Keeping the mighty honest

THIS summer Lexington visited William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon. For a reporter it was a bittersweet moment: a reminder of an age when newspapers threw off profits so vast that an American press magnate could scavenge the globe for endangered treasures, prising heirlooms from Old World nobles before shipping them by the ton to his Californian lair.

Today, all is stood on its head. Once-profitable journals are bleeding money and readers. America’s grandest media dynasties seem as embattled as inter-war European aristocrats, and the endangered relics being snapped up are newspapers, as 21st-century tycoons dream of playing the press baron.

August 5th saw the snaffling of the Washington Post by the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. It followed a series of newspaper sales to very rich men, in which scores of titles from the Boston Globe to the Richmond Times-Dispatch have changed hands. The Post deal dwarfs the rest. The newspaper’s longtime owners, the Graham family, may never have rivalled Hearst for grandiosity: no private zoo for them, or egging America into a small war with Spain, as Hearst once did. But by breaking the Watergate scandal that toppled President Nixon, the Post durably marked relations between voters, politicians and the press.

The Post’s proprietor through those turbulent days, Katharine Graham, held a double place in Washington’s hierarchy: at once regal Georgetown hostess and scrappy newshound, ready to hold the establishment to account. That is a very American position. British journalists shun complete respectability, feeling a duty to be ready to savage the mighty, or rummage through their bins. Elsewhere in Europe, government contracts and subsidies ensure that press barons will only defy the mighty so far.

Graham braved threats—Nixon’s attorney-general growled that she would “get her tit caught in a big fat wringer” if she published fresh Watergate allegations—even while playing tennis or dining with government bigwigs (she carefully fed intelligence to her reporters afterwards). Before her death in 2001 she presided over years of hefty profits, helped by near-monopolies over Washington’s morning-news and print-advertising markets.

Her successors struggled as the internet broke monopolies of all sorts. The Post is being sold after years of plunging print circulation and a disastrous decision to act like a local newspaper (bosses even closed bureaus in New York and Chicago). The story is the same everywhere, and the collapse in newspapers’ paid circulations already triggers contempt. At the White House, aides routinely bully or ignore once-mighty papers; they have lost their fear of them. It is the same in Downing Street or the Elysée Palace. But the best newspapers, even as they shed readers, still retain power to cow politicians.

The Post is being bought because it matters. In recent weeks it has embarrassed Barack Obama’s government with scoops about spying on phone and e-mail records, and shaken Virginia’s Republican governor with revelations about gifts from a donor (see article). Such bipartisan muckraking remains a noble calling, and—though techno-Utopians may scoff—there are specific ways in which general newspapers are better at it than the most terrier-like internet sleuths.

Newspapers properly strike fear into elected politicians in two ways. First, by having the gumption and the manpower to reveal wrongdoing. The web is brilliant at this, too—though some of the biggest online stories of recent years were broken by dead-tree-and-ink reporters, whose outlets still have resources that often-parasitic news websites lack. But second, newspapers wield clout by weight of numbers. Cheer the arrival of philanthro-proprietors by all means. But that model will not work if these are not so much publishers as indulgent super-readers, leaving titles to pin their survival, in effect, on a paying circulation of one.

After covering politics from four continents, your columnist can report that size matters. A mediocre paper with millions of readers intimidates politicians more than a high-quality tiddler. In specific ways politicians are impressed by news organisations that attract every day a critical mass of ordinary folk with a bundled offering: sports for some, business for others, and politics for a few obsessives. Such newspapers usefully oblige politicians to tailor messages for an audience not made up of single-issue types or partisans. That is one reason why traditional papers have influence: to dismiss them is to dismiss a community of voters.

Washington’s best-read websites do not achieve this. Though useful, Politico.com, the insiders’ favourite, turns the work of government into a who’s-up-who’s-down contest: politics over policy, recent over important. Others are proudly partisan, creating echo chambers that admit no contrary facts or opinions.

The press needs punters, as well as patrons

There is no reason to think that today’s magnates are entering the newspaper business to kill it: funding a decent title should not daunt a billionaire. Mr Bezos spent about one-hundredth of his fortune buying the Post for $250m. He promised that the paper’s values will not change, indeed declaring himself “ready” should someone threaten to put his body-parts through a wringer. Some sceptics worry about tycoon-owners pursuing corporate or political interests. They should pop along to Hearst Castle, to remind themselves that self-interested press barons are hardly a novelty.

With luck high-tech types such as Mr Bezos can dream up digital wheezes that attract new readers, while preserving the best of general-interest newspapers—their breadth, and the serendipity of stumbling on unexpected articles or opinions. If new proprietors merely finance niche outlets with ever-tinier circulations, their money might do more good elsewhere. Mr Bezos has invested in space travel, for instance. Hearst would have loved that.

^{Economist.com/blogs/lexington}