that the "investigative" side of this story was undertaken by a group of radicals and not by the media.

And to wrap up the year Hungary's right-wing government under Viktor Orbán has recently announced new laws to curtail press freedom in that country. That alone may seem unsurprising given Hungary's past experience with a Communist dictatorship but things were meant to have changed. Orbán's country is now a member of the European Union and on 1 January assumes its rotating presidency. A serious dispute about the nature of press freedom has broken out between the Hungarian government and many other members of the EU. It is a debate on which the Union should not compromise. A financially healthy, free and critical media is at the heart of democracy.

Pulp fiction reaches the papers

What should we do about newspapers? They are increasingly controlled by companies that are focused primarily on short-term profit. Their pages are dominated by infotainment and lifestyle features and in many papers the content has been forced to the edges by full-page and half-page advertising. Experienced journalists are being fired and ever more content is syndicated with a resulting drop in diversity of opinion. The attempt to maintain a semblance of political independence and objectivity in commentary seems to have gone out of fashion. The German public intellectual Jürgen Habermas has written an excellent article on this question (see 'Media, Markets and Consumers: the Quality Press as the Backbone of the Political Sphere' in Europe The Faltering Project (2009).

Newspaper publishers argue that the problem lies on the demand rather than the supply side. They believe that the public is losing interest in serious political, economic or social analysis and journalism. Circulation is all that counts, and they cannot make people read (and pay for) content that does not interest them. Some commentators argue that the blogosphere and other new-media sources are compensating for the decline in serious journalism in the traditional press. Others are skeptical about such claims.

Meanwhile an information divide is emerging in many western societies. A small elite is aware of how information and opinion is controlled and manipulated. Its members use the few remaining sources of quality journalism and information to further cement their power. They are well enough educated and experienced to cut through the infotainment flood. The great mass of the population seems happy to surrender any potential role in the intellectual and political structuring of the society in which they live. The entertainment of superficial and short-lived "scandals" - usually about "them up there" - suffices to satisfy the desire to feel "informed". The attention span is short and the next breaking celebrity divorce or restaurant review is only a flick of a page away.