[Peace-discuss] Good riddance to newspapers

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It seems to me that Alex Cockburn, co-editor of the online (and hardcopy) 
newsletter CounterPunch, has got it right, amidst all he hand-wringing over the 
death of newspapers.]

	CounterPunch Diary
	Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I read the anguished valedictories to our sinking newspaper industry, the calls 
for some sort of government bailout or subsidy, with mounting incredulity. It’s 
like hearing the witches in Macbeth evoked as if they were Aphrodite and her 
rivals vying for the judgment of Paris. Sonorous phrases about “public service” 
mingle with fearful yelps about the “dramatically diminished version of 
democracy” that looms over America if the old corporate print press goes the way 
of the steam engine.

In The Nation recently John Nichols and Robert McChesney quavered that “as 
journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of 
our civic life go dark” and that “journalism is collapsing, and with it comes 
the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law 
as it has been understood here in the United States.”

I came to America in 1973 to the Village Voice, which Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and 
Norman Mailer founded in 1955 to bring light to those whole sectors of civic 
life kept in darkness by the major newspapers of the day, starting with the New 
York Times. As a tot I’d been given bracing tutorials about the paradigms of 
journalism and class power by my father, Claud, who’d founded his newsletter The 
Week in the 1930s as counterbalance to the awful mainstream coverage in those 
years. From Europe, I’d already been writing for Kopkind and Ridgeway’s Hard 
Times and also for Ramparts, respectively a newsletter and a monthly 
founded—like much of the old underground press—to compensate for the ghastly 
mainstream coverage of the upheavals of the ’60s and the Vietnam war.

In other words, any exacting assessment of the actual performance of newspapers 
rated against the twaddle about the role of the Fourth Estate spouted by 
publishers and editors at their annual conventions would issue a negative 
verdict in every era. Of course there have been moments when a newspaper or a 
reporter could make fair claims to have done a decent job, inevitably eradicated 
by a panicky proprietor, a change in ownership, advertiser pressure, eviction of 
some protective editor or summary firing of the enterprising reporter. By and 
large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have—often rabidly—obstructed 
and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and political condition.

In an earlier time writers like Mencken and Hecht and Liebling loved their 
newspapers, but the portentous claims for their indispensable role would have 
made them hoot with derision, as they did the columnist Bernard Levin, decrying 
in the London Times at the start of the 1980s the notion of a “responsible 
press”: “we are, and must remain, vagabonds and outlaws, for only by so 
remaining shall we be able to keep the faith by which we live, which is the 
pursuit of knowledge that others would like unpursued and the making of comment 
that others would prefer unmade.”

But of course most publishers and journalists are not vagabonds and outlaws, any 
more than are the professors at journalism schools or the jurors and “boards” 
servicing the racket known as the Pulitzer industry. What the publishers were 
after was a 20 per cent rate of return, a desire that prompts great respect for 
“the rule of law,” if such laws assist in the achievement of that goal. In 1970 
this meant coercing Congress to pass the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, 
exempting newspapers from antitrust sanctions against price-fixing in a given 
market. Nixon signed the law and was duly rewarded with profuse editorial 
endorsements in 1972.

The early and mid-1970s saw a brief flare-up of investigative zeal, but not long 
after Nixon had been sent packing, Katharine Graham, boss of the Washington Post 
Company, used the occasion of the annual meeting of the Newspaper Publishers 
Association to issue a public warning to reporters not to get any uppity ideas 
about shining too intrusive a searchlight on the way the system works: “The 
press these days should…be rather careful about its role.… We had better not 
yield to the temptation to…see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” 
Who wanted ugly talk about conspiracy and cover-up when there were broadcasting 
licenses to be OK’d by the FCC, postage rates to be rewritten and laws to be 
drafted such as communications “reform” in 1996.

South of me in Mendocino County, California, is the Anderson Valley Advertiser, 
a weekly edited by my friend Bruce Anderson. I’ve written a column for it for 
over twenty years. The AVA does everything a newspaper should do. It covers the 
county board of supervisors, the court system, the cops, water issues, the 
marijuana industry. It’s fun to read and reminds people of what a real newspaper 
should be, which is why half its circulation is outside the county, often the 
other end of the United States. The AVA lives resolutely up to the injunction by 
Joseph Pulitzer it carries on its masthead, “A newspaper should have no friends.”

I asked Bruce about proposed bailouts of the mainstream press: “Do you like 
these bailout ideas?” “No I don’t. I don’t even want them to rest in peace. I 
want them to twist and turn in their graves eternally. Why? They don’t do any 
local reporting and haven’t for about twenty-five years. I’m talking here about 
the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, owned by the New York Times Company, and the San 
Francisco Chronicle.

With the drought upon us here on North Coast the Press Democrat has yet to run a 
coherent account of how precarious our water supplies and delivery systems are. 
Why? They might get objections from the building industry and the wine industry 
on which they’re almost totally dependent for advertising these days.

“They don’t cover the way the place is run and for whom it’s run. That is, the 
board of supervisors, the boards of education, the water districts—all of which 
we regularly cover with a staff of two. The Chronicle no longer serves any 
function. It’s a museum running reprints of Herb Caen and Art Hoppe.”

Does this remind you of a paper near you? Weep not for yesterday’s papers, for 
the old Fourth Estate. At every critical hour, in every decade, it failed us. 
And yet they do weep. It’s like the dogs in Konrad Lorenz’s book running up and 
down either side of the fence, barking at each other. One day they take the 
fence down and after a moment’s bewilderment the dogs continue as before. The 
other night I watched Bill Ayers at some bookstore being filmed by CSPAN. He was 
asked what he thought about the press. Ha! I said to myself, here’s a fine 
opportunity for the Terrorist Ayers to throw some bombs, hail the rise of the 
internet and the opportunity for millions to read a fact-filled radical website 
like CounterPunch. Come on, Bill, greet the new day. But no, Ayers said that he 
liked to settle down at the breakfast table with the New York Times and The 
Nation and have his daily little bicker with them. Bark, bark, bark. It adds up 
to what Mark Ames, featured today on our site, just referred in an email to me 
as that   “inexplicable cowardice that everyone here in print is infected with. 
Jesus, they don't even shoot or club people here like they do in Russia, [where 
Ames founded the splendid Exile] and still they exercise more freedom, take more 
risks there in print than they do here.”

Comrade Ayers, that’s not your lifelong partner New York Times the other side of 
the fence. That’s the graveyard. So much for the so-called Left. Without the New 
York Times, the Federal Reserve, the public school system, the Fundamentaists 
and the IRS to yap at, they’d be lost. Two years ago Jeffrey St Clair and I 
wrote "End Times (a fine title lifted by Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in a recent 
visit to the New York Times, where editor Bill Keller said his paper provides 
the news its readers “ought” to know) – The Death of the Fourth Estate." At its 
start we evoked the old world of a mass, semi-organized left in America: of 
pamphlets and mimeographed leaflets; of last minute  rushes to the print shop; 
of inky proofs and galleys; all now as distant as a hot-metal linotype machine. 
Back in the dawn off the nuclear disarmament movement in the Fifties and 
Sixties, I thought it  a good day’s work when we  stood outside a U.S.A.F./ 
R.A.F. base at Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire,  handing out leaflets and got maybe 
50 service people to take one, as they drove in and out. These days, at the end 
of each month here, at CounterPunch, we can look at the daily breakdown of our 3 
million or so hits, 300,000 page views and 100,000 unique visitors and see that 
we’ve had some 15,000 regular readers on U.S. military bases around the world.

In the David vs. Goliath struggle of the left pamphleteers battling the vast 
print combines of the news barons the tide has turned. On a laptop’s twelve-inch 
screen we stand as high as Punch Sulzberger, or Rupert Murdoch. Twenty years ago 
the Los Angeles Times was a mighty power. The owners of the Knight Ridder chain 
complacently counted on a 20 per cent-plus   rate of return on their properties. 
Today the L.A. Times totters from one cost-cut and forced employee retirement to 
the next. Knight Ridder’s papers of high reputation went on the auction block. 
Will the broadsheets and tabloids vanish entirely? Not in the foreseeable 
future, any more than trains disappeared at the end of the railway age. A mature 
industry will yield income and attract investors interested in money or power 
long after its glory days are over. But it’s a world in decline, and a 
propaganda system in decline.

The left is so used to being underdogged that it is often incapable of  looking 
a gift horse, meaning a dead horse, in the mouth and greeting good fortune when 
it knocks on the door. Thirty years ago, to find out what was happening in Gaza, 
you would have to have had a decent short-wave radio, a fax machine, or access 
to those great newsstands in Times Square and North Hollywood that carried the 
world’s press. Not any more. We can get a news story from a CounterPuncher in 
Gaza or Ramallah or Oaxaca or Vidharba and have it out to a world audience in a 
matter of hours.

Yes, of course the state doesn’t like the loosening of control; of course it 
could start policing the net more heavily and subsequently take sites down more 
often. Costs of access could shoot up. All of these could happen and, absent 
resistance, may well happen. But right now, as so often amid “end times,” there 
are new times to be explored and turned to advantage of radicals.

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