Only the future will give us an answer to the following question: Has the crisis beleaguering media empire, presided by Rupert Murdoch, fired a mercy bullet at the printed press, or has it granted it new life? The answer depends on whether the traditional media will ignore the lesson and desist from wrongful practices that pushed the majority of their readership to lose confidence in it, and turn to the new media, or whether the traditional media will get rid of the tabloid mentality, as well as unprofessional and unethical practices, to win over a new generation of readers. I do not have a crystal ball, and so I will let time reveal the fate of the printed press. Instead, I will talk about what I know. In truth, the press all around the world often overblows circulation figures, albeit such exaggeration takes on different forms. In the Third World, a given newspaper may claim that it sells one million copies per day when in reality, it only sells 50,000. In the West, on the other hand, where sales figures are recorded and cannot be manipulated, a given newspaper may distribute a part of its editions for free or for very low prices, in order to claim a high circulation number, since advertisers pay newspapers proportionally with their circulation. The News of the World has closed in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, although it was the most circulated Sunday paper in Britain. The numbers I have before me say that its average sales last month stood at 2,667,428 copies, compared to 1,000,848 copies for the Sunday Times whose owner is also Murdoch, 288,928 for the Observer, and 151,229 for the Independent on Sunday. The other figure pertaining to the above is the distribution of the News of the World last month, which dropped by 5.7 percent relative to the same month last year, while the distribution of the Sunday Times fell by 7.8 percent, the Observer by 11.6 percent, and the Independent by 3.8 percent. Daily papers are naturally more important, because they are with the readers six days a week. However, what was said about the Sunday papers can also be said about the daily ones: The Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, sold 2,808,746 copies last month, a decline of 5.8 percent compared with the same period last year. The Times sold 440,581 copies, a 12.5 percent fall, the Guardian sold 256,283, a 10.4 percent fall, and the Independent sold 167,681, or 5.8 percent less copies relative to last year. I write with the figures from May, April and March also in front of me, all pointing at a progressive decline in the circulation of British newspapers. I also have similar figures from the U.S., but I will not publish here as I am running low on space. However, these figures also reflect a progressive decline that has put some of the world's most famous and most prestigious papers on the brink of bankruptcy. Circulation figures are extremely important, because they attract advertisers. While the News of the World was shut down because of the phone hacking scandal, the other reason was that the major advertisers had decided to boycott the paper, announcing one after another that they would not deal with an unethical paper that had eavesdropped on everybody's voice mail, especially that of a teenage homicide victim, before deleting her voice messages. I would have wished that the Arab press had institutions that monitored sales down to each edition, as is the case in the Western press. For instance, the figures I leaned on today were published by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), an establishment jointly owned by the British papers, representing everyone in the industry. What the figures say, both before and after the Murdoch empire scandal, is that the printed press is on the path to extinction, and that it will come to an end in the West before our newspapers stop, since we are lagging behind the rest of the world by ten or twenty years. Of course, the new media is a key reason for the demise of the traditional press, which indeed emphasizes this to the extent of obscuring other reasons. This suits the traditional press of course, because it wards off accusations of its lagging behind. However, the full picture shows that the international press has changed, and has paid the price as a result. Journalism is no longer a profession with a message and a moral commitment, but just a profit-seeking business, like the frozen meats and bags businesses. It is enough to examine the example of the American press, which reached its zenith when it exposed the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and then fell to a nadir as it promoted the lies of the Bush administration in the course of its justification of the invasion of Iraq. […] We are all indeed paying the price for this. [email protected]
