EARLIER THIS year, Jay Harris walked away from his job as the publisher of the San Jose Mercury News rather than comply with Knight Ridder directives to keep cutting costs. Observers were shocked. Harris, one of the highest-ranking African-American news executives in the country, was an industry star. But he said he could not in good conscience implement cuts that would hurt his already-profitable paper just to make it still more profitable. And he issued a public call for national action — perhaps in the form of a high-profile commission — to study how Wall Street’s unrealistic profit demands were hurting the news business.

"I wish I could be as hopeful as Tom [Rosenstiel]," Harris told the Phoenix by e-mail. "On the positive side, this has been a giant reminder to the corporate managers that news is important, that it sells newspapers and attracts viewers, and that audiences expect them to do a good job. If and when they pull back they will probably catch some well-deserved flak. The question going forward is whether the CEOs and other corporate managers will pay more attention to the needs of their readers and journalism’s responsibility to the nation in a time of profound national challenge, or remain beholden to large institutional investors and Wall Street analysts who likely will want the companies to do all they can for the bottom line and year-to-year growth — the crisis facing the nation notwithstanding."

As Harris understands all too well, the price of what became business-as-usual is now coming due. For the past decade the media have focused on celebrity and scandal, sex and sleaze, providing wall-to-wall coverage of O.J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, and Gary Condit. The attention given to Osama bin Laden and other Islamic extremists was, by comparison, minuscule — despite the earlier World Trade Center bombing, attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Clinton White House’s misbegotten raids on purported bin Laden strongholds in Sudan and Afghanistan. Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw recently cited studies showing that "newspaper editors and television news executives have reduced the space and time devoted to foreign coverage by 70 percent to 80 percent during the past 15 to 20 years." It’s no wonder that we now find ourselves adrift in a dangerous world that we don’t understand.

Media analyst John Morton thinks it won’t be long before the media revert to their downsizing ways. "I expect there will be considerable pressure on cutting costs," he says. "Even a crisis, if it goes on forever, is no longer a crisis, and in time people will revert to their former habits."

Former Boston Globe editor Matt Storin warns that, even if the hunger for news remains strong, it won’t necessarily follow that the advertising revenues will be there to support it. "At the very time when they might want more, they might get less," Storin says of news consumers. "As good as circulation and viewership is, it’s the advertising that pays the bills, by and large."

Yet such a development would not only be bad for democracy — it would, ultimately, be bad for the bottom line as well. Indeed, the war on terrorism may represent an opportunity for media that are willing to invest in the journalistic resources necessary to cover it. Business consultant (and presidential cousin) John Ellis, a columnist for Fast Company, believes that "the appetite for great reporting has never been higher," and predicts that news organizations that rise to the occasion will also, in the long run, enjoy the greatest economic success.

As a comparison, Ellis invokes the well-known story of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, and the way each responded to the severe paper shortages of World War II. The Herald Tribune cut its news hole; the Times loaded up on as much reporting as it could, and cut advertising. The Times, of course, emerged from the war as New York’s — and the nation’s — leading newspaper. The Herald Tribune went out of business two decades later.

Trouble is, during World War II the Times’ owners, the Sulzberger family, could do anything they pleased with their newspaper. Today, even the Sulzbergers have ceded some of their control to Wall Street.

In the current media environment, in which nearly all of our most important news organizations are owned by publicly traded corporations, the issue isn’t whether individuals want to do the right thing, but whether the stock market will allow it.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com