Chris Hedges: Gone With the Papers

[babylonsister]

Gone With the Papers
Posted on Jun 27, 2011

By Chris Hedges

snip//

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.

more...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/gone_with_the_papers_20110627/?ln

[ananda]

1. Something I heard yesterday.

"For a person to know, they have to be willing to know."

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. "Our political apparatus and systems of information have been... taken hostage by corporations"

he says in the article.

One of the most articulate, insightful truthtellers we have left, is Mr. Hedges.

[babylonsister]

3. And he sure can write; I envy that. Very articulate. nt

[Overseas]

4. So true. So sad.

[starroute]

5. This seems half-true at best and highly romanticized at worst

Big city newspapers have always been owned by the wealthy and have promoted the interests of their friends and their advertisers. That's simply the way it was -- you needed a large infusion of capital up front to buy those fancy high-speed presses and hire a hundred people, and then you needed ad revenue to keep things going. But the result is that a paper like the New York Times, for all its pretensions, has always shamelessly slanted its coverage towards the monied interests.

Newspapers haven't been all that accurate either. Hedges writes, "Traditionally, if a reporter goes out and reports on an event, the information is usually trustworthy and accurate." But my own experience has been that when a reporter shows up to report on an event of which they have no first-hand knowledge, the result is likely to be slanted, partial, and contain at least one or two major whoppers. And this is true of everything from anti-war demonstrations to science fiction conventions, so it's not just a matter of political bias. It's more the reporters' tendency to think of themselves as insiders and of everyone else as strange native tribes whose doings are to be treated as a matter of entertainment for their readers.

The one place Hedges does have it right is that when newspapers were at their peak, they were willing to pay for reporters to just sniff around, hunt for leads, ask the shoeshine boy on the corner for tips, and do anything they could think of to come up with a story to scoop the competition. But I'm not even sure how long that ideal model prevailed -- certainly the Twenties were marked more by the Sunday supplement sensationalism of the Hearst papers or the even more lurid sex scandals favored by the Daily Graphic.

So probably that classic model was at its peak only during the Thirties and Forties, like so much else in our society. Certainly, by the time I was a kid in the Fifties, people were getting their breaking news from radio or TV -- then picking up the evening paper for more details -- and you never saw newsboys out on the corner yelling "Wuxtry, wuxtry, read all about it." There were still something like a dozen papers in New York City then -- down from maybe seventeen a couple of decades earlier -- but they were already losing that hyper-competitive edge.

On balance, I think the answer is not to bring back the obsolete business model of the large metropolitan dailies, but to figure out what was best about them and how to replicate it. The core of what Hedges is talking about has to do with there being people whose income depends on looking for trouble -- and who also have sufficient institutional backup to protect them from retaliation if they find it.

That was a very delicate balance, and not one that can be easily replicated. The salaries of all those crack reporters, after all, were paid for by stuff that is far more efficiently done online -- sports statistics, stock market charts, classified ads, comic strips, even astrological forecasts. So the real question becomes one of how you can maintain serious local journalism financially, and in what medium, without either falling under corporate control or being reduced to the level of part-time blogging.

[provis99]

9. this post deserves to be an OP in its own right.

[Demeter]

6. Aside from Local News, I Get What I Need and Want from the Internet

Granted, the best articles come from overseas journalists, half the time. But there are freelancing bloggers with a finger on the pulse of reality.

[Uncle Joe]

7. The Internet is the new town square and the people aren't "retreating" so much as they're reforming.

Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.

[Doctor_J]

8. Making lying a crime would help a great deal

When Michelle Bachmann declares that the president "depleted all of the oil reserves", when in fact the number was 5%, she should be charged with slander. Then invoke "3 strikes" statutes, and after a month most of the hate radio, Cable "News", and Repuke pundits & politicians would be in federal prison, keeping house for drug lords.