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

[C. G. Estabrook]

The conclusion of this amiable and articulate article amongst the general 
lamentation for newspapers' desuetude ("Asleep, my love? / What, dead, my 
dove?") is that we need better newspapers.  Of course, we need better media in 
general - outlets that are not simply large business corporations, which are 
parts of even larger business corporations.  Instead, we need "vagabonds and 
outlaws." All the great spirits of modern Western journalism - from Erasmus to 
Marx to I. F. Stone (to mention only the departed) have been refugees, 
unclubbable and even occasionally sour.

It was Joseph Pulitzer, of all people, who said, "Newspapers should have no 
friends.” Pimps pretend they're friends, as the corporate owners of newspapers 
do.  But true outlaws should be wary of such interested friends.  Cockburn and 
his co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair set out in detail what happens to the press with 
friends like that in "End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate" (AK Press, 2006)

Cockburn is the son of the British I. F. Stone, Claud Cockburn, whose books 
(including his wonderful autobiography, "I, Claud") give an unparalleled picture 
of  20th c. journalism.  And Cockburn fils has been writing knowledgeably & 
insightfully about the US press for 35 years, to my certain knowledge: I began 
reading his "Press Clips" column in the old Village Voice in the mid-1970s.

But you're right, of course, that it's easy to take pot-shots at Nichols: he was 
the one who wrote in The Nation that Obama's Nobel speech was "an exceptionally 
well-reasoned and appropriately humble address" delivered with "a grace that was 
as appealing as it was commendable.”  As the reports come in of US Special 
Forces rousting children from their beds, handcuffing them and murdering them 
("suspected terrorists") in Afghanistan, the liberal American press is still 
able to praise the charming blood-stained monster Obama has become.

In answer to your last question, the NYT is the only game in town: all of the 
"straight" press (as we used to say) says the same thing (e.g., there's been no 
general circulation socialist paper in the US since WWII), and they take their 
marching orders from the NYT, to which I do subscribe; I also subscribe to (and 
read first) the Financial Times - much better than the NYT (the business press 
is better than "political" papers like the NYT and the WaPo because the business 
elite need to know what's really going on, not the propaganda cover) - and read 
others, domestic & foreign, online.

A friend of mine in college said that, on Sunday mornings, "I read the New York 
Times to find out what I think" ("...and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny 
chair"?). He knew at least what he was supposed to do.

I also do a local public television show (7pm Fridays on ch. 6) called "News 
from Neptune" and devoted to "the news of the week and its coverage by the 
media." It welcomes "vagabonds and outlaws." Is that constructive?

The best will in the world can do the right thing (be constructive?) only by 
accident, in the absence of an accurate analysis of the situation. (And frenetic 
demand for constructively puts me in mind of Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book.)

Cockburn's strikes me as the more accurate analysis of the situation in regard 
to newspapers: "By and large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have — 
often rabidly — obstructed and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and 
political condition."

Regards, CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> It is not clear what the conclusion of this sappy sour article is: Would we
> all be better off if newspapers disappeared? Or, if only the major ones like
> the NYT disappeared? Or should we only support newspapers we like? Or only
> those who report on local affairs? In short, this articles doesn't lead
> anywhere constructive, except to deride the present state of much of our news
> media (which is hardly constructive). I suppose one conclusion is that not
> much would be lost if newspapers disappeared (except that Cockburn does favor
> his local paper). The only object seems to be to take pot shots at McChesney
> and Nichols, which, especially for the latter, is too easy.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> P.S. Carl, do you subscribe to the NYT or any other major news sheet? Why?
> 
> On Jan 14, 2010, at 10:18 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> [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. 
>> 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.
>> 
>> COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
>> 
>> http://www.creators.com/opinion/alexander-cockburn/who-needs-yesterday-s-papers.html

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