There once was a high-budget promotional concept ostentatiously labeled by real estate advertising gangsters as “The American Dream”: every family should own a home.

The ruins of Detroit are no less spectacular, no less heartbreaking, than those of fallen ancient capitals. A beaux-arts railway station, its 18 stories vacant for the last two decades, crumbles under the tread of scavengers and vandals, its tracks pulled up, its windows punched out. A once-grand movie palace, on the site where Henry Ford built his first automobile, lives on as a derelict parking structure. Marvels of industrial architecture bleach in the sun, disappearing under urban prairies, green and garbage-strewn meadows that line the city's major avenues.

The city's disappearing act is matched by its vanishing institutions. For Chrysler and General Motors, these are the days and nights of Chapter 11 - the American bankruptcy code which allows reorganization and repudiation of contracts - while Ford attempts a desperate restructuring of its own. The ingenious legions of bankruptcy lawyers may labor in New York courtrooms (where the process is supposed to be faster, and relatively less painful), but Motor City is the site of the pileup. As bankruptcy loomed over Detroit, I went to take the city's pulse.

Unemployment in the metro region pushes towards 14 percent, the highest in the country, and rising. Municipal bonds are at junk status. The city fathers - those not ousted in successive scandals over marital infidelity, perjury, the death of an exotic dancer, and improper text messaging - grapple with a $300 million budget shortfall. Infrastructure buckles and frays. The population declines: a city of nearly two million souls in 1950 musters fewer than a million in 2009.

Yet in June the Red Wings, the city's beloved hockey heroes, made an electrifying bid for a second straight Stanley Cup. Faith in Obama still ran high among the city's overwhelmingly African-American population, despite the fallout from the administration's "managed" bankruptcies. And over the long Memorial Day weekend in May, more than 75,000 electronic music fans streamed into Hart Plaza on the renovated waterfront, dancing ecstatically in the shadows cast by empty skyscrapers.

Young Detroiters prefer to boast that their city gave the world techno music, rather than harp on the invention of the modern assembly line or on the Nation of Islam (which came into being in 1930, in the city's Linwood Avenue neighborhood). Every year, one of the world's largest electronic music festivals pays homage to the small group of African-American producers and DJs who fused local traditions of funk and Motown with avant-garde European electronica in the early 1980s. Soon the sound had spread to cutting-edge clubs, underground raves, and plucky record labels around the world.

One of the pioneer DJs, Derrick May, described it as a "complete mistake... like George Clinton and Kraftwerk caught in an elevator, with only a sequencer to keep them company." Yet this unlikely fusion - ethereal and driving, futurist and vintage, high concept and for the masses - fits Detroit well. Recent standard bearers of the Detroit aesthetic include Carl Craig, who is equally at home remixing Ravel and Mussorgsky or juicing up a dance floor, and Jay Dilla, a hip hop producer who achieved transcendence by discovering obscure soul records and sampling them flawlessly.

Decline and collapse

Like Venice, like the family farm, Detroit has been going under for as long as anyone can remember, making it more symbol than city to other Americans. The official motto is Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus (We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes) - an optimism already two centuries old, referring to a city-wide fire in 1805. Likewise, GM's world headquarters are at the "Renaissance Center", a cluster of glowering glass towers, a familiar backdrop from baleful news reports on TV, which was recently redeveloped on the fleeting profits of the Hummer Boom.

Talk of renaissance and rebirth is stale officialese to many Detroiters, but downtown does show signs of life - a renovated theater, a fixed-up hotel, cleaner streets. Still, the city's thousands of homeless wander the few parks; thousands more squat in vacant buildings. A little farther out, the authorities have lavished less attention; whole districts of the city molder half-empty, and condemned towers of public housing await demolition. This may be the ultimate stage of inner city blight: grassy, silent lots and the peaceful ruins of stately homes. No gun-toting criminals, no noxious industry, no overcrowded housing projects--in fact, no one in sight at all.

The pivotal moment, according to many white Detroiters, was the 1967 riots. In the most compelling Detroit novel of recent times, Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, those terrifying race riots received extended fictional treatment for the first time. "Oh my god! Is like Smyrna! Like the Turks they are burning everything!" cries Desdemona Stephanides in the riot's early hours, evoking traumatic memories of the horrors that drove the novel's Greek immigrant family to America in the first place. Eugenides depicts the anguish of Detroit's white middle class, heavily ethnic, which fled en masse in the following years. Although polarized race relations had long haunted the city - ever since the influx of southern blacks to the auto factories brought competition for jobs - the fall-out of 1967 signaled a definitive pattern of "chocolate city, vanilla suburbs" and a new atmosphere of ineluctable mistrust.

Keeping up with white flight and moving nimbly for tax breaks, the auto companies inhabit this whole gridded sprawl, first patterned by the Land Ordinance of 1785. Chrysler's headquarters are in the cozy suburb of Auburn Hills, Ford anchors the city of Dearborn, and GM threatened a move to nearby Warren until bankruptcy hit. It was in Highland Park, a now-impoverished black enclave within Detroit, that industrial architect Albert Kahn built the visionary factory which famously churned out Model T's in under a minute; the structure now grows shabby as an unloved storage depot.

In fact, the whole of the original Northwest Territory became a cradle of the American auto industry, with important early ventures by the Studebaker brothers in South Bend, Indiana, and Ransom Olds in Lansing, Michigan, among hundreds of others. The triumph of the Big Three, clustered so close together, took decades - and was a testament as much to business acumen and an era of consolidation as to feats of engineering.

Most haunting of all, in light of this year's bankruptcies, is the memento mori on East Grand Avenue, in Detroit itself: the former plant and headquarters of the Packard Motor Car Company. This massive complex, containing 47 buildings spread over 3.5 million square feet, has been crumbling since Packard's demise in 1956, when the luxury brand succumbed to competition from the Big Three. The site later became a hub of Detroit's illegal rave scene. Today, you find oceans of old shoes dumped across the old factory floor, or the charred remains of a boat, which pyromaniacs brought here for a lark.

Detroit is probably America's best-known example of a shrinking city, and it's still in free fall. This is one reason why the city has little to show for its large-scale, officially-sanctioned renewal plans. The city's bright spots are small-scale, experimental efforts. Immigration - particularly from Africa and the middle east (the city of Dearborn is by now the acknowledged center of Arab America) - is one hope of the revivalists. Bringing back manufacturing - electric car startups, green job schemes, and high-speed rail plants have all been mentioned - is another. To boost local businesses, a new, homegrown currency, the Detroit Cheers, was recently launched.

Mostly in their 20s and 30s, Detroit's several hundred urban farmers, linked by the Detroit Agriculture Network, have their own answer to the shrinking city. Many sell their produce at Eastern Market, one of America's largest and oldest public markets, currently being restored to greatness shed by shed. Some farmers are growing vegetables along Woodward Avenue, the city's main drag, which runs from the riverfront to the suburbs. Others establish community gardens the size of postage stamps wherever they can.

On the depressed east side, Tyree Guyton and other artists have transformed a section of derelict Heidelberg Street into an vast outdoor art project. Dozens of discarded stuffed animals hang from the sides of a boarded-up house. Regiments of defunct vacuum cleaners, waving gloves from their handles, mark out an overgrown garden. Shopping carts defy gravity on an exposed treetop.

The result is more eerie than beautiful, a possible model for the endless foreclosed suburbs of southern California and Arizona. The Sun Belt will soon follow Detroit's lead into decline, say the prophets of doom. And what artistic medium to better savage the American Dream than the single-family home (as artist Mike Bouchet recently demonstrated in Venice)? Yet the Heidelberg Project also points up the limits of Detroit's DIY urbanism, already appearing as neglected and ghastly as the surrounding desolation it critiques. The artists deliver a harangue to accompany the decay, a raging against the dying of the light, but no end to the decay itself.

President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009 lived up to its billing as an attempt to allay the mutual suspicion between the United States and Islam and chart a fresh course. It went further than many expected in offering two audiences - Israelis and Arab Muslims (in particular Palestinians) a "moral" frame of reference for a hoped-for new phase of engagement. But the speech had a third (and less-noticed) audience: people in the United States itself, especially those who for whatever reason have negative views of Muslims and their religion. 

Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.

Godfrey Hodgson's most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009)

His earlier books include The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press, 2006); A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007)

Among Godfrey Hodgson's openDemocracy articles:

"Barack Obama: at the crossroads of victory" (11 June 2008)

"A game of two halves" (15 July 2008)

"Welcome to the party: American convention follies" (18 August 2008)

"America's foreign-policy election" (28 August 2008)

"America's economy election" (17 October 2008)

"Yes he can!" (6 November 2008)

"Change?" (2 December 2008)

"An end and a beginning" (5 January 2009)

"Barack Obama: don't waste the crisis" (6 February 2009)

"Barack Obama's reality gap" (27 February 2009)

"Barack Obama: end of the beginning" (30 March 2009)

"Barack Obama's hundred days" (29 April 2009) This gave the speech an injection of domestic political significance. The president will need the support or at least acquiescence of people at home if he is to make progress with his strategy for peace in the "greater middle east". An attitudinal shift towards the Muslim world in the US may be essential to this effort.

Obama's urge to distinguish his approach from that of his predecessor to an area of vital importance to American foreign policy was plain. Where the crude and polarising rhetoric of the George W Bush administration and many of its supporters served to fuel hostility to the Muslim world (often hardly distinguishing between Islam and the 9/11 bombers, for example), Obama made an enlightened effort to show sympathy and some understanding of Islam.

He several times quoted the Qur'an, and was applauded when he did. He highlighted what a less sensitive and courageous man might have avoided, that his middle name is Hussein. "I'm a Christian", he said, "but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago with communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith."

But perhaps just as important as his address to Muslims, his speech contained a challenge to prejudice - while conveying a message to those Americans troubled by any impression that their president might seem "too close" to his Muslim hosts. So he attacked anti-semitism and repudiated holocaust-denial (knowing that Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is far from the only influential Muslim to flirt with that ugly perversion of history); and proclaimed his commitment to America's "unbreakable bond" with Israel.

Moreover, Obama balanced his "outreach" to Muslims with strong words on what they must do if the chasm between Islam and the west is to be bridged. He evoked the "humiliation" and suffering of the Palestinians in explicit terms; but he denounced violence, and singled out the very kinds of violence with which the Palestinians have been especially associated. "It is a sign neither of courage nor power", he said, "to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That's not how moral authority is claimed; that's how it is surrendered".

The speech was full of proud references to America's values and to his belief in their universal applicability. But where his predecessor and the neo-conservatives who defined the George W Bush administration's profile in the world projected the sense that they had a monopoly of belief in democracy, Obama presented America's values as universal in a different way. They were no longer to be understood as instruments that the United States intended to disseminate everywhere (by force if necessary), but instincts that were already shared by people of goodwill, including (of course) Muslims; and which only needed the right conditions to be realised.

The homeland campaign

The way that this theme was elaborated in the second (and perhaps less reported) half of this truly remarkable speech really demonstrated both the breadth of Barack Obama's human insight and his political talent.

Here his focus moved onto four issues so broad that they subsume even the conflicts of political and religious communities across the middle east: economic development, tolerance, democracy, and (with detail and depth) women's rights.

Some of the president's listeners, and not least hardened reporters - accustomed to tired rhetoric when politicians turn to the subject of their ideals - might have missed two important elements of what this second half of his speech was intended to achieve.

First, he was making the point that these issues are of equal interest to the participants in the region's quarrels, as well as to others - that they are, indeed, universal concerns. Second, he was in a subtle way addressing the concerns of Americans about Islam and about the effort he proposes to make to improve America's relations with the religion's followers.

The challenge for the president is that there are large numbers of people in the United States and elsewhere in the west who are (or have become in the course of the 2000s) generically critical of "Islam" or its adherents - and are sceptical about the possibility of improving relations with the imagined "other". They are found, moreover, in all sections of society - and far beyond members of the unreconstructed right. Many American women, for example - perhaps liberal American women even more than conservative - see the Muslim Arab world as a place of irredeemable sexism.

The president went some way to respond to this by connecting his belief in the equal value of daughters and sons, and the importance of women's education, to an unequivocal statement that Muslim countries need to improve the rights and opportunities of their female citizens. In this he was also seeking to offset any worries that, in his effort to reach out to Muslims, he might be tempted to abandon values that are implanted in American society.

Obama's references to democracy and human rights were similarly motivated: both to signal a commitment to his Cairo audience (with an unmistakable if indirect judgment of the brutal regime of his host, Hosni Mubarak) and to meet the concerns of (especially) liberal Americans about the lack of political freedoms in this part of the Muslim world. He was applauded by many of his Egyptian listeners when he pointed out that "there are some who advocate democracy only when they're out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others." But the message was for the people at home also.

Many commentators are right to point out that it will take more than even the most skilful of speeches to remove mutual suspicion between the west and Islam, let alone between Israel and the Arab-Muslim world.

This proposal of "a new beginning" did, however, reinforce my conviction that Barack Obama is one of the most gifted and serious statesmen the world has seen in action for a very long time. In Cairo, he showed remarkable insight into the embittered politics of the middle east. Even more, he displayed once again his deep understanding of the many facets - the fears and the ideals, the prejudice and the pride, the caution and the generosity - of the American people.

The word “crisis” is overused, as are the anodyne  “problem” or “issue.” (As in the highly flexible, “I have issues.”) Ordinary troubles become inflated into “crises” because crises sound somehow more dignified or electrifying. A problem sounds possibly serious, if hypothetically soluble, but a crisis sounds, as well, critical.

Yet the overuse might lead us to bend over backwards and fall into euphemism - calling a grave matter “a little difficult,” for example, as is common, for some reason, in American discourse today. There are crises. History proceeds by convulsions, not only increments - or rather, increments build up into crises, and before one knows it, the landscape has changed, one is living in a different world, and the world before it changed is barely conceivable and certainly unrecoverable. It was a foreign country; they did things differently there.

Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the PhD programme in communications at Columbia University.

He has written twelve books, among them

The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals (John Wiley, 2007),

Letters to a Young Activist (Basic Books, 2003) and

The Intellectuals and the Flag (Columbia University Press, 2006).

His website is hereIn the case of the murky future of journalism, it is fair to speak of crisis - crises, actually. The landscape has changed, is changing, will change - radically. Just because the industry is crying wolf does not mean that the wolf is not nearby.  In the story, when the real wolf showed up, no one was ready. 

Four wolves have arrived at the door of American journalism simultaneously while a fifth has already been lurking for some time. One is the precipitous decline in the circulation of newspapers. The second is the decline in advertising revenue, which, combined with the first, has badly damaged the profitability of newspapers. The third, contributing to the first, is the diffusion of attention. The fourth is the more elusive crisis of authority. The fifth, a perennial - so much so as to be perhaps a condition more than a crisis - is journalism’s inability or unwillingness to penetrate the veil of obfuscation behind which power conducts its risky business.

Circulation and revenue

The surplus of crises has commentators scrambling for metaphors, even mixed ones. The Project for Excellence in Journalism put it this way in a recent report: “The newspaper industry exited a harrowing 2008 and entered 2009 in something perilously close to free fall. Perhaps some parachutes will deploy, and maybe some tree limbs will cushion the descent, but for a third consecutive year the bottom is not in sight.” The newspaper industry in the United States is afflicted with a grave and deepening sense that it is moribund, that the journalistic world they knew is vanishing; that it is melting away not just within their lifetimes but before their eyes.

The numbers virtually shout out that this is not paranoia. Overall, newspaper circulation has dropped 13.5 percent for the dailies and 17.3 percent for the Sunday editions since 2001; almost 5 percent just in 2008. In what some are calling the Great Recession, advertising revenue is down - 23 percent over the last two years - even as paper costs are up. Nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone. Foreign bureaus have been shuttered - all those of the Boston Globe, for example, New England’s major paper. I recently met the Chicago Tribune’s South Asia correspondent, responsible for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, with five years of experience there. Having been recalled to work on the Metro desk in Chicago, she resigned.

There is, in particular, the advent of competition for classified advertising, long the newspapers’ financial mainstay, but now available free online. In the recession, display advertising is way down.  Newspapers overall lost 83 percent of their stock value last year. You can buy a share of stock in the McClatchy papers, which used to be one of the highest-quality chains, for less than the cost of a single copy of the paper. The Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times and several other major papers, has filed for bankruptcy. So have the papers in Minneapolis and Philadelphia. The afternoon papers in Denver and Seattle have closed, and in Detroit, weekday home delivery for both dailies takes place only Thursdays and Fridays only; Monday through Wednesday, only a smaller edition is sold at newsstands.  This article is based on an address prepared for “Journalism in Crisis”, University of Westminster, London

Overall, newspapers remain profitable, in the low to mid teens, but several corporate chains took on enormous piles of debt when they made acquisitions in recent years (The Tribune: $13 billion in acquiring the Times Mirror Corp).  Chain ownership of local newspapers by corporations that trade on the stock exchange undermined them. With expectations of declining profits in the future, investors pursued what is cynically called a “harvest strategy” - bidding up their stock market value in expectation that profits would have to be harvested quickly, before the bottom fell out of their financial value. Profitability, they reasoned, would come from cost-cutting, which meant cutting back the practice of journalism. The chains cut back on coverage in order to try to compensate for the loss of advertising revenue. This has not won back readers. One prominent television commentator recently said: “The New York Times has 60 people in its Baghdad bureau. As far as I can tell, the Times doesn't have that many subscribers under the age of forty.” He was joking, of course. Of course.

Here are some excerpts from another study, from 2008, by the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

And still revenue plunges, if not so much because circulation is shrinking than because business acumen did. Obviously newspaper companies have made many poor business decisions in recent years, from taking on mountainous debt to establishing a precedent of free internet access. When poor business decisions are chronic and widespread, you have to conclude that the companies have entered a twilight where anxiety has gotten the better of understanding. How stable even the New York Times can remain, given its own precipitous stock decline in the last five years, is unclear. Its two-tier stock arrangement, designed to preserve control within the Sulzberger family, may not insulate it enough if losses continue to mount. The Chandler family of Los Angeles, reduced to squabbling, ended its own reign there, and Dow-Jones’ Bancroft family sold out to Rupert Murdoch a year and a half ago.  The Washington Post Company seemed to have dodged the bullet by buying the testing company Kaplan, re-annointing itself an “education and media company”, and letting the tail wag the dog - Kaplan accounts for more than half of company revenue. But if that expedient has saved the paper, it is a more meager paper. A longtime foreign correspondent who took a buyout a few years ago told me that when he visited the newsroom recently, the old globe that pinpointed the Post’s foreign bureaus was gone - it would have looked too embarrassing.

To limit the discussion to the last decade or so both overstates the precipitous danger and understates the magnitude of a secular crisis - which is probably a protracted crisis in the way in which people know - or believe they know - the world.  In the US, newspaper circulation has been declining, per capita, at a constant rate since 1960. The young are not reading the papers. While they say they “look” at the papers online, it is not clear how much looking they do. We may well be living amidst a sea change in how we encounter the world, how we take in its traces and make sense of them, a change comparable to the shift from oral to written culture among the Greeks and the shift to printing with movable type in 15th and 16th century Europe. 

This shift has been in play, accelerating, disrupting theories of linear progress, or progress through linearity, for almost two centuries - from photography through film and television to the Internet, in the rise of screens and the relative decline of sequential text.

It isn’t my purpose here to try to sum up what might be gained and lost in such a transition—surely both sides of the ledger are active. Nor is it my purpose to lock onto some hard-and-fast black-and-white theory of utter, utter change in sensibility. The newspaper was always a tool for simultaneity (you don’t so much read a paper as swim around in it, McLuhan was fond of saying) at least as much as a tool for cognitive sequence. What if the sensibility that is now consolidating itself - with the Internet, mobile phones, GPS, Facebook and Twitter and so on - the media for the Daily Me, for point-to-point and many-to-many transmission - what if all this portends an irreversible sea-change in the very conditions of successful business? The question is not answerable. But that is exactly the point.  To navigate a business in such choppy seas is no task for the faint-hearted.

The clamor for attention

Attention has been migrating from slower access to faster; from concentration to multitasking; from the textual to the visual and the auditory, and toward multi-media combinations. Multitasking alters cognitive patterns. Attention attenuates. Advertisers have for decades talked about the need to “break through the clutter,” the clutter consisting, amusingly, of everyone else’s attempts to break through the clutter.

Now, media and not just messages clutter. Measured by the criterion of how people spend their time, the central activity of our civilization is connection to media. At work, at home, on the street, in the car, in elevators and malls, commuting or waiting, we spend much of our day in a torrent of images and sounds, navigating through it, filtering it, desirous of it and through it - sometimes immersed, sometimes floating, sometimes wading, sometimes choosing, sometimes engulfed. Success goes to the media, portals, and sites that attract attention.

Accordingly, not only has print circulation plunged, but the amount of time spent with newspapers is also declining. According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in 2006, while “the total time that people spend with the news is largely unchanged from a decade ago,” still “the time people devote to reading newspapers is down from an average of 19 minutes to 15 minutes, partially because fewer are reading papers and partially because those who do spend a bit less time at it.” Just under one-fifth of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 claim to look at a daily newspaper - which is not to say how much of it they read. The average American newspaper reader is 55 years old.

Of course significant numbers of readers are accessing - which is not to say reading - newspapers online, but the amount of time they seem to spend there is bifurcated. In roughly half of the top 30 newspaper sites, readership is steady or falling. Still, “of the top 5 online newspapers - ranked by unique users – [the] three [national papers] reported growth in the average time spent per person: NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, and the Wall Street Journal Online.” One thing is clear: whatever the readership online, it is not profitable. 

As for national television news, the median age of evening news viewers is 61. The average age at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is over 65. The average age of all network TV viewers just crossed 50.  The median age in the United States is 38. Cable news audiences spiked up during the 2008 campaign, but then subsided. Even local news, the home of "If it bleeds, it leads", has seen viewership decline.

Media saturation

The undermining of newspapers is the product of many converging factors, which I would summarize under the heading, "media saturation". Media saturation is the product of compound, feverish competition for the attention of persons that is capable of being monetized - and it works. There is, of course, the rise of the Internet. There is the increased time Americans spend working and commuting, which is that much less time for newspapers.

It is true that newspaper websites are gaining readers, or visitors. Unique viewers are estimated to “add 8.4 percent to the average newspaper’s readership, making up most, but not all, of the audience decline.” Still, even online ads fell last year, by 0.4 percent, and add up to less than 10 percent of newspaper revenue. 

As for public television, the situation is equivalent. Public funding amounts to roughly half of the budget of the nightly News Hour; corporations donate the other half in exchange for vanity quasi-commercials.  But in the age of "maximizing shareholder value" over the past few decades, corporate support has declined. Foundations have taken up some of the slack, but their own endowments have taken a beating, and they’ve cut their grants too. Public radio is a bright spot, with 13 percent of Americans saying they regularly get most of their news from National Public Radio (NPR). These are disproportionately the college-educated and older.

The"opinion" blog

Now, the rise of opinion blogs and sites gives reason to think that political discourse is far from dead - even, perhaps, more absorbing, at least for the young, than the old regime of newspapers and television. The 2008 political campaign generated unusual interest from young people, who told pollsters they “get their news” from the internet (although it’s far from clear that their claims can be taken at face value). But it is worth considering that very little of the hard nuts-and-bolts work of reporting is done by internet sites. Almost all current-events blogs collect news from newspaper sites or the handful of internet sites that commission actual reporting (as opposed to commentary, informed or not). The blogs do amalgamate and “connect dots,” and the connecting of dots is a necessary function of a journalism that enables people to intervene in governance.

An example from a website, Talking Points Memo (TPM), with which I’m associated. In 2006, seven United States attorneys were dismissed in midterm by George W Bush’s Department of Justice. These dismissals were made known locally. They were unusual. Local reports were amalgamated at the national level by a de facto collaboration of TPM readers who posted such stories, in effect improvising a national newsroom. TPM reporters conducted their own investigations. A pattern emerged: the US attorneys had been fired in order to prevent investigations of Republican politicians or because they refused to initiate investigations that would damage Democrats. Congressional hearings ensued. The upshot was that nine high-level officials resigned, including the Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales. Eventually, the Justice Department Inspector General declared that the process used to fire the first seven attorneys and two others dismissed around the same time was "arbitrary," "fundamentally flawed," and "raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions."  A necessary condition for this rectification was that an assortment of scattered facts was collected into a larger, more penetrating story. This is a prototype of the practice of journalism.

Very few online sites practice the unearthing of facts. For the most part, they opinionate - which is a useful but parasitic activity. It may consolidate opinion among those who feel the need to have opinions; it may bolster feeling; it may mobilize people into political action. But the circulation of news bits originally gathered by newspapers and other dead-tree journalistic endeavors does not preserve reportorial jobs. It does nothing for the economic viability of the mainline press. It speaks to networks of readers who cluster around the opinion sites purposively. They do not stumble upon the big news having looked into the paper because of an interest in sports, comics, or crossword puzzles. 

Journalistic careers?

The revenue that sustains the online sites comes almost exclusively from advertising. Subscriptions, in general, do not work (The Wall Street Journal is the great exception in the US). Precious few full-time reporters make a living from the internet. Most blogs and other news sites are written by people who make their living in other ways, or are working for vanity owners willing to lose money (for a while), or are promoting their freelance careers. Increasingly, internet journalists will be forced to make their livings with “day-job” careers - like professors.

What this means for journalists starting out is that expectations for journalistic careers are in the process of shifting. It is foolhardy to expect to make a career climbing a single ladder in a journalistic establishment now. Many of our own students at the Columbia Journalism School seem to understand that from the start. As a result, we may recruit more adventurous students - in my view, not a bad thing, though the danger is that adventurousness comes with a steep price of ill-preparation.

What's the business model for serious reporting?

The question that remains, the question that makes serious journalists tremble in the US, is: who is going to pay for serious reporting? For the sorts of investigations that went on last year, for example, into the background of the surprise Republican nominee for Vice President, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska. Planes to Alaska from the lower 48 states were suddenly choked with reporters from mainstream media. What with the cost of flying nowadays, how many online sites, even the handful of nonprofits supported by public interest foundations, could afford to send a reporter, even if they had the will, drawn in part by the scent of family scandal? A couple of new foundation-supported nonprofit news sites are just starting up to do original, especially investigative, reporting, a development greatly to be welcomed. Voiceofsandiego.org has won attention, with a staff of 11 including 6 reporters and a photographer. Minnesota’s MinnPost.com has a staff twice the size. In Paris, mediapart.fr hopes to sustain itself with a few tens of thousands of paid subscribers. Such enterprises seem to be well launched. What they will amount to is anyone’s guess.

Authority

Arguably the erosion of trust is journalism’s deepest trouble as well as the one longest in the making.  Seen from the public’s vantage point, there is a crisis of authority. Do we believe what we read? Should we? What does it mean if we don’t? Surveys establish that newspapers have been losing public confidence, as have television networks and local broadcasters as well. Overall, CNN is no more trusted than Fox News.The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times. According to one recent study, fewer than one in five Americans say they can believe “all or most” media reporting, down from more than 27 percent - a rather low figure in itself - five years ago. From the news organization’s point of view, there is a crisis of credibility, and attendant anxiety. If the public doubts that objective journalism is possible, on what basis can journalists claim professional status?  On what does their standing rest? In what sense do they matter in the life of the society? Should they fasten themselves to the mast of objectivity or free themselves altogether from its strictures - and in the latter case, how should they proceed?

Journalism’s legitimacy crisis has two overlapping sources: ideological disaffection from right and left, and generalized distrust. Between them, they register something of a cultural sea change. The authority of American journalism has, for a century or so, rested on its claim to objectivity and a popular belief that that claim is justified. These claims are weakening. Americans remain suspicious of political life in the first place. “The pursuit of happiness” is understood as first of all a private pursuit.  As Daniel Bell once wrote, America’s “sociological foundation was the denial of the primacy of politics for everyday life.” Private life deserved to be protected from the State - the American Constitution was founded on that promise. Perhaps the great genius of the newspaper was not simply in the invention of reporting but in the paper’s ability to serve as the great aggregator, so that something of a public sliver or even a polygon if not a sphere was created by the sum of all papers, as incidental readers accumulated into functional publics.

Fragmentation has derailed that model. Insofar as newspapers and television news are forfeiting their authority now, and people who do want more than a smattering of news are increasingly congregating around talk radio, cable television, and online sites that match their ideological preconceptions, we are entering unknown cultural territory. 

What happens when postmodern suspicion becomes generalized?  Pessimists think that the society’s ability to adapt to real-world change is impaired. Optimists, who tend to be younger, think that journalistic refashioning and collaboration can produce a model of “distributed knowledge” convertible into the foundation of a positive political transformation. Whether or not we are haltingly working our way toward a productive “revaluation of values” in journalism, I have no idea.

Deference

No survey of the journalistic landscape, even one this superficial, can omit the journalistic failings that are generated not by particularly poor business decisions, not by technologically-assisted fragmentation and media supersaturation, but by the abiding, classic and characteristic sin of journalism: deference to authorities. 

We have seen in recent years two devastating failures to report the world - devastating not simply in their abject professional failures but in that they made for frictionless glides into catastrophe. The first was in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the major media tossed away skepticism in favor of cheerleading on the question of Bush’s commitment to the existence of a Qaida-Saddam alliance and on the question of WMD. Official mea culpas in the New York Times and Washington Post only acknowledged after the fact how the reporting was sexed up, how “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” because journalists did not hesitate to defer to government officials whose cornering of the national security market and mastery of the manipulation of the objectivity fetish went unchallenged.

More recently, we have the run-up to the financial crisis, where (as a study in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review establishes) the overwhelming majority of articles in the ostensibly critical-minded financial press looked upon the housing-credit bubble as a miraculous achievement of nature. In this case, the authorities deferred to were the bankers, deregulators, and financial analysts whose stake in the bubble was sizable and whose mastery of arcana, and/or ability to obscure the proliferation of nonsensical gambles in the name of unrestrained market rationality, was held to be definitive.

Given these grave failures of journalism even when it was operating at greater strength not so long ago, one might say that rampant distrust is a reasonable and even a good thing. Walter Lippmann famously wrote in Public Opinion 85 years ago that journalism was an instrument of public purpose, an effort “to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.” The press’ failure to connect dots, to piece together the facts and meaning of developments in their profusion, broke the crucial link in the chain, the one that Lippmann summarized in the operative words: “on which men can act.”

So even a forthright and broad-gauged address to the crises of circulation, revenue, attention and authority will not restart any Golden Age. It would be foolish to expect it. It is not as though journalism is the only rotten pillar of global society. Journalism cannot be relied on when breakdowns in public trust and intelligence are severe, as long as the political system benefits from institutional myopia, and great fortunes thrive on public ignorance. 

Resolutions

It always warms the heart and calms the mind to follow a discussion of crises with an unveiling of resolutions. The sequence has a pleasing cadence, even when it has to strain for justification. The present case is one of those occasions when talk of resolution is - to say the least - premature.

One reason is circumstantial. The coincidence of crises makes an exit strategy scarcer. How much of the travail of 2008 can be ascribed to the Great Recession, and how much is structural, a function of Internet competition, declining attention, and declining authority all at once? The Project on Excellence’s conclusion is that “roughly half of the downturn in the last year was cyclical, that is, related to the economic downturn. But the cyclical problems are almost certain to worsen in 2009 and make managing the structural problems all the more difficult.”

Notice the reference to “managing the structural problems.” They cannot be solved, they can only be managed. The unavoidable likelihood, pending a bolt from the blue, is that the demand for journalism will continue to decline and that no business model can compensate for its declining marketability. No meeting of newspaper people is complete these days without a call - some anguished, some confident - for a “new business model” that would apply to the online “paper.” The call has been issued over the course of years now. It might be premature to say so, but one might suspect that it has not been found because there is none to be found. 

The repute of journalism as a force for Enlightenment rested heavily on the assembling of what was, in a sense, an accidental public. Even in times of high circulation, the readership of newspapers came through two fairly distinct channels. There was an amalgamation of citizens charged, or charging themselves, with the task of knowing their world better in order to govern themselves. These readers were frequently partisan. In the 19th century, they had their own newspapers. Even in the 20th century, with the promotion of the ideal of objectivity, they were often interested parties. This amalgam was supplemented by a wide array of readers who were drawn to the newspapers to consult features, recipes, comics, sports reports, and movie schedules, and who, having been drawn there, grazed past news of the wider world and became passingly familiar with the actions of governments and other prime movers.

The fact that large numbers, even majorities of the population, were drawn to the news became a resource for reformers of all stripes. Public opinion - which was a phantom, as Walter Lippmann argued - was there to be mobilized because the public assembled itself around the breakfast tables and on railroad cars, reading the papers. With the decline of the newspaper comes the decline of the unitary public as a force capable of being mobilized.

This doesn’t mean that the new media dispensation is a bulldozer set against democracy. The success of the Obama campaign last year in turning the Internet into a force for mobilization makes that plain. Still, the new administration groans under the weight of its obligations, and whether it can sustain that mobilization remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the diminishment of news continues, and much as we are in the business of stripping away our illusions, there is no way this can be good. As the sociologist Paul Starr has recently argued, the coverage that suffers most as newspaper costs are cut is the local- and state-level coverage for which there is the least independent demand. In the chronically corrupt state of New Jersey, for example, there were 50 reporters assigned to cover the state capital twenty years ago; now, 15 remain. The major national newspapers will survive in some fashion, I don’t doubt (much). But the middle levels are crumbling.

Proposals to shore up newspapers, to rescue them from the consequences of their horrendous business decisions, tend to point to to point to two possible sources. Both, in turn, rest on public policy.

One way to go is financial support for nonprofit foundations, charities, the likes of which own newspapers in a few cities, and are, selectively, supporting reporting through nonprofit websites like ProPublica.org and Voiceofsandiego.org.  Of course, the very existence of nonprofit foundations rests on tax policies that advantage their creation. So in the end, it is public policy and only public policy that will determine what kind of journalism survives.  

A few weeks ago, at Senate hearings, Steve Coll, a former managing editor of the Washington Post, proposed that Congress make it easier for news organizations to refound themselves on nonprofit bases and moreover to subsidize reporting now being shut down. Many proposals are circulating: tax subsidies for newspaper subscriptions; new advantages to nonprofit newspaper owners. If there were a national endowment that poured money into serious reporting via local boards dominated by professional (platform-neutral) journalists, it could do a great deal to wall off the journalists from the smothering embrace of the state. 

Or the unregulated, laissez-nous-faire market. Even in the US, we're rapidly running out of alternatives to public finance. Perhaps it can still be said that the experience of the BBC demonstrates that financing can be heavily insulated from control. The US, lacking the license fee, has more trouble.  Still, even in the US, it’s time to move to the next level and entertain a grown-up debate among concrete ideas.

Can a public board give representation to a range of voices, including nominees by Congress, thereby improving the odds that decent reporting survives the ineptitude of newspaper publishers? I don’t know. Are the BBC and Channel 4 models for hands-off subsidy? I don’t know that either. 

What I do know is that journalism is too important to be left to business interests. If there were any doubt as to what newspapers at their best can accomplish for the public good, you need look no further than the British parliamentary scandal.  If there were any doubt that the best American newspaper is worried about the coverage that newsroom shrinkage is preventing, take this headline, from page 3 of the New York Times of May 21st: "Death Row Foes See Newsroom Cuts as Blow"

Leaving journalism to the myopic, inept, greedy, unlucky, and floundering managers of the nation's newspapers to rescue journalism on their own would be like leaving it to the investment wizards at the American International Group (AIG), Citibank, and Goldman Sachs, to create a workable, just global credit system on the strength of their good will, their hard-earned knowledge, and their fidelity to the public good. 

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, as Rahm Emanuel said. I hope my next talk can be called "Building New Foundations from Garbage".

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated on 4 March 1933. "This nation asks for action", he said in his inaugural address, and he answered the call. By the time Congress adjourned on 15 June, he had sent it fifteen messages and persuaded it to pass fifteen major pieces of legislation. And they were major. They included the Banking Act and the Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial and investment banking; the Agricultural Adjustment Act to establish a policy to save American farming; and the National Industrial Recovery Act to do the same for industry. He set up the Tennessee Valley Authority and sponsored an international financial conference, passed numerous reforms of the mortgage industry and took the United States off the gold standard.Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.

Godfrey Hodgson's most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009)

His earlier books include The World Turned Right Side Up: a history of the conservative ascendancy in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1996); The Gentleman from New York: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Houghton Mifflin, 2000); More Equal Than Others: America from Nixon to the New Century (Princeton University Press, 2006), A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007)

Among Godfrey Hodgson's openDemocracy articles:

"Barack Obama: at the crossroads of victory" (11 June 2008): "America's foreign-policy election" (28 August 2008)

"America's economy election" (17 October 2008)

"Yes he can!" (6 November 2008)

"Change?" (2 December 2008)

"An end and a beginning" (5 January 2009)

"Barack Obama: don't waste the crisis" (6 February 2009)

"Barack Obama's reality gap" (27 February 2009)

"Barack Obama: end of the beginning" (30 March 2009)

"After the G20: America, Obama, the world" (6 April 2009)

These were the famous "hundred days", in the course of which Roosevelt saved American capitalism and - some would say - saved American democracy as well. The period set a standard by which the wisdom and effectiveness of future presidents was to be judged.

In 1961, media judgment of the achievements of John F Kennedy's first hundred days in office was harsh (and the president was no less self-critical). He had been far from inactive. But his successes were seen as having been cancelled out by the catastrophic failure of his attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba. Kennedy, asked how he liked being president, answered wryly that he had liked it better before the Bay of Pigs.

Even JFK's humiliation could not compare with the original hundred days, which measured the interval between Napoleon's escape from exile on the island of Elba and his decisive defeat at Waterloo.

Barack Obama approaches the end of his first hundred days in office with a record that lies somewhere between those of Roosevelt and Napoleon. He has been as active as FDR; avoided any disasters; and has certainly not met his Waterloo. This is, then, a good moment to assess how he has performed so far in terms of what he wants to achieve, and what his supporters expect from him.

In the world's eye

For President Obama to do better than his predecessor internationally was always going to be easy. For George W Bush was disliked by huge numbers of the world's people, and an even larger proportion of their leaders; indeed, the degree of loathing exceeded that visited on almost any other American president.

But Obama has not just basked in the widespread relief at his arrival in the White House; he has also acted well. He said on his first day in office that he would close the Guantánamo prison camp, and is working on it; within a few more days he had struck the note the world wanted to hear on Iraq, on torture and on climate change.

His meetings in Europe and Turkey for a series of summits on 2-7 April 2009, and in Trinidad & Tobago for the Summit of the Americas on 17-19 April, were an almost unqualified success. People everywhere liked and trusted him. (The one partial exception was his urging the European Union to accept Turkey as a member: the reaction in Washington if France's Nicolas Sarkozy were to urge the United States to accept Mexico as the fifty-first state!)

Only gradually has it emerged that while Obama may understand the world's anger at the Bush administration's hubris and rudeness, his own foreign policy in many ways is set to continue the established themes of American policy. He might be ready to draw down US forces in Iraq; but only to send more to Afghanistan. He might have appointed excellent regional special envoys - Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross; but with no expectation of dramatic progress in their areas of responsibility.

Obama's public demeanour may be hugely welcomed across the world. But the US under his leadership will still pursue many of America's great-power goals. The fist might open into a handshake, but his remains a project for a new - if less aggressive - American century.

In the domestic arena

At home, as the hundred days end on 29 April 2009, President Obama's record is even more ambiguous. No one doubts his determination to drag the American economy out of the quagmire. Many doubt whether his administration (studded as it is on the financial side with those most associated with the policies that caused the trouble in the first place) knows how to do the job.

Equally, no one doubts the sincerity of his reform agenda. But many doubt whether, given the slowdown of the economy and the ballooning of the budget deficit, he will be able to advance his social and environmental goals: introducing universal healthcare insurance, investing on a significant scale in public education, and reducing America's dependence on imported energy.

Only a fool, said JP Morgan, would "go a bear" on the United States. But a very large number of fools did "go a bull" on a scale that has come close to ruining the world's strongest single economy (and thus, in a globalised economy, to ruining everyone else's). 

Indeed, what President Obama's first hundred days illustrate is the limited ability of the American presidency to respond to the country's real needs. The glamour, the excitement and the appeal of the US presidency were graphically on view at the inauguration on 20 January - but almost immediately the limitations of presidential power were apparent.

This is highlighted by the fact that key offices in the treasury remained unfilled for weeks at the height of the worst financial crisis since the early 1930s - because a constitutional provision requires high offices to be subject to the advice and consent of the Senate, ensuring a slow process at the best of times.

It is also clear in the president's difficult relationship with Congress. The legislative process in the House of Representatives (which controls money bills) is encrusted with the new system of "earmarks" and other special interests that tread close to the borders of corruption. In the Senate, an administration's need (thanks to comparatively new conventions) to in effect win three-fifths of the votes to pass legislation makes the process lengthier. In both chambers, the committee system - cumbersome and exposed to special-interest lobbying - is now closer than ever to paralysis. 

The problems are compounded by the fact that among the many high-minded people in Congress, there are few towering figures. In part, this is because the public sees the political system as dominated by presidential will and presidential action - an illusion that the media (and especially) television has reinforced. The president is portrayed as dynamic, the Congress and other institutional rivals as bumbling. The use of phrases such as "commander-in-chief" and "leader of the free world" for the president, contrasted with the supposed parochialism and self-interest of senators and congressmen, further exaggerates the contrast.  

In the balance

Already, as the hundred days come to an end, older political realities have reasserted itself. The forces of inertia look heavier than ever. The Obama administration acted with decisiveness and energy to recapitalise the banks. The bankers simply took this as an opportunity to strengthen their balance-sheets and keep paying themselves bonuses. The country's manufacturing industry is in such a poor shape that Fiat is seen as a potential saviour for both Chrysler and General Motors. The faint signs of revival on Wall Street contrast with the bleak outlook on Main Street, where real-estate values continue to fall and unemployment continues to rise (see "Barack Obama: end of the beginning", 30 March 2009). 

Also in openDemocracy on Barack Obama's presidency:

Simon Maxwell, "Global development: Barack Obama's agenda" (20 January 2009)

Pervez Hoodbhoy, "Obama's triple test" (21 January 2009)

Fred Halliday, "The greater middle east: Obama's six problems" (21 January 2009)

openDemocracy, "Barack Obama: hope, fear... advice" (19-23 January 2009) - reflections from thirty-seven of our worldwide authors

Simon Critchley, "Barack Obama and the American void" (22 January 2009)

Ruth Rosen, "American women's stimulus: voice, agency, change" (18 February 2009)

Jim Gabour, "The redemption game" (20 February 2009)

Plus - regular comment on openUSA

When I travelled across the United States at the time of the inauguration to discuss The Myth of American Exceptionalism [Yale University Press, 2009] - a book that is very critical of aspects of American democracy - I was constantly asked how I could say such things when America had just elected Barack Obama. My reply was two-fold: that the double task of reforming the inequalities and the inefficiencies of American society while rescuing an imploded financial system seemed almost beyond the strength even of the strongest president; and that in any case the presidency did not now have the powers or the influence it would need to complete this task.

The presidency, after all, was far from all-powerful even in Franklin Roosevelt's day. FDR complained that getting the Washington government, and especially the US navy, to do what the president wanted was like punching a pillow. In All Things to All Men: The False Promise of the Modern America Presidency (1980), I showed in detail how Roosevelt had responded to challenges as frightening as those confronting Barack Obama by using a range of instruments - the Congress, the Democratic Party, the permanent government, and the press and radio - to lessen his isolation within the constitutional system. "By the end of his twelve years in the White House", I wrote, "the temporary shift in the balance of power between the President and the Congress resulting from then dramatic initiatives of the Hundred Days had become the way Washington worked."

"For all that", I went on, "he had done nothing to change the rules of the game. He had simply shown how it was possible to win most of the time. In so doing, he had greatly heightened expectations - both in Congress and in the nation - of what his successors would be able to accomplish". FDR's presidential domination is not the way Washington works today.

The fact that Roosevelt was president during a period of unprecedented crisis at home and abroad may have strengthened his authority as well as testing it, yet this still did not permit a permanent change. The six decades since Roosevelt's death have seen all of his successors, several of them men of great force of character and formidable political skill, fail to make the system work as well as he did.

Harry Truman, working with the presidency as Roosevelt had left it to him, did as well as anyone. Dwight D Eisenhower did better, as historians now recognise, than his liberal critics thought at the time. Both John Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, activist Democratic presidents, complained vociferously of their powerlessness and railed against the constraints of the system.

After them, the president's situation became even harder. Richard M Nixon was driven from office amid scandal. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were derided, then defeated. Ronald Reagan came to the White House announcing that government was the problem, not the solution, a belief that did nothing to make government more effective. George HW Bush was an excellent foreign-policy president, but unsuccessful at home and defeated in a re-election bid. Bill Clinton only narrowly avoided ejection and George W Bush became a model of unpopularity.

If the American president has (as the textbooks say) to perform the roles both of an elected monarch and a consecrated prime minister, the record of the past two generations suggests that the monarchical attributes of the office have fared better than its administrative and political fortunes.

Barack Obama has in his first three months confirmed his possession of formidable political skills. The question must be whether they will be enough to help him transcend the very real constraints and weaknesses of what is constantly, but inaccurately, described as the most powerful office in the world.

update: the BBC's North American editor Justin Webb has since blogged about this subject here 

Reports emanating from Italian sources earlier this week suggesting that the Vatican has effectively vetoed three of President Barack Obama's nominees to fill the vacant role of United States Ambassador to the Holy See--based on their liberal views on issues such as abortion and stem cell research--may signal the beginning of a cooling in US-Vatican relations under the Obama administration.