What Happens to Coverage of Average Folks If Newspapers Die?

There’s an old saying in the news business: It’s a journalist’s job to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

The idea, of course, is that it’s not enough for reporters to simply chronicle the events of the day; they should also hold the powerful and rich accountable, and shed some light on the plight of those who used to be called “the less fortunate.”

Recently we’ve seen how far some journalists have strayed from that mission. CNBC’s Rick Santelli, and his on-air tirade about the White House plan to save what he called "loser" homeowners from foreclosure, drew the wrath of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, who has since aimed a series of populist broadsides at CNBC, culminating with his interrogation Thursday night of Mad Money host Jim Cramer.

Some have called Stewart a modern-day Edward R. Murrow; Stewart, I’m sure, would probably respond by asking, how bad have things gotten when a comedian is likened to a crusading investigative journalist?

How bad, indeed?

Print journalism as an industry is floundering, and there’s been a lot of talk lately about what will be lost if newspapers go the way of eight-track tapes. Muckraking journalism will almost certainly be a casualty.

But there’s something else that will be lost if newspapers die: Reporters who have a certain solidarity with the common man or woman because they are the common man or woman.

The problem with TV journalists, you see, is that most of them are quite well-off, and many of them are rich.

Take Brian Williams, Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. They all seem like decent people, and no one would argue that they haven’t worked hard in building distinguished careers for themselves.

But how much does someone who rakes in millions, if not tens of millions of dollars a year, really have in common with the guy who’s been laid off from his factory job? How much empathy or even accuracy can we expect from a seven-figure correspondent asked to report on the lives of average people, much less the truly down-and-out?

And I’m not just talking about the celebrity network anchors and reporters. Even most local TV journalists earn far more than the average shop clerk or bus driver.

Most newspaper reporters, on the other hand, are in no danger of earning such astronomical salaries (much to their chagrin, I should add). A reporter at a small-town local paper probably earns about as much as the schoolteacher, the cop or the office worker in the same community. Chances are they live in the same neighborhoods and their kids attend the same schools.

Now, does this necessarily mean that local newspaper reporters are going to be better at reporting on those hit hardest in hard times than the high-salaried TV types? Maybe not.

But given this state of affairs, is it really so surprising that a wealthy reporter on a cable business network would express such brazen contempt for everyday people who were losing their homes?

And when the country is in the throes of what may the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, do we really want to leave the comforting of the common people, and the afflicting of the affluent, to a bunch of journalists who are themselves millionaires?