Robert McChesney and John Nichols were on Democracy Now yesterday. Both are journalists who have recently authored a book entitled The Death and Life of American Journalism.

One of the exchanges between the hosts and guests caught my attention. This is Nichols speaking:

“There’s a new Pew Center study out. They actually studied Baltimore. They looked at where all the original newspapers came from. They looked at all the independent media, all the online, everything. They found that 96 percent, almost 96 percent—there’s a little debate about the precise figure, but well over 90—came from old media, largely from the daily newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. But here’s the scary part, the footnote. The Baltimore Sun is producing 73 percent fewer original news stories today than twenty years ago. So new media is commenting on old media, but it’s not filling the void of news. Old media is giving us a lot less.

“And so, you say, well, OK, come on, Pew Center folks, tell us, where is the news coming from? Who is generating it, if it’s not—well, it’s in there. 86 percent of the stories came in the form of public relations, either from government or from corporations; only 14 percent produced by a reporter who went out and tried to speak truth to power. This is a scary zone we’re entering.”

Let me boil this down for you. Most everything on television and on the Internet (like this blog) is nothing more than repeated news. In other words, both are echo chambers. The only real source of original news comes from traditional media, like newspapers, which are dying. But even here, most of their news comes either from corporate or government sources. That is, we’ve entered a zone in which corporations and the government create 86 percent of the news and the percentage is growing.

Welcome to the brave new world.