[Peace-discuss] My [McChesney's] new book: The Death and Life of American Journalism

Thu Jan 14 22:18:38 CST 2010

[This reminds me to renew my subscription to the Anderson Valley Advertiser
<http://theava.com/>.  I sometimes think we could use such a paper around here - 
something like the old Octopus.  But maybe the US media world has changed too 
much. Local papers have been co-opted just as other local media (radio, TV) have 
been. --CGE]

	Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?
	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 the beautiful 
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. 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, Hecht and Liebling loved newspapers, 
but the portentous claims for their indispensable role would have made them hoot 
with derision, as 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 profs at journalism schools or the jurors and "boards" 
servicing the racket known as the Pulitzer industry.
click here
What the publishers were after was a 20 percent 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, Calif., is the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a 
weekly edited by my friend Bruce Anderson. I've written a column for it for over 
20 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.

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 25 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, too. The Chronicle no longer serves any 
function. It's a museum running reprints of Herb Caen and Art Hoppe."

Does this not remind you of a paper near you? Weep not for all of yesterday's 
papers, for the old Fourth Estate. The ones that deserve to will make it through 
— vagabonds and outlaws.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking 
newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of 
Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through 
www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read 
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web 
page at www.creators.com.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/alexander-cockburn/who-needs-yesterday-s-papers.html

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