The title on the docket read “The Future of Journalism” and if the U.S. Senate Subcommittee for Communications, Technology and the Internet is an accurate barometer, the forecast for print is poor indeed.  Those testifying at the hearing included a high-profile Google exec, a television producer, and the head of a non-profit investing in new media for local communities.  In fact, only one representative of the current print media was present and he – James Moroney of the Dallas Morning News – is renown for his push of that paper onto the web.

Joining them was the hearing’s headline act, Arianna Huffington, a noted liberal public voice, onetime gubernatorial candidate and co-founder of lefty news blog The Huffington Post.    Having experienced no small success at the head of one possible manifestation of journalism’s future, Huffington had this to say about traditional media and its stifling effect on keeping the public informed.

They are far too quick to drop a story-even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing.  [Online journalists] chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they’ve gotten down to the marrow.

Huffington’s got it right in the sense that online journalists, with their virtually unlimited print space and dramatically lower content costs, do lack the constraints of their traditional counterparts.  The luxury of living without word limits or column inches lends online work to invest the kind of time in smaller stories magazines and newspapers often must let go in favor of breaking news.  But does luxury mean the format change will produce higher quality news?  Will bloggers beat world-class newsrooms?

Let’s look at two small, but significant stories from the past week neglected by mainstream media outlets.  Last week the Justice Department dismissed its case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists employed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  A case of true sedition and espionage, a pair of lobbyists were accused of covert back-channel communications of national security secrets with a wide swath of the US government, funneling that information back to Israel.  The four-year legal battle involving the wiretapping of a congresswoman, the possible testimony of Condoleeza Rice and a number of Bush administration insiders and a complex web of business and political interests that almost certainly compromised classified information to a foreign government.  A foreign government not only armed with nuclear weapons, but also in the middle of a sweeping political change and fresh from armed conflict just months before the case was dismissed.

The story was dumped in Friday’s trash and largely ignored since by outlets more concerned with swine flu, Specter’s switch and a SCOTUS opening.  The Huffington Post did hold on to it, though to what effacacy?  HuffPo has only run two stories on the AIPAC case since the dismissal, both op-eds by David Bromwich and Harry Moroz.

The latter focused on Obama’s promise of freeing the White House from lobbyist influence and the former focused on an out-of-context quotation from the New York Times and a related 2004 investigation of Ahmed Chalabi.  While both of course are valid, neither could be rightly considered getting any closer to the marrow of the Fed’s bone with the Israel lobby.  Neither had any previously unreported perspectives or new primary sources.  This is reporting through Lexis-Nexis; obviously accurate but hardly insightful.  The AIPAC story needs a Bob Woodward grade breakthrough gained through an extensive set of relationships and penetrating access, not further exposition by someone adept with search engine skills.  Deft Googling is not going to expose those pulling the levers of these grand machines.

The second is the story of Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA and the plastic paragon of the anti-gay movement.  The artificial and inarticulate blonde made headlines after she voiced her support for California’s Proposition 8, bringing the culture wars to the otherwise banal Miss USA beauty pageant.  After the queen publicly opposed gay marriage, the Huffington Post has run 19 separate stories focused on her and her views.  MSNBC, by comparison, blessfully has run four.

One story died because someone powerful wanted it to; the second died because it should have.  But in neither case did Huffington’s vision of online journalism exceed the quality of her traditional competition.  Indeed, in both cases, they could only offer less restraint on editorial excess, with the simpler of the two stories getting radically more attention.

The Senate Subcommittee does have it right – traditional journalism is dying and its future is online.  But, the public needs more than the charge people like Arianna Huffington are leading.  While creative non-fiction and editorial perspective – the kind this website offers that you are reading right now – has a place in the broad body of American journalism, it is not a replacement for real reporting.

The Huffington Post, Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, and Dream Not Of Today are all valuable contributors to a free society.  But how free would our society be if they replaced the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Time Magazine?

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