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Gone With the Papers
I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.
Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets.
The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, Murray Kempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats, crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in Africa and the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and forgotten in our urban slums or Appalachia. These presses churned out raw lists of data, from sports scores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of the city or the world we would never otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters and critics reviewed movies, books, dance, theater and music and covered sporting events. Newspapers printed the text of presidential addresses, sent reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall and followed the courts and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the lurid and the macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion.
We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.
A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.
I, like many who cared more about truth than news, was pushed out of The New York Times, specifically over my vocal and public opposition to the war in Iraq. This is not a new story. Those reporters who persistently challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question and examine the reigning political passions, always tacitly embraced by the commercial media, are often banished. There is a constant battle in newsrooms between the managers, those who serve the interests of the institution and the needs of the advertisers, and reporters whose loyalty is to readers. I have a great affection for reporters, who hide their idealism behind a thin veneer of cynicism and worldliness. I also harbor a deep distrust and even loathing for the careerists who rise up the food chain to become managers and editors.
Sidney Schanberg was nearly killed in Cambodia in 1975 after staying there for The New York Times to cover the conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, reporting for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Later he went back to New York from Cambodia and ran the city desk. He pushed reporters to report about the homeless, the poor and the victims of developers who were forcing families out of their rent-controlled apartments. But it was not a good time to give a voice to the weak and the poor. The social movements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War had dissolved. Alternative publications, including the magazine Ramparts, which through a series of exposés had embarrassed the established media organizations into doing real reporting, had gone out of business.
The commercial press had, once again, become lethargic. It had less and less incentive to challenge the power elite. Many editors viewed Schanberg’s concerns as relics of a dead era. He was removed as city editor and assigned to write a column about New York. He used the column, however, to again decry the abuse of the powerful, especially developers. The then-editor of the paper, Abe Rosenthal, began to acidly refer to Schanberg as the resident “Commie” and address him as “St. Francis.” Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost weekly for lunch along with the paper’s publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, grew increasingly impatient with Schanberg, who was challenging the activities of their powerful friends. Schanberg became a pariah. He was not invited to the paper’s table at two consecutive Inner Circle dinners held for New York reporters. The senior editors and the publisher did not attend the previews for the film “The Killing Fields,” based on Schanberg’s experience in Cambodia. His days at the newspaper were numbered.
The city Schanberg profiled in his column did not look like the glossy ads in Rosenthal’s new lifestyle sections or the Sunday New York Times magazine. Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of citizens were sleeping on the streets. It was one where there were lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where the mentally ill were thrown onto heating grates or into jails like human refuse. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing. He lost his column and left the paper to work for New York Newsday and later The Village Voice.
Schanberg’s story was one of many. The best reporters almost always run afoul of the mandarins above them, a clash that sees them defanged and demoted or driven out. They are banished by a class of careerists whom the war correspondent Homer Bigart dismissed as “the pygmies.” One evening Bigart was assigned to write about a riot, drawing from the information provided by reporters on the scene. As one reporter, John Kifner, called in from a phone booth rioters began to shake it. Kifner relayed the distressing bit of news to Bigart, who, sick of the needling of his editors, reassumed Kifner with the words: “At least you’re dealing with sane people.”
Those who insist on reporting uncomfortable truths always try the patience of the careerists who manage these institutions. If they are too persistent, as most good reporters are, they become “a problem.” This battle, which exists in all newsrooms, was summed up for me by the Los Angeles Times reporter Dial Torgerson, whom I worked with in Central America until he was killed by a land mine on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. “Always remember,” he once told me of newspaper editors, “they are the enemy.”
When I met with Schanberg in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side he told me, “I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was not going to the museum. I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would the Times investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”
But Schanberg also argues, as do I, that newspapers prove a vital bulwark for a democratic state. It is possible to decry their numerous failings and compromises with the power elite and yet finally honor them as important to the maintenance of democracy. Traditionally, if a reporter goes out and reports on an event, the information is usually trustworthy and accurate. The report can be slanted or biased. It can leave out vital facts. But it is not fiction. The day The New York Times and other great city newspapers die, if such a day comes, will be a black day for the nation.
Newspapers “do more than anyone else, although they left out a lot of things,” Schanberg said. “There are stories on their blackout list. But it is important the paper is there because they spend money on what they chose to cover. Most of the problem of mainstream journalism is what they leave out. But what they do, aside from the daily boiler plate, press releases and so forth, is very, very important to the democratic process.”
“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added. “That is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the Establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are a positive force. I don’t think The New York Times was ever a fully committed accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it in your own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers official Washington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of the Establishment.”
“Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on. “Newspapers keep the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We discover the civil rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We go at it hellbent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been neglected and treated like half citizens. And then when things calm down it becomes easy not to do that anymore.”
The death of newspapers means, as Schanberg points out, that we will lose one more bulwark holding back the swamp of corporate malfeasance, abuse and lies. It will make it harder for us as a society to separate illusion from reality, fact from opinion, reality from fantasy. There is nothing, of course, intrinsically good about newspapers. We have long been cursed with sleazy tabloids and the fictional stories of the supermarket press, which have now become the staple of television journalism. The commercial press, in the name of balance and objectivity, had always skillfully muted the truth in the name of news or blotted it out. But the loss of great newspapers, newspapers that engage with the community, means the loss of one of the cornerstones of our open, democratic state. We face the prospect, in the very near future, of major metropolitan cities without city newspapers. This loss will diminish our capacity for self-reflection and take away the critical tools we need to monitor what is happening around us.
The leaders of the civil rights movement grasped from the start that without a press willing to attend their marches and report fairly from their communities on the injustices they decried and the repression they suffered, the movement would “have been a bird without wings,” as civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis said.
“Without the media’s willingness to stand in harm’s way and starkly portray events of the Movement as they saw them unfold, Americans may never have understood or even believed the horrors that African Americans faced in the Deep South,” Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, said in 2005 when the House celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. “That commitment to publish the truth took courage. It was incredibly dangerous to be seen with a pad, a pen, or a camera in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia where the heart of the struggle took place. There was a violent desperation among local and State officials and the citizens to maintain the traditional order. People wanted to keep their injustice a secret. They wanted to hide from the critical eye of a disapproving world. They wanted to flee from the convictions of their own conscience. And they wanted to destroy the ugly reflection that nonviolent protestors and camera images so graphically displayed. So when the Freedom Riders climbed off the bus in Alabama in 1961, for example, there were reporters who were beaten and bloodied before any of us were.”
Our political apparatus and systems of information have been diminished and taken hostage by corporations. Our government no longer responds to the needs or rights of citizens. We have been left disempowered without the traditional mechanisms to be heard. Those who battle the corporate destruction of the ecosystem and seek to protect the remnants of our civil society must again take to the streets. They have to engage in acts of civil disobedience. But this time around the media and the systems of communication have dramatically changed.
The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print who believed the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that it will be harder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public. The preoccupation with news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting will effectively marginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy established power. Protests, unlike in the 1960s, will have a difficult time garnering the daily national coverage that characterized the reporting on the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and in the end threatened the power elite. Acts of protest, no longer covered or barely covered, will leap up like disconnected wildfires, more easily snuffed out or ignored. It will be hard if not impossible for resistance leaders to have their voices amplified across the nation, to build a national movement for change. The failings of newspapers were huge, but in the years ahead, as the last battle for democracy means dissent, civil disobedience and protest, we will miss them.
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51 Comments so far
Show AllDark Ages America is upon us.
Alternative print sources certainly exist. The Utne Reader is one, which, unfortunately, is not known by enough people. Mother Jones is another, but is so strident that it probably repels many people. The New Yorker is probably the best known general purpose magazine, whose quality has gone up now that Tina Brown is no longer the editor. The current editor has had Seymour Hersh working on different assignments since 9/11. Those articles are always interesting and reliable.
Regarding mainstream media, I have been reading the NY Times six days a week since 1969. Even the midwest edition which I get (a scaled-down version of the NYC edition) is better than anything else available out here in the hinterlands. It is the best of a bad lot - a left-handed compliment, but an accurate one.
I have mixed feelings about on-line sources. First, many of them are based on print media, so aside from availability, they are no more reliable than newspapers. Second, it is not always clear who posts them, so one needs to keep about a pound of salt handy when reading some of them.
---"Mother Jones is another, but is so strident that it probably repels many people."---
Like the Utne Reder (and The Nation, and to some extent, the Progressive, and In These Times) Mother Jones sold-out long ago - it is an insult to the memory of the woman it is named after.
I once subscribed to them all, but now, the only print magazines or publications I get are:
Z Magazine (Recommended)
Dollars and Sense (highly recommended)
The Monthly Review (The most well-known journal of socialist thought)
The reduced-to-a-little-flyer FAIR Extra,
The Multinational Monitor - but it seems they quietly stopped publishing after the Spring 2009 issue.
Steel City Revolt - And excellent local publication by the anarchist Pittsburgh Organizing Group
Bravo, but which of your recommendations supported Kerry or Obama?
Excellent post, sheepherder.
Bill from Saginaw
not a good idea to wait around for the big newspapers and other media to report on events. if it happens, fine, but there are other methods of spreading the word.
there were town criers and pamphleteers in the colonial times; there are a number of electronic methods now. if we really want change, and we're willing to be open to solutions and then do the required work, we can make it happen.
The revolution many not be televised so to speak, but we can certainly find ways to spread the word about what needs changing and what we are doing to make it happen.
again a brilliantly written article by Chris Hedges. I long for the newsroom he recalls and the hard boiled reporters as I long for our young people to help us organize street protests. Something came to mind. I think it was the coverage in the NYTimes about the Tea Party marches and the Glenn Beck gatherings in DC; How for days the Times covered these events but nary a word when millions of us marched across the land to protest the war in Iraq before it began. The Times sides with the power. and a lot of people call the Times 'left wing'.
A newspaper's priorities are those of the people who run it. As Hedges pointed out, Abe Rosenthal was very Conservative (Hedges's comments about him were very diplomatic - he was a dictator). If Rosenthal were still running the paper it would not have covered the Wikileaks releases. But Bill Keller, until recently, the managing editor, did think the story was worth covering. Regardless of what Rosenthal or Keller decided was worth publishing, someone would be critcizing the decision.
when i lived in the lower east side of manhattan in the 60's i saw black and hispanic children shot at and sometimes killed by the police. it was never or hardly ever mentioned in the papers....now it is any form of dissent....
That kind of coverage is not new. If you read Menken's book, "Newspaper Days," about his days as a reporter in Baltimore a century ago, you will find the same attitude was prevalent - "no need to cover those stories, because no one cares about those people."
H. L. Menken, Studs Terkel and Molly Ivins, how we miss you.
I'd add IFStone to your good list. also one of my favorite writers, a sports writer by trade-Ring Lardner.
I recall a Knight-Ridder news article from the spring of 1972 concerning the American Society of Newspaper Editors where it had been agreed that news coverage of protests was fueling dissent, and a guideline was established that news of protests would not be carried above the fold and that such items would no longer be covered as world or national news, but as local news only. The lack of daylight turned public attention from the anti-war movement, even as the war in Vietnam itself continued. The personal contacts made kept the underground left alive and its marches continued vigorously into the early 80s -- but no one heard anything about them, giving the illusion of unanimous support for Reagan.
Class Act, what! Were you there or sumptin'? ;-) I started marching with my "another mother for peace" and continued the tradition until we moved from DC right around the time of Ollie North getting hauled before Congress. You're right, about protests receiving little coverage once VietNam was winding down after the discovery of the secret war. The commercialized Beach Boys concert Earth Day and the ERA marches of '76,'77 and '78 were the last big ones according to the media, before the Million Man March. And as most of us here at CD know, nobody anywhere in the world came out to stop those non-retaliatory acts against Iraq,Iraq or Afghanistan, either.
I still have my "Another Mother for Peace" poster in my window (and everywhere I've lived for the past 40 years) - War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things. If only it had stuck as an idea with our warmongering population/government.
Wonderful essay by Chris Hedges, especially the insights he attributes to Sidney Schanberg.
The demise of daily, meaningful print journalism will not only effect the ability of ordinary adult citizens to define social reality and take part in what remains of the democratic political process at a local, state and national level. The slow atrophy of newspapers and newspaper reporting will also have an adverse impact upon children.
Trip down memory lane time.
As a child growing up in Muskegon, Michigan and learning how to read, our household had home delivery of a morning edition newspaper (the Grand Rapids Herald) and the evening edition of the Muskegon Chronicle. The morning paper was a breakfast ritual. Four sections for four people. Father got the front section. Mom got the second, more local section. My older sister got the section with Ann Landers column and two full pages of cartoons. I, the youngest, got the sports section.
Gaining literacy to the point where I could partially comprehend the "hard news" portions of the newspaper was somewhat a rite of passage. Kids ask awkward questions. I wanted to know why Truman got us bogged down fighting not only Koreans but those billions of Chinese too, and what Ike was going to do differently about it. Asking such questions - about war, or about the Commies, or why Negroes were treated like that in the South - required my parents to think and try to verbalize coherent answers to Little Billy's nettlesome questions. Sometimes those questions dealt with big, serious issues. Sometimes the questions were bizarre or proved humorous.
Starting each school day over oatmeal and ten minutes of the sports section taught me not only rudimentary English, but practical mathematics. While other kids idolized Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams or Willie Mays, here in Michigan it was (understandably) the Detroit Tigers' young phenom right fielder Al Kaline who was my hero. I figured out how to read a baseball box score. I grasped the concept of what formula created a statistic called a batting average. I followed intensely how the top ten or twenty players in the league rose or fell each and every day in the various ranking categories of their human worth, based entirely upon whether they (Mr. Kaline in particular) had most recently had a good game or a stinker.
The implicit message of deciphering box scores, batting averages, pitchers' earned run averages and strikeout totals, was that life in the real, adult world outside was a lot like that. You succeeded or failed in a very public way. You could always figure out exactly where you personally ranked in the pecking order of your peers. Perfection was possible - hitting for the cycle or tossing a no hitter. But in the real world, failure was the norm. When Ted Williams achieved that most miraculous of achievements - hitting .400 for a season! - the great man was still failing miserably and letting his teammates and fans down six times out of ten. In order for one team to win, another team inevitably has to lose. Life was like that.
One of the weirdest memories of those marginally literate days concerned the labeling on a package of potatoe chips. A midwest chip maker called New Era Potato Chips had a yellow plastic background with a dark, off setting silouette of a woman (vaguely resembling the statue of liberty) on it. For some reason, a slogan printed around this logo under the bold face New Era brand name bore the words "On the alkaline side."
For months, I fixated upon this particular snack food. My mother did her best to cater to the kids' food whims. Suddenly favoring potato chips was just another phase Little Billy was going through. And then one day I asked mom. Was there a peanut or popcorn company out there, too, that was also on Al Kaline's side?
Chris Hedges is absolutely right about the tragic demise of high quality print journalism as the corporate bean counters orchestrate and react to the so-called invisible hand of the marketplace. The gradual decline and death of daily newspapers will also impact how the next generation of American children will be socialized, for better or for worse.
Almost for certain, it will be for the worse. Instead of asking mom or dad, Little Billy will be culturally conditioned to first go Google search. There will be a loss for democracy but also (opps!) for traditional family values.
Bill from Saginaw
Also enjoyed Hedges' commentary, and this was a nice commentary of yours, Bill, on your reflections on your growing up in Michigan in the 50s.
Our family in NW Iowa subscribed at various times to the Des Moines Register (morning) the DSM Tribune (afternoon), Sioux City Journal (morning) and the weekly Flanagan, Illinois, Home Times, as an uncle and aunt and their family operated it.
Some of that printers ink rubbed off on two brothers and their families who operate an independent newspaper, The Storm Lake Times, which covers several counties in NW Iowa; and another brother publishes The Progressive Populist, www.populist.com
While their work requires long days, and financial compensation has always been minimal, they've been publishing The SL Times for 21 years, and TPP for 16. So they're in it for the long haul! And all along the papers have been excellent!
Best wishes, Bill in Dubuque
from the article:
~ The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets. ~
before we go walking down nostalgia lane, let us note the passage above...newspapers have been named incorrectly from the beginning...
they have always been 'ad' papers first, and 'news' papers second...
interesting these articles, referring to the dying 'press', only come at the issue from the point of view of the reporter...
here, we are, literally, taken into the throes of an actual Old Paper's newsroom, where the cigarette-and-coffee, rolled-up-shirt-sleeves, phone-ringing, frantic-typing environment radiate perceptive thinking, ethical standards, and hard work, all on the behalf of some vague, beloved Public...
why are we not taken down another hall, and into the same Old Paper's advertising department? were they not also coffee drinkers, and cigarette smokers, and typers?
where are stories that highlight the 'hey' day of that guy? the old newspaper ad man?
as the quoted passage reminds us, the newsroom was never the true heart of the paper...
the advertising department was...
when one combines this fact with the fact that what is printed is propaganda, one sees that, in buying a newspaper, one is paying to be tempted to purchases one might not otherwise make, and lied to regarding one's society...
no real reporting is taking place in America...it can't...
if it ever does, it is quickly squashed...killed...
those in the know, know...
perhaps we continue to romanticize the newspaper reporter because they are the only imagined foe for our oppressors, those of us in among the citizenry living via delegation, and all...
we hope reporters uncover, police investigate, and courts evaluate...
to accept this does not happen is uncomfortable...
understanding the importance of advertising, and selling, to our society clarifies much...
one might argue the ad man would get you closer to the truth than the news man...
Hedges is one of my favorite writers, but this piece is a mixed message, that newspapers used to be the pulse of the country/city, that real journalists have been marginalized and muted, but that we still need newspapers since tv news is seldom journalism and the internet is a ghetto (?).
I scan the free weekly abbreviated version of my local paper and then use it to clean glass. I don't watch television and don't like buying newpapers and magazines that are half advertising. I'll just hang out in the 'ghetto', thank you - which, dear Chris, is where I read your article.
By ghetto, he meant it in the ethnic sense - the internet is largely cloistered cells of self-affirming choir-preaching, but little of the sort of broad disseninaiton of ideas to the "uninitiated" that broadsheet newspapers once had.
Chicken or egg here is not necessarily important: Are newspapers dying because we are in an age of extreme disinformation and sociopathic lust for power and money? Or are we in age of of extreme disinformation and sociopathic lust for power and money because newspapers are dying?
Back in the heyday of the papers in the mid-20th century, there was a more manageable amount of information, MSM was more truthful, the profit motive was not quite so sociopathic, and the spreaders of disinformation were far less sophisticated than today...the internet is a lot of fun, but for every fact there are a 100 fake facts, and figuring out the truth is a dubious game.
Regarding information and facts, as well as economics, we are entering a revival of the medieval period. The USA has already revived the Crusades against the Muslims. Most likely, due to overpopulation and our technological war against the environment, some kind of mass die-offs of humans, akin to the Black Death, will also occur, but on a larger scale. So welcome to the new medieval age.
Page one:
An evolving thought, rough around the edges...welcome your comments.
As our numbers increase we might see that, in part, simply ignoring, circumventing and/or shunning the unsustainable corporate state, rather than direct resistance, will accelerate the change we seek. The "establishment" has to spend an amazing amount of time and money keeping the vast majority contained in the fog of the idea that their world definition/narritive is the only one.
Walking around in groups, talking, even joking with each other (Russians did it to good effect) , networking, all help progress.
We read and share the works of T Hartmann, Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest), Lipton&Bhaermann (Spontaneous Evolution), and the many others who have helped clarify the issues.
The business form "corporation" is revealed as a central issue.
But, such a form can only arise and be maintained by a humanity that manifests itself as "not-part-of-Nature".
So, as much as we can, we make individual decisions, and support group decisions that Recognize Reality --- we are one with Nature. The non-natural cannot match that power. Nature is absolute.
The current maximum concentration of wealth and power may be seen as an effort by the non-natural to insulate themselves from that reality. It begs the application of direct opposition.
But wait....
The corporate state, etal, is the spawn of a race that still has some evolving to do.
The corporate state is something a clever, but immature, race would do.
Perhaps the massive concentration of power is Natural...humanity's battery being charged to the max to propel the leap to our next level. Much the same as the atmosphere being charged with heat and moisture to kick off climate change...as above, so below. Also Natural is the fact that it cannot stay this way for long...any more than a pendulum can hang at one end of its travel, or the cap of a pyramid remain suspended in thin air without its base under it....
You feel it. You have felt the tremors. You know what comes next.
Humanity, at one with our planet, is on the rise.
"Mankind will not cease to explore, but the end of all their exploring will be to arrive at where they began, and see the place for the first time." (by some English poet)
"The only things that work well are the things that work the way Nature works."
---Black Elk, in Black Elk Speaks, by Neihardt.
While Hedges is right that news reporting has declined, he's wrong to place the blame on the Internet replacing the newspapers. Hedges should be grateful that this is happening since very few major newspaper companies and hardly a local newspaper company would ever publish his enlightening articles that the public needs. There are four other points that I should briefly point out that Hedges fails to touch upon:
1. Printing newspapers isn't cheap, environmentally or economically. See my discussion with Alcyon under the article "Age of Distraction".
2. Newspapers often show a limited number of comments from people on the articles or the newspaper company itself whereas the Internet easily allows thousands of comments and replies in real time.
3. It has been said and correctly so on this site that other countries have successfully used the Internet to organize and fight against their governments drifting to the right. If they can do it, so can we.
4. While some online technologies such as Facebook and Twitter deserve all the blame for putting people into insecurity and ignorance, blaming all of the Internet or IT people is just plain wrong. Youtube has informative videos that can be progressively enlightening. Even progressive forums can be used as a powerful tool to enlighten and organize so that radical changes for the better can happen.
Point number two: Newspapers do print letters to the editor on a variety of subjects. But the practice varies considerably.
The state-wide paper I get has cut the number down considerably. These days, half of the page is an ad, and the other half usually has a column by a local "mover-and-shaker" on a topic of no interest to me. The rest of the page has letters, usually on one topic. So a lot of censoring (they would call it editing) goes into determining what kinds of opinions are expressed. One of the local papers I read will print two letters of reasonable length a month by any individual.
Both of these papers have an on-line edition, which allows us to comment on the letters printed, and as is the case on CD, sometimes a large number are posted. I don't read the on-line letters because I feel that if a person is not willing to put his name on something that most of the public is likely to see, I don't feel obligated to consider his opinion.
Another local paper, a weekly, will print as many as you send in. In that paper, people respond to other letters quite often - usually about either global warming, school tax issues, or the importance of posting the Ten Commandments in public venues.
I like to read the letters to the editor - I just wish the editors would ease up on their selection criteria and publish more of them.
Another insightful piece from The (good) Man.
Thank you, Sir.
Some of the magazines are still okay, I think Harper's is pretty good but newspapers... I used to read the Village Voice but I don't know if they're worth a damn anymore.
I think the worst part is that the Internet now serves as a massive pressure release valve in American politics. The outrages we've seen over the last decade are staggering and all that happens now is a lot of angry banging on keyboards. I doubt we'll see anything like the WTO riots before flies are buzzing around the heads of starving American children with swollen bellies.
The Internet has been a catastrophe for progressive politics in general, not just for big city newspapers.
Here's the headline I look forward to seeing:
New York Times, RIP
You could add the Washington Post and several others....
When I retired, nine years ago, I had to get the NY Times in the mail (rather than drive 45 minutes to the nearest place that sold it). The service was lousy at first, but improved in the last couple of years (I usually got it the day after it was published, and sometimes on the day of publication).
This year the Times started a home-delivery service in my county, which shocked me - shocked to think that enough people here read it that they would start the service. The county in which I live has no elected Democrats, at any level, and regardless of how you vote, if your great-grandparents did not settle here after the Civil War, you will never be considered as anything but an outsider.
Regardless of one's opinion of the paper's stance on issues, the fact that management thinks it worthwhile to expand their service here means that a gradual change in the area is happening. You may think it is a right-wing rag, but most of the people around here think of it as a left-wing rag. The book "Living Blue in a Red State" could have been written for my area.
Terrific thread! I would imagine that Hedges wrote this as much to 'goose' conversation as to mourn the passing of a familiar mode of information clarification.
It reveals the depth of conflation between notions about democracy, freedom, responsibility, compassion, economics, one's guiding principles, etc... and how one is permitted to 'live' or not. Even deeper, real community conversations are much more nuts and bolts of daily local life. That's the 'ethic' and fabric that has been spun out into the abstracts of 'topics' discussed by hallowed hall ivy 'experts'.
We live in a social construct where the experts attempt to ground the 'cloud' of abstract connections into oversized profit making answers (like nuclear etc.) from science that is largely speculative (thesis, antithesis, synthesis). Its backward. Traditional cultures draw on generations of wisdom connected to place, family, clan, astronomical, natural patterns. we've got it bass-ackward.
Another distinction that frequently fails to be made is the difference between 'science' and 'technology'. There used to be standard distinction between basic and applied sciences - corporate interests have conflated these as well.
We're nearly illiterate in many ways that have little to do with reading and everything to do with awakened, thinking, loving human beings. Life is lived in collaboration, great joy in choirs singing to choirs and preaching to the choir has a salutary resonance. Only when these are suppressed/oppressed does the fear, accumulation identity and competition become the norm (and hence the primary deity).
We have more than enough millennial science to apply technologies that would produce abundance for everyone, which would reduce reproduction pressures. The profit motive seems to be stuck in narcissism that needs to be removed from the center of universe. AUOHHMMM....
"A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact." –(Chris Hedges)
Hedges whistles in the graveyard with the chill wind of the past mocking, even parodying the quaint paeans to 'citizenship,' 'impartial information,' 'civic discourse,'and 'verifiable fact.' The writing does not have to be put on the wall any longer, as the era of political representation has come to an end.
There is no longer comfort even in the elegiac, for that too is mocked.
"I had a dream about realty. it was such a relief to wake up."
–(Stanislaw Lec)
The real problem with 'the news' and information has gone far beyond the depredations of hegemonic control by the oligarchy. It is a metaphysical one, resulting from the rapacious divestiture from 'realty' itself in modern society. Realty itself has been deregulated. Things have moved almost beyond the realms of what is true and what is false, masking politics impossible.
The purpose of 'journalism,' as a search for truth through critical thinking, no longer has the negative component at its disposal to energize it, since reality itself is being abolished by a radical positivism now made universal.
"If negativity is totally engulfed by the system, if there is no more work of the negative, positivity sabotages itself in its completion...and the work of the negative is replaced by an immense work of mourning,"
–(Jean Baudrillard)
Like Button :O).
Dear Mr. Hedges,
Do you think it might be possible to jump start just such a movement by starting to meet with other passionate, well-known bloggers and planning a march? If a critical mass of journalists and others called for a march, perhaps at least a few months out, so some of us can make arrangements for family care, etc., I would love to see the outcome.
It may have to be a widely shared sense of injustice. I was glad to see the cooperation of some notoriety for an environmental cause recently, and i would love to see this happen for an even larger cause, call it what you will.
I'll call it a democratic republic, and i'll hope to join you all in a march.
These are times like no other in modern memory. We are in a state of freefall. What shall we do? I haven't seen anything work yet to reverse this trend. The word "splat" seems appropriate.
"And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet."
That statement is not very helpful. The internet is a key component of the necessary alternative that must be implemented to maximize universal enlightenment, empowerment, equity and justice. We can do it without the internet but the internet substantially reduces the costs. To empower the people we have to cultivate global information exchange, grass-roots style, among other things. Universal enlightenment is first priority in empowering the people.
If Hedges wanted to, he could address this point. That he chose to address other points instead only means that for whatever reason, he failed to focus his attention on universal equity/justice. That so many people have thus far failed to do so largely explains why we have yet to achieve it.
Universal equity/justice is the basic feature of a maximally fulfilled society. Take it or leave it. Your choice.
The demise of the large corporate newspaper is chickens come home to roost.
At the behest of their corporate overlords, large corporate newspapers have always opposed a raise in the minimum wage, have always opposed Medicare for All, have always opposed taxes on the wealthy.
So guess what?! There is less disposable income for the rest of us!
Even though the country came out of the recession over a year ago, who gets all the benefits? I've had a wage freeze for 2 years, and Obamacare is costing me an extra 74 dollars per month this year. I choose to not subscribe to our local newspaper, except for the Sunday edition.
This country's large corporate newspapers are writing their own epitaph in their lousy rightwing editorials. So good riddance.
Bill in Dubuque
“hear ye! hear ye!” the town crier shouted!...
“straight from the horse’s mouth!”...
ears came to listen to accurate accounts missing...
for the north and east... and the west and south!...
“some news travels fast beyond raw happenstance...
onto propaganda’s fine rationalizing!...
they’ll blend true bits and pieces into selective ideas...
diluting real substance from newsworthy items!”...
“complete coverage ignores many worthwhile stories...
expanding detours to fill vacant gaps...
as the currents of mainstream still flow at their own rate...
giving bankroll terrain extra laps!”...
“they’ll leave you believing it’s pure info you’re reading...
though they actually mutate certain facts!...
they report situations through more inclinations...
as that news outlet’s slant gets attached!”...
“hear ye! hear ye!” the town crier shouted!...
“before they put words in my mouth!”...
“don’t rely on those views for so much of the news...
from the north and east... and the west and south!”...
(on a further note... had tried to post the above on the truthdig site last night and again today... but both the preview and post buttons there just kept redirecting me to "sorry... page not found" etc... anyway... had contacted them last night about this... though no reply back yet)... :)
(tried it again as an unregistered commenter... through my sally kline name... and also adding the following... but the same "sorry... page not found" etc still came up)...
((the following was just written yesterday after reading chris hedges’ article here... and it was specifically written as a thoughtful comment to the above particular article of his... was unable to post it in the same manner as had posted last week’s specifically written comments to his particular article back then))... :)
Damn few will relate to what you have written, Chris, but this one brought tears to the eyes of a 75-year old man who took the wrong turn in the road when faced with deciding on a career path for the rest of his life. It is the single biggest mistake of my life.
Thanks.
Newspapers have always been a for-profit business.
The major source of income for newspapers is advertising.
Advertisers need to reach customers with the sufficient discretionary income to purchase their products.
Sales to customers from advertising must at least pay for the cost of advertising. Without the increase of sales from advertising, there will be no advertising.
Thus, newspapers must necessarily focus the CONTENT of their newspapers to be of interest and importance to the potential consumers of the advertised products.
Thus newspapers become politically conservative, as their most valued readers. "Business" and "Money" sections, financial news, stock martket quotes, etc. ad nauseum are the major focus of all major newspapers.
Thus, the corporate owned for-profit print media is devoted to maintaining the economic system and politics to maintain and maximize their own profit and the profit and wealth maximization of their readers.
Thus, there is NOT A SINGLE MAJOR NEWSPAPER IN THE UNITED STATES THAT HAS A COLUMN, A PAGE, OR A SECTION DEVOTED TO THE ECONOMIC INTERESTS OF WORKING PEOPLE, TRADE UNION ORGANIZED OR UNORGANIZED WORKING PEOPLE.
Working people have no discretionary money to buy the expensive cars, real estate, etc. featured in the advertisements. Instead, the papers print comic pages and sports pages to further distract people from thinking that their personal economic crises are not in fact social problems shared by millions of other working people.
The fact is that most working people have no ECONOMIC reason to pay 75 cents a day to buy a newspaper.
Thus the circulation of newspapers have plummeted and become irrelevant to the mass of working people that perhaps decades ago found something of interest.
Several decades ago I remember the massive Sunday Los Angeles Times had one or two entire SECTIONS advertising JOBS and HELP WANTED. This was the major reason newspapers were of on-going interest to working people.
Today, WITH NO JOBS FOR THE MILLIONS OF UNEMPLOYED the free newspapers, the advertising throwaways, or reading the newspaper at the library (if one is still open close by), will suffice without throwing away 75 cents.
Newspapers will not change their "class bias" and even "class war" bias against working people as it might offend their advertisers. This class bias will not change even as the papers lose their advertisers who can no longer afford to pay for the expensive ads (especially with fewer responses from advertising) to reach a smaller and smaller audience of wealthy consumers.
"A newspaper is the lowest thing there is."
--Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley
Hey, if Mayor Daley hated them that much they couldn't have been all bad.
Other than Hedges' really poor choice of words when he refers to the "intellectual ghettos" of the internet (something like 'often overly time-consuming intellectual smorgasbord of mind-bogglingly dispersed good, bad, toxic and increasingly over-specialized news sites' would have been better), his article here is an eloquent requiem for great city newspapers and their cultural peak (between the late 1880s and the end of WWII & rise of TV) as much as it is for the vast armies of reporters they once fielded to cover so many more aspects of local news & culture in big cities than we now get in most cities.
The New York Times is laying off several hundred more reporters right now. While I loathe their foreign policy and economic betrayals, their city desk and cultural coverage of New York and many national cultural figures and developments of various kinds is still unmatched. I would love to have those aspects of my city and region covered even half so well.
Even if you hate the bias of this or that paper, the vast majority of original news reporting (as opposed to opinion writing) on ANY subject is generated by newspaper reporters. As that disappears there is nothing to replace that sheer number of full-time paid boots on the ground, time consumingly going to this or that place to find sources and ask questions and do follow-up digging. Investigative reporting demands even more time and effort and is all but dead in this country already. America will be increasingly blind to itself and will receive fewer and fewer timely heads-ups regarding a growing list of domestic crises.
Hey, if you've plenty of money, live elsewhere and believe "goddamn America and everyone in it," then you should rejoice at the death of great American newspapers. If you live here or don't live here but still care about the tens of millions of people in America who are just as victimized by its dominant subset of government/corporate ruling elite monsters as people in other countries targeted by that same demographic, then don't be too quick to scoff at the demise of newspapers and original newspaper reporting.
In 1900 there were over 40 DAILY competing newspapers in New York City in multiple languages. Journalism NEEDS local and intense competition, and reportorial and editorial diversity in medium and large cities--especially political and economic power centers. Why? Because the drive to "scoop" the competition--as once existed in cities with multiple competing daily newspapers--meant finding sources and angles (perspectives) on the story that other papers didn't have and getting them to press FAST.
With five (5) giant conglomerates controlling over 96% of the mass media now, and with newspapers dying, what passes for news in this country is a glorified Echo Chamber of Militarized Commerce that is clogged with neo-lib/neo-con duopoly opinion junk, delivers less and less original reporting, and is staffed by a hyper-atrophied number of "approved voices" who wheel and turn together on a pre-arrived consensus dime like a small flock of vultures.
My city of 6.5 million has ONE major daily: A lobotomized completely anti-labor shrimp compared to what it was 16 years ago when it used to win Pulitzer prizes on a regular basis covering government corruption, horrible living conditions for the city's poor, and expose a crooked business or government/business crony now and then. It's typical headline now is about building fancy new state-of-the-art entertainment rooms in your upper-middle-class house and cracking down on illegal aliens. Now it's just litter box liner when the neighbor has finished her crossword puzzle.
Writers, especially authentically liberal or progressive writers exist in large numbers in America. But they sure as hell most of them (myself included) can't find a full-time or even decent part-time paying job writing any kind of news in this country anymore. Almost as sad is the fact that left wing political cartoonists can't find paying jobs on newspapers anymore, either and the internet business models don't want to pay them but pennies for their work. Great political cartoons like TroubleTown are vanishing just when we need to be able to make fun of the ruling neo-liberal RepublicratBagger politicians more than ever.
The more voices shut out of American news the less diversity of reporting and editorial slant we will have. That is not a good thing no matter how the opponents of newspapers try to tart it up.
With the gradual disappearance of paper-papers, the public sphere - the 'Agora' / 'Forum' public meeting-place of the old Greek and Roman societies which our 'fora' build on - is eroding further. We're becoming compart-mental-ized into sitting before individual screens, as here, meeting less face to face with the full communication then taking place. With physical paper-papers we'd sit around tables, exchanging quick comments on the texts, sharing sighs and grunts, and sharing the paper itself. It's a more complete form of exchange.
The dangers of losing public spaces should be obvious: less and less specific common sense and sensing, more and more living in social bubbles. This makes us citizens more easily manipulated, whether that state arrives deliberately or not. By switching to electroning media we're all part of the 'conspiracy' to reduce the commonly felt sense of being, the societal consensus.
We might demand that the internet and other electronic "social" (actually pretty anti-social) media be used for huge, globe-spanning ritual events of coming together. Like big sports-events or free rock-concerts, only with more varied and interacting participatory content: singing, chanting, listening to poetry and declarations, global festivals of being human beings disseminated over the net, e.g. with huge screens erected in parks and public venues in every town around and other public programmes minimized at the time to encourage everone to come out.
It could be a program stretching over a full summer day (most of humans live in the landmasses of the northern hemisphere) focussed on what we most want to think about together, interspersed with music, meditations, announcements and - yes - news-presentations of new, important human developments. Ah yes, a global party and happening celebrating what we most cherish about being alive together - and simultanously discovering more about it, deliberately developing and refining our experience of being a grand tribe of one species. (Alcohol de-recommended or minimized in availability, other intoxicants used ritually and with good instructions - as there's no way such an event could be outright 'sober'. Better to guide use of intoxicants than to fail to ban it, with the usual havoc in the corners that precipitates).
- Good dream, yes?
Thus the Agora / Forum for the One Society we humans are growing into could be reestablished on a deliberately global scale.
I think what you suggest moves the relatively elite class of human beings around the world who have internet access (which is still a minority of humanity) deeper into virtual reality, which is not reality no matter how real it looks or sounds. People can't handle too much sensory overload from too many inputs, either. New England town hall meetings or community or neighborhood meetings of a similar size allow people to get out their cubicles and computer niches and see and physically greet one another in person and listen to each other's comments in person and that is truly human social activity.
Hedges belongs on the porch in his rocking chair, as he "hedges" away in increasing irrelevancy. give it up pops.
A letter I just wrote the Star and Tribune as the MN state government is now shutdown:
The corporate media is as much to "blame" for the shutdown as the GOP, the unions who did not lead and work with other groups, the Democrats who didn't lead and treat some of us as second-class citizens and the professional poverty industry. They followed every red herring story and continue to this day to not explain that the budget is NOT the problem. The budget is a symptom; the disease is money in politics and corporations who would GUT THIS STATE as quickly and cheaply as they possibly can and to hell with anyone who gets in their way. Corporate tyranny via the Koch brothers, American Legislative Exchange, Grover Norquist, Tony Sutton and a host of right-wingers have "played" this state and they are winning. To have not ONE legislator complain loud and long about the furloughing and retirements on SHUTDOWN DAY, the 30th, should tell the entire story. They are still being PAID. Get that? Still being paid and taking PAC money. Our message was not "Tax the Rich" - but "MONEY OUTTA POLITICS", "Thank you Mark Dayton" and "36,000 good reasons to STOP A SHUTDOWN" which we spread all over the known Universe. Only the MN media isn't hearing us. Will it ever? We doubt it. Enjoy your Saabs and Volvos guys while people begin a starvation diet. You deserve the pink slips we handed out .. "You're fired!" which you absolutely REFUSED to report on. We're going to keep handing them out while asking continually, "WHY ARE LEGISLATORS BEING PAID on a holiday weekend this sad? and every single weekend thereafter until the SHUTDOWN stops. While you are WASTING taxpayer dollars bickering about which sector of the US population will have to do without, so you can sell more newspapers, build more bombs, fight more wars, give 6 billions a 7.7% tax rate while I pay 22.1% on $8,200 per year, bail out banks and flex your flacid, arrogant muscles - the rest of us will try to find jobs, try to keep our homes, pay over $4 for gas and skip lunch, PRAYING we don't get sick .... Shame on you all who had a hand in this. Real cuts hurt real people. www.usuncutmnblogspot.com
I haven't bot a newspaper for more than 15 yrs and I'm more up to date than ever.
Now I get my info from TV -- al jazeera, the BBC, CBC, PBS (for the US view) and a number of reliable websites such as Intl Socialist Review, WSWS, Monthly Review, Counterpunch and a few others, plus the articles of experts on politics such as Fisk, Pilger, Chomsky, Parenti, Blum, Michael Green and others including Chris Hedges.
That's all I need -- good ridance to the propagandists.
JJR