Networks or Newspapers; Dewey or Lippmann?
I’m grateful for Eric Alterman’s long meditation on the future of newspapers, if only because he correctly balances a discussion of Walter Lippmann–who has rather bizarrely been adopted as the patron saint of American journalism–with John Dewey–who would in that formulation be the patron saint of blogging.
Lippmann likened the average American—or “outsider,” as he tellingly named him—to a “deaf spectator in the back row” at a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that “is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.” A committed élitist, Lippmann did not see why anyone should find these conclusions shocking. Average citizens are hardly expected to master particle physics or post-structuralism. Why should we expect them to understand the politics of Congress, much less that of the Middle East?
Lippmann’s preferred solution was, in essence, to junk democracy entirely. He justified this by arguing that the results were what mattered. Even “if there were a prospect” that people could become sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered.” In his first attempt to consider the issue, in “Liberty and the News” (1920), Lippmann suggested addressing the problem by raising the status of journalism to that of more respected professions. Two years later, in “Public Opinion,” he concluded that journalism could never solve the problem merely by “acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours.” Instead, in one of the oddest formulations of his long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.
John Dewey termed “Public Opinion” “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned,” and he spent much of the next five years countering it. The result, published in 1927, was an extremely tendentious, dense, yet important book, titled “The Public and Its Problems.” Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding journalism’s flaws or the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. But Dewey thought that Lippmann’s cure was worse than the disease. While Lippmann viewed public opinion as little more than the sum of the views of each individual, much like a poll, Dewey saw it more like a focus group. The foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy—the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.
Dewey also criticized Lippmann’s trust in knowledge-based élites. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”
Recent celebrations of Lippmann’s appeal to objectivity have ignored the need and tradition of a dialectic between Lippmann’s institutionalized public and Dewey’s conversation, not to mention ignoring Lippmann’s profoundly undemocratic later stances. Alterman’s description here provides a valuable historic lesson on these two seminal thinkers.
But I came away with the sense that Alterman doesn’t quite get how that dialectic between Lippmann and Dewey works. That’s partly because while Alterman admits that a more partisan press leads to a more engaged citizenry…
The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.
…He simply doesn’t consider the tremendous importance of such a development. I’ve had great journalists dismiss the notion that if journalism doesn’t result in an engaged citizenry, it has failed in an important respect. While Alterman doesn’t go that far, his silence on the importance of heightened political engagement is telling.
Alterman also betrays an insufficient understanding of a Deweyan conversation when he labels the mono-vocal rants of an O’Reilly or a Limbaugh as the first blossoming of Dewey’s conversations.
The rise of what has come to be known as the conservative “counter-establishment” and, later, of media phenomena such as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O’Reilly, on cable television, can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like élite.
Limbaugh may welcome callers to his show, but he’ll cut the mike of anyone who dares disagree with him–or even deviate from Limbaugh’s chosen narrative. And to suggest the corporate funded conservative media–complete with its designated elites at the Weekly Standard and well-funded think tanks–does not follow Lippmann’s model of manufacturing and managing public opinion rather than conversing with it ignores the entire structure and history of the conservative media.
But the point where I got really exasperated with Alterman’s depiction of the blogosphere came when he claimed there was no match for Dana Priest in the blogosphere.
It is hard to name any bloggers who can match the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the Post ’s Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin.
Don’t get me wrong–I think Dana Priest is by far one of the best reporters out there; she contributes both deep expertise and a real ethic of journalism to produce important work. [Incidentally, Dexter Filkins? Couldn’t Alterman come up with a better example of a superlative NYT journalist?] But it just so happens I’ve been struggling to get a grasp on the Basra offensive since I’ve come back from vacation, and so turned immediately to Colonel Pat Lang to read what he had to say. And though Lang usually engages in the kind of "parasitic" blogging Alterman describes (riffing on press accounts rather than doing original journalism), and though Lang’s acerbic commentary lacks all of Priest’s balance and moderation, I’d pit Lang’s expertise–knowledge of the military and intelligence–against Priest’s any day. Oh–and he reads Arabic, which is a pretty big plus. And Lang is just one of the many experts who inhabit the blogosphere, participating firsthand in a conversation with citizens, explaining to those wearing the ill-fitting shoes why their feet hurt.
Similarly, Alterman mourns traditional reporting on the effect of violence on Kenya’s middle class, but fails to note that some of the best reporting from crisis areas–most recently, Myanmar and Tibet–has come from ordinary people posting to blogs.
Obviously, what Dana Priest does is very different from what Pat Lang does. But in the absence of voices like Lang’s engaging in unmediated conversation with real citizens, in a world where David Broder is seriously labeled as the Dean of anything worthwhile (as Alterman does), our country has gone badly and dangerously wrong. It makes no sense to mourn the financial demise of dead tree newspapers without recognizing that, without an engaged citizenry, Dana Priest’s best reporting might drop silently from the nation’s consciousness.
We need both a viable press and an engaged citizenry. And for all the woes of the newspaper business, I think our citizenry remains the more fragile institution.
Tangent:
I’m pretty sure that many of Limbaugh’s listeners know he’s jerking them around, but stick with him because they’re comforted by his angry tirades. Still, those listeners, and everybody else, don’t want to be handed a pile of BS on, say, which car purchase won’t let them down, or which insurance policy or credit card, or cell phone deal isn’t a rip. This is at least one area where Progressives have an edge. People want the truth on consumer affairs, and that might be enough to drive audiences to Progressive consumer oriented blogosphere for consumer news, which can’t be divorced from policy news.
Get people focused on their wallets, and not on gay marriage.
Lippmann was the voice of what we would today call “corporate media”, as far removed from journalism as NutraSweet is from brown sugar. Like Cheney, he didn’t want “the public” to participate in government; he wanted it to silently obey. The ignorance promoted by corporate media, not the forbidden fruit of journalism, promotes that goal.
His complaint that “the public” were dullards, unable to contemplate particle physics or the politics of the Middle East (or Alabama) is only half right: many CongressCritters and political appointees are equally ignorant.
Journalism is sometimes legitimately just the facts, like the number of dead in Burma, Tibet or Iraq. It’s more valuable when it confirms facts and puts them in context. Corporate media are increasingly loathe to do that. Fortunately, citizen journalists can be especially good at doing it.
This blog sets a stellar example at putting facts into their proper context. Like putting strong enough reading glasses on a chess player, it allows the reader to see where that might logically lead us, and gives us a voice through which to agree or disagree with that direction.
That’s what most frightens the Lippmanns and Cheneys. Informed citizens, like Iraqi voters, can’t always be relied upon to silently obey.
I have been a newspaper reader my entire life. For years, whenever my wife or I traveled, we would bring each other the local paper. We especially enjoyed papers from small towns. Over the last 20 years there has been a steady decline in the quality of information in the paper. Editors and publishers must think their audience is the people who get their news from cable TV. Even the august NYT has huge sections on things no reasonable person would give a rat’s behind about: the style section reads like an upscale version of People magazine: witness this: on the town with the Dukes of Hazzard. Or this, a 10 year retrospective on Viagra in the Week in Review, featuring this gem:
I quit reading the Tennessean in 2000 because the coverage of Al Gore was so aggressively right wing, and get local news from a small commuter paper, one of those 20 minute read things.
Newspapers are failing exactly because they don’t fill any need. They offer nothing to the to people who really care in the way of actual news. They require spending money and actual reading, thus losing the cable news crowd, which hates them for their liberal bias anywary. Most of the hard-working middle class comes home exhausted and long ago lost the habit of reading the paper. Who is left?
I think Lippmann purposely confused ignorance with stupidity. Ignorance, not knowing facts or how to arrange them, is curable through learning. Stupidity, being unable to learn the facts or profit from knowing them, is terminal. Come up with your own punch lines about which category best fits George Bush.
Main Street, Wall Street, and both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have their dullards as well as their whiz kids. Most citizens and all whiz kids are ignorant of many things. What they share is an ability to learn and make judgments. They both know what’s important to them. What citizens lack is knowing how what Wall Street or government does will affect what’s important to them.
The job of corporate media is to preserve that ignorance. Journalism’s job is to expel it from the Garden.
Your example of Pat Lang as representative of the blogosphere at its best is perfect. While one can imagine a print or broadcast journalist having the sort of expertise that Lang does, one can’t imagine a newspaper of TV network of recent years in which such a figure’s expertise could be relayed to his or her audience with comparable directness and honesty. (Even Dana Priest often seems to be writing as though she felt a gun were being pointed at her head; the greatest practical constraint in her medium is access to the readers — in terms of whether your story gets in at all and also in terms of how it’s placed.) The reason for this is basically that the newspapers and networks themselves have become “candidates,” and everything they print and broadcast must be filtered through their sense of the image they want to project and defend to their audience and to the forces in government that they wish to/need to deal with on a regular basis. Col. Lang — and he is far from alone in this regard in the blogosphere — couldn’t give a fig about such matters. Take away his blog from Col. Lang (or Marcy’s from Marcy), and they’d still be essentially who they are. Take way the NY Times from Maureen Dowd or NBC News from Tim Russert, and I think that in very short order they’d be nobodies. And by that I don’t mean that they’re without talent (though they certainly are challenged in that regard) but that they’re corrupted by their near-total engagement with/reliance upon the needs and constraints of their mediums’ life as mediums. Direct, honest speech to us, if they were still capable of it, cannot for that reason pass their lips.
Good analogies with MoDo and Russert. Both have morphed from “reporters” to “opioners”: instead of facts and context, they give us catch-phrases, gotcha questions and snark. They are Victorian actors stuck in a single, profitable role that they play over and over. They are like Shakespearean actors doing commercials because it pays the bills and pads the portfolio. Russert, for example, brags about coming from Buffalo; yea, and he used to be thin and broke, too. He’d never go back to either.
In addition a lot of the corporate media are in on it. Neocons to the core or just plain old rethugs. Give somebody 5 million a year might make them a rethug like Russert. Speaking of which when was he actually a journalist. Jack Welch destroyed the old MTP format and installed him as moderator. He acts just like an attorney at a deposition working on adversaries (dems) and making his clients ( rethugs ) look good. Oh he is an attorney, go figure.
The following list highlights some interesting connections in the DC Media village.
Washington Star Alumni
All of these “journalists” (insert sarcasm) have gone on to bigger and better things in Rove’s Math equations.
Now, is this Lippman or Dewey? Hmmmmmmmmm
Marcy et al
My sister who reads here regularly pointed this column out to me. I do not think of myself as a journalist. In the language of the day, I would represent myself as a “concened citizen.”
I write commentary, usually based on the reporting of others. I do not have a newspaper or media outlet to support travel to Iraq or many other places and so I have no other way to receive the material on which I comment. An exception to that would be the frequent correspondence I receive from “volunteers” in the field. If that is “parasitic” then I plead “guilty.”
I am surprised to see that my comments are thought to lack “moderation.” Perhaps it does, but if the performance of the MSM is “moderate” then I would not wish to be so.
The conformist behavior of many in the news media is truly reprehensible. “Self-serving” is the best that can be said of it. I have had the luxury of several lives crammed into one. Perhaps journalism is too important to be left to the journalists. Pat Lang
Col. Lang
Honored you stopped by–and I’m happy to hear you call yourself a “concerned citizen” rather than journalist. I rather think that’s what we’re all doing in the blogosphere–reviving the lost art of citizenry.
I’m just grateful that some of the participants offer the depth of experience that you do, and are willing to share it.
It’s a pleasure to see you here, Colonel Lang, virtually speaking, of course. Thank you for taking the time to comment, & thank you so much for the work you do on your own blog.
Most of all, may I express my gratitude for all your years of service to our country.
That’s where my toe stubs too. What Alterman is missing is that Dewey grasped and cared about the basic principles and structures of democracy (see your Bill of Rights, eg), which are not the same thing as sheer populism and certainly amount to more than just voting, necessary if not sufficient condition though voting is. One difference between Dewey and Lippmann is that Dewey obviously shared the Enlightenment belief that all citizens, taught to read, given a chance to think about history and to remain well informed, would be strongly committed to those principles and pretty well capable of defending and administering them without forever handing them over to elites.
And in reaction to Alterman’s characterization of “parasitic” blogging, I think that this from eoh @ 2 is important:
There are, eg, a lot of foreign correspondents out there (although fewer than there used to be) shovelling the facts at us. Most of them are very brave, and some of them become immensely wise through experience. But more of them are just shovelling the facts, or worse, the propaganda. It takes alert citizens to process the data dumps much of the time; that’s promising, not parasitic, imo.
I get very frustrated with people who equate the conservative media and the (increasingly dominated by liberal) blogosphere. Such equations ignore the structure of the media in question. Furthermore, I think there’s an impulse to equate the two so there is a political balance: conservative talk radio and liberal blogosphere.
But that ignores that what is liberal about the blogosphere is both political (that is, Democratic) and philosophical (that is, espousing the belief that rationality and debate result in better judgment). It is not a mistake that (neo)conservatives have fared poorly over the long term in the blogosphere–I believe it has everything to do with an incompatible philosophy.
What I hear from Lippmanites, at its most charitable, is that they are all in favour of journalistic democracy, what they are afraid of is journalistic anarchy. That somehow, the people must be protected from dangerous and unreliable ideas and publications. Well, “Concern trolls” have not been a creature of the blogosphere, they have been around forever. There have been variants on this theme of authorized discourse since the rise of literacy among the middle classes during the late middle ages threatened the monopoly that the Church had over religious and philosophical discourse – if only priests and monks could read and write, every dispute would be resolved in house. When the printing press came along and made books available at least to the middle class, and pamphlets available to all who could read or be read to, the Reformation and then the Enlightenment resulted. What scares the established media is a medium like the Internet where every voice is POTENTIALLY equal transforming into a situation where everyone’s voice is ACTUALLY equal, at least in the ability to reach the same number of readers through the same medium. This is not something to be concerned about, rather applauded, and the “quality” issue will solve itself over time in the marketplace of ideas.
We all agree here at the Lake that this a truly democratizing development. Now sure, not every blog is a fountain of scholarship and penetrating analysis – as EW says, a lot of it depends on the users, and just like the Internet has given lazy students the ability to plagiarize quickly and easily for their essays, the Internet has given propagandizers on the right a way to virally spread the stupidest messages as quickly and broadly as they have readers willing to do so. And this is the real check on the system – there are few motivated readers of conservative blogs who will participate in building up the reliability of the online provenance of such works. There is a philosphical difference between liberal and conservative blogs – a confidence among the liberal blogosphere that good ideas well expressed will be spread more widely and among more influential persons and shapers of opinion than the talking points and angry demagoguery that characterizes right-wing blogs. I’m really stepping on EW’s expertise and scholarly experience hear, but that is what really at the end made samizdat more reliable than Pravda at the end of the day.
I’ve seen a survey of democracies around the world, and the thing that seems to correlate highest with the most open democracies is Net Neutrality. Keeping the internet open and accessible to all is an extremely important cornerstone of modern democracy. If we let business control the Internet, then we pave the way towards Aristocracy, and away from real democracy.
Bob in HI
Can’t wait to catch up on this full thread later, but this struck me:
Dewey was a teacher and educator. He’d seen people grow and change. That was not Lippmann’s forte, nor was it Lippmann’s experience. (My background on Lippmann is based on reading Ronald Steele’s excellent bio of him back in the early 80s when it was first published. IIRC, Lippmann’s education emphasized classics and he led a very privileged life.)
Dewey was writing in 1927; at that time (at least in my Western state) ‘fully qualified’ teachers held “Teaching Certificates”, which were 2 year degrees handed out by “Normal Schools” (not as academically prestigious as universities or colleges, but regarded as sufficient preparation for teaching young children to read and write). In my state in the 1920s, female schoolteachers were paid $980/year, and male schoolteachers were paid $1300 per year. The ‘average’ school year had only recently been extended to 100 days, and many children were the first generation in their families to receive a ‘free, public education’.
Dewey was writing during an era when many schools still didn’t have electric lights. Consider that many towns and cities were still putting in telephone wires, and he was writing before the Great Depression. (FDR was suffering from poliomyletis in the early 1920s, adapting to the paralysis of his legs, while Lippmann and Dewey were writing.)
In 1927, many working Americans only had a 6th or 8th grade education.
Washington State’s ‘public school curricula’ in the 1920s required: grammar, rhetoric, spelling, and arithmetic (calculus was taught in a college or university). Kids were still writing with chalk on chalkboards at desks with inkwells. In Washington, Idaho, and Oregon rural kids were still arriving at public school on horseback and in wagons in the 1920s.
All across the West, the idea of a public, free education for every boy or girl was still a radical, exciting idea. Edward R. Murrow would have been a schoolboy in Edison, Washington up near the Canadian border, before heading for land grant college Washington State College (home of the Wazzu Cougs, recently defeated in the Sweet 16). Others, including future Pac-10 coach and quarterback talent by the last name of “Elroy” went to public schools in Aberdeen**, Washington — a little logging town of hard drinking, tough ornery cusses who were still sawing down trees 10+ feet in diameter and sending them off to the local lumber mills.
A little more context for the period in which Lippmann and Dewey were writing:
In 1919, Washington State passed an act that shifted the basis of pricing an automobile license from ‘horsepower’ to ‘weight’ — and for the first time reqired ‘lights, brakes, and a horn, whistle, bell, or other signaling device on moving (non-farm) vehicles’. Consider that ‘lead ethyl gasoline’ was patented in 1922; like many regions, my state still had mostly dirt roads in the 1920s.
The kind of education required to enable a population that could produce new materials and design new technologies was still a gleam in Dewey’s eye; the very notion of high school science labs, or chemistry labs, was still novel. (In fact, many communities in my state did not have high schools up until the 1940s and 1950s.)
Lippmann knew New York, London, Rome, Paris. And he knew his Greek and Latin, as did every genuinely educated man (or woman). (For that matter, the Catholics would continue to say the Latin Mass for another 40 years after the publication of “Public Opinion”.)
Dewey knew the U.S. of A., with all its teeming, argumentative, ambitious, raucus immigrants. Dewey would probably be proud to know that the raucus American rabble invented blogs. And, I rather suspect, would that kid who grew up in Aberdeen among loggers.
** Later, another generation of Aberdeen kids grew up and formed a band… Nirvana, if anyone here has ever heard of it…
Good context. Dewey worked at a time when the public library, thanks in part to his efforts and Carnegie’s money, became the working class university. You could find a Carnegie library or building on nearly every Main Street and college campus in America.
It was like lighting a fuse; the explosion in learning led to many other reforms, including greater access to publicly-funded, free primary and secondary education and nearly free post-secondary education via the land grant colleges, whose origins predate but parallel Dewey’s career. (California’s system, for example, was still nearly free until, um, Ronnie Reagan became governor, wasn’t it?)
It was the impetus for putting “democracy” into representative government, which is too often government for the representatives. Pity that Carnegie was such a brute when making his money and putting down steel mill strikers who dared to ask for higher wages, demands which the richest man in America could never understand.
Hell, in grade school in the 40s in small town southern Minnesota I remember writing with chalk on slate black boards and learning to write with pens dipped in ink wells!
This is just such a wonderfull thread that I can’t leave it alone.
It struck me in reading this that Dewey’s modern heir is Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator who taught semi-literate working class people how to read by having them read their local newspapers. I especially recommend Freire’s book, Pedagogy of Hope, in this regard. Sounds completely “Deweyan” in this context. And he was doing it without the aid of the Internet.
More Dewey and Freire, please.
Bob in HI
Bob, yes — what a wonderful thread 8-))))))))
Great stuff; splendid commenters. (I’m so often agog here
“Pedagogy of Hope” duly noted in my ‘to do’ list; will look for it at your recommendation.
Reading is revolutionary; and now, with neuroscientists better able to research its effects, the conversation should become even more interesting.
So many people now in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s who had trouble learning to read were not diagnosed for learning disabilities; the tests, interventions, and research simply didn’t exist. (Let’s hope better research, teaching, and focus on cognitive development can spare us many more GWBush’s, who I strongly suspect relies on ‘intuition’ because he’s unable to sort through the amount of reading his job requires. But he’s not alone in those limitations. )
FWIW, I’ve done a bit of work with adults who have had learning (reading and language) disabilities, and have made some great progress with them by having them read the sports pages (they liked the baseball and box scores), weather, stock market lists… then got them branching out to simple narratives about sports players, then on to other news articles. It’s information they can use in conversation, and not to overwhelming for them. It’s a good thing to see them catch on and enjoy it, but the OpEds are too ‘abstract’ for them in my experience.
Look forward to reading Freire.
Still smiling over Minnesotachuck’s report of inkwells in his schooldays. Lovely.
————
FWIW, I mentioned “Elroy” from Aberdeen… yikes. I meant ‘Elway”. I’m not always spot-on with names (yikes!).
>>I’ve had great journalists dismiss the notion that if journalism doesn’t result in an engaged citizenry, it has failed in an important respect.< <</p>
This is one of the primary reasons I became so addicted and enamored of the blogs — their ability to highlight issues that the corporate media was ignoring. As a result, I became much more engaged and politically active — writing letters to the editor (recently had one published in the LA Times), calls/faxes to Congress, donating to progressive candidates, etc.
If Firedog and TPM hadn’t devoted so much time to the Plame and US Attorneys matters, would we even know about this stuff in any meaningful way? Ditto Scott Harper and Larissa on the Don Siegelman matter — 60 Minutes was going to shelve the piece.
This isn’t to totally slam the establishment press — Priest did great work on the Walter Reed story, and Charlie Savage at the Globe highlighted the signing statement controversy. (Although the latter in particular could have been done by anyone with the dedication to wade through all of the information and research — it was in the public record.)
But let’s hope we can at least get the trad media to really examine itself and if necessary shame them into changing their ways. I hope to never hear the phrase “maverick” and John McCain uttered again except in sarcasm.
“I hope to never hear the phrase “maverick” and John McCain uttered again except in sarcasm.”
amen, decotodd. john mccain is to “straight talkin’ maverick” as michael jackson is to “king of pop”.
Not to play SAT analogies too much, but Michael Jackson was at one point a very successful and talented performer, and McVain was never a straigt talkin’ maverick. I think a better analogy would be…. “as George W. Bush is to ‘compassionate conservative’” – both being myths that the corporate media were fed by the Republicans for endorsement to the voting public.
i was going more for self-anointed monikers.
If McCain was ever a maverick it’s because he got pissed off and made the poorly considered opinion to move in the exact opposite direction of the mainstream conservative policy, not because it would be better policy, but because he was pissed off.
And in addition to the work of Col. Lang, a distinguishing feature of the liberal blogosphere has been the ability to instantly access the thoughts of experts like Juan Cole on Iraq, Roubini and Calculated Risk on the economy and markets (Krugman has the unique ability to blog and be in the NYT, and it doesn’t seem to have affected his objectivity), Balkin and Horton on legal issues, and our own gracious hostess on all matters political.
IF, the press was doing their job, Bush would not be in office. The blogoshpere is “pushing” on the Fourth Estate to do what it is suppose to do — keep the editorializing on the opinion page, not the front page.
EW-
Welcome back! And thanks a bunch for your thorough review of this important and lengthy article! I’ve been trying to call attention to it for the past few days, and I’m glad to see that you have given it the attention it deserves.
This is an important conversation, because it involves the future of the way we get and understand the news. I appreciated Alterman’s review of the historical impact of HuffPo and TPM, but he dropped the ball by not taking a look at FDL’s coverage of the Libby trial, and the attention that got.
My own personal usage has evolved a lot over the past 3-4 years. I still subscribe to news feeds from the WaPo, the NYT, and the LAT, but I don’t read there much any more, unless I’m referred there from FDL, here, DailyKos, or elsewhere. I like the new NewsBox at FDL, and the fact that it provides a “Comment” facility.
The news media are evolving, right under our feet.
Bob in HI
Wow. A wonderfully existential and enlightened conversation here, and an important one too.
First off, Col. Lang, welcome and thanks for the outstanding and important work you do; you have many, many fans here. I do urge you not to be taken aback, as it appears you might have been, with the use of the term “parasitic”. I think it’s use was as a descriptor, although perhaps an unfortunate one, rather than as an invective. Perhaps a better term might be derivative, in that work relies, as you say, often on the footwork of others. We here are all in that same boat. We may be bad company, but we are company. At any rate, however you want to characterize what you do; it is outstanding, critically important, and much appreciated. Please keep doing it.
Secondly, as to the main discussion, what I see missing to some extent is the root of all evil, or so the popular saw says. Money. And it impinges profoundly on every aspect that has been bandied about so far. The move of newspapers from labors of love and information that, hopefully sustained themselves, to profit centers, and now the decline to the point to where they are really neither. The moneyed drive of television, whether network or cable, for ratings. The discussion of the individual journalists, which above talked about their egos, omitted how that is also driven by money/income. Reporters write books; big money there. Used to be their books were retrospectives about their reporting; now, through a combination of forces, their reporting is short shrifted in favor of their books. The recent Lichtblau article on his and Risen’s wiretapping story history is a good example. The NYT wouldn’t publish the work until Risen made the “gutsy” decision to add it as a chapter to his book. Gee, what a heartwarming tale of guts. What I see there is concern by the NYT over what is better for them financially – to print or not to print, and concern by Risen to insert or not insert in his book for profit. Where was the concern for the public good? These heroes had computers and the internet was available; why was the need of the populous to know subverted by one and all to the almighty fucking dollar?
Now, i could go into the weeds pretty deep here as to the greater, and deeper, roots of this problem. They are many, and they are varied, and none of us is without blame for that. For now, suffice it to say that the belligerent packaging of the god almighty “American Dream” is destroying the American ethos.
Woodward and Bernstein used to be heroes, not now. All because they became the enemy.
Good point, highlighting the influence of money. A la William Randolph Hearst, it’s never been far from the scene. One difference today is that success made the press insiders. An insider’s primary purpose is to stay inside, protect other insiders, and keep everybody else out. Russert is a classic example, Cheney’s go-to-guy to disseminate his PR. Or, Fox News, which started out as a well-funded GOP agitprop operation and remains that today.
The structural problem is that society and its laws, which allocate a special place for journalism, assume that it fulfills an outsider’s role. Hence, the conflict and danger to democracy.
The role of money has changed, too, along with the expectations of those who have it. They have changed their conception of a business as a going concern and what’s considered an adequate rate of return. Both have been Shanghaied, literally and figuratively.
Companies are no longer “organic” combinations of resources which produce goods and services while having a personality and playing a role in the communities in which they do business. Rockefeller may have never had such romantic notions about his companies, but it was a model that succeeded and which some companies still use successfully. But many are now bodies whose organs are worth more than the personality they make up. Wall Street harvests and recombines those organs, attaches them a catchy name or complex formula, and tells would be investors that their monster is Alive! The “subprime mortgage crisis”, aka systemic financial meltdown, illustrates the point.
The point of the Frankenstein metaphor is that companies have become divorced from their assets, including their people and communities. One consequence is that the rate of return that’s deemed reasonable, which attracts needed capital, has skyrocketed. In the newspaper business, I see that in the troubled management of the LA Times by the Tribune Company.
The LA Times’ annual profit would have made a manufacturing CEO think he’d died and gone to heaven. But it was too low for the asset-stripping models used by today’s whiz kids, and so it had to “rationalize”. In a newspaper business, that means cutting reporting staff and expenses, and substituting virtually free national and international stories and local pablum.
More importantly, it means attempting to shape news coverage in order to garner favor with government, whose regulatory approvals yield unprecedented consolidations and business products, with questionable gains for everyone but the company’s owners. Clear Channel’s history illustrates that, as does Murdoch’s Fox News. That yields mind-numbing profits and political influence.
News profits are paltry by comparison, which also makes cuts in news organization misdirection, because the purpose is to shape the coverage, not report the news. News becomes a way station that props up, in this case, the GOP, which permits unprecedented consolidation of radio, tv, cable and print media, including the venerable WSJ, which yields more political influence, ad nauseum.
This is exactly right. I mentioned above that I read a commuter paper. That guy makes a decent living running the paper, hires a few people to cover local and state government (this is the capital), and a couple of people to cover local sports, rips some stuff off the wire service, and provides a nice service. Plus a sudoko puzzle.
This model works just fine for all kinds of businesses. Like the coffee shop I like, that has a nice array of locally baked goods, and locally roasted coffee. Compare that to the Starbucks model. Pay the locals a tiny bit, and send lots of profit to the home company.
Consider the hospital where my dad worked for decades. It was owned by the Holy Cross nuns who built it with charitable contributions, and operated it just fine forever, making enough money to pay for upgrades to staff and facilities and equipment, and to pay its employees. Compare that to the model of HCA. Not only does HCA have to do pay for the upgrades and so on, it has to produce enough money to pay the stockholders a good rate of return. And that rate of return has to increase every year so that the stock will go up.
Where does all that money come from? Not from efficient management, that’s for sure.
Exactly, especially in the health care context, where advances in technology have contributed to RISING health care costs for more advanced machinery, drugs and techniques, as opposed to other fields where technical advances reduced costs (like banking, but at the cost of jobs, especially those in regional middle management). Of course, I have always been of the opinion that this is driven by the insurance business model, which is cost plus – the higher the costs, the higher the premiums, and the more cash flow for a vitally necessary program that people want, like auto insurance which is a requirement for people to drive – the higher the costs, the more money they can get on the spread for the investment side of the business.
I’m about a third of the way through reading Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life and it directly addresses these issues. Most impressively, it does so in a way that gets past the narrative cliches of both the left and the right. I haven’t got to his prescriptive thoughts yet (assuming there are some) but purely on the basis of the analytical underpinnings he’s building regarding what’s been going on in our economy (and the world’s) over the past 40 years I highly recommend it.
Hey, cool. Keep those in mind, I was serious about coming back to this topic sometime. There was a thread back at TNH where we went off on this topic and it was some good stuff. Rejigging tax structures, corporate liability veils, stockholder’s rights and duties etc. What you are reading would fit beautifully.
Candidate for book review and later thread? It would fit well with issues that should be addressed in a proper Democratic platform.
Reich was on This Week with Stephanopolus this morning, along with Krugman, and he was really good – he said that McCain’s speech on the mortgage meltdown amounted to “Let them eat cake”! And Krugman could barely contain himself sometimes, his eyebrows would go up every time George Will said something stupid.
I liked the Hoover analogies and Will’s take on it. precious.
Sounds like a good show. For years, the media wouldn’t put a Krugman or a Reich on without at least two neocon minders to blunt their message.
Thanks. I’ll give it a look.
Link to the roundtable. My gosh, George Will is a boob.
Yeah. I can ramble on for a long time on some of this; thankfully for all, I am not currently so inclined. We have had in the past some pretty good conversations about how to change some of the corporate dynamic in this country and, I think, maybe that is something that would be good to return to somewhere in the future. If I had thought about it, I would have done that in conjunction with the Bear threads last week, but, alas, I did not.
The influence of the compulsive, mad profit drive in news journalism is pervasive though. It is not just the influence on the things reported and how they are presented, it is the depth. We reach for an ever lower least common denominator. Your reference to the LA Times is especially painful to me. Through my summers working in the classic car restoration business in Santa Monica, I came in contact with Otis Chandler a bit and the what is going on with the LAT today would just kill him, if something else had not already. Sadly, it was his passion for antique and classic cars that caused him to drift away from Times-Mirror, which precipitated the decline and fall that has reached freefall today.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble on with such a long post. But the threads seemed to need tying together. Classic car restoration? Oh, my. I’ve given up dreams of a DB4 or Morse’s Jag; the engine rebuild alone would pay for a year’s college tuition. I’d settle for a ‘73 TR6 with a hot cam, proper suspension and diff, and anything but a Lucas electrical system.
The story about Otis Chandler is moving. It’s a classic problem in family companies and monarchic families. Attributes that lead to greatness skip a generation and great institutions become “dust and air”. Sadly like the DOJ.
Somewhat OT, but not totally:
The MSM is out with the story that Muqtada al Sadr has ordered his troops off the streets. From the way this is being pitched on every MSM account I’ve seen so far the reader is left to infer that this is a climb-down on Sadr’s part, and thus perhaps a sign of weakness and/or a loss of face.
However, within the past week I stumbled upon a new blog, Roads To Iraq, about which I know very little, but the writer of which seems pretty closely plugged into what’s going on over there. S/he frequently refers to Arabic publications and offers links to them. From the writing my guess is that English skills are very likely a recent acquisition.
In any case, the Roads To Iraq writer suggests that Sadr’s cease fire is the result of negotiations with representatives of the Maliki regime that took place in Iran following the death of Maliki’s security adviser at the hands of the Mahdi Army. The writer implies, but does not state, that the negotiations were at the behest of the Maliki regime.
If this is true, the MSM narrative is very misleading, as is all to common these days.
Thanks for the link to Roads to Iraq. Looks like a good resource. Since Col. Lang may still be around, or come back to read here, a post detailing his take on the latest from Muqtada al Sadr would be greatly appreciated over at http://turcopolier.typepad.com….._tyrannis/
Another contra-MSM narrative post up on Roads to Iraq offering up info I haven’t seen anywhere else:
PS: Does anyone know why FDL’s implementation of the WordPress comment system indents as a quote only the first paragraph of multi-paragraph quotes? To make it look right I have to enter the open quote and close quote by hand for each additional paragraph.
Lippman sounds incredibly arrogant. He might want to stop and consider that if the MSM actually did their jobs and reported thoroughly and accurately about critical issues the American public might have a clue. If “corporate media” were actually concerned about an informed public instead of ratings. Our country and the rest of the world would be a whole lot better off.
But “ratings” and “smut” rule.
Lippman sounds like he supports an uninformed American citizenry. Those arrogant types do. They like it when they get to make the decisions.
Um, Lippmann has been dead for almost thirty years. The only thing he supports at this point is a gravestone.
Contrary to bmaz at 21, in every instance of these problems that I had direct experience of at the paper where I used to work, it was not about money in any direct sense that I could see or disentangle but about forms of posturing and self-image. I’ll have to give an example, and it will perforce be convoluted, but that’s because this stuff IS convoluted. At some point in the late ’70s/early ’80s — in an attempt to shake up old editorial management, gain “classiness,” and assemble a new loyal cadre of insiders — the newish editor imported several well-regarded people from the NY Times (including a Pulitzer-winning reporter). As it happened, the Times’ editorial cadre under Abe Rosenthal had decided in the early days of the AIDS epidemic that this was essentially a “gay disease” story rather than a “epidemic” story and could be/should be pretty much swept under the rug, in part because those bad people with their bad behavior deserved what they were getting. Further, all the Times cadre that came over to our paper had bought into that view and brought it with them. Thus our talented science/medical reporters were told at first that AIDS-related stories pretty much needed not to appear at all of possible and to be handled a la the Times manner when they did appear. (I remember in particular that our paper’s features editor was ordered not to do an interview with Randy Shilts about his then-new and best-selling book “And the Band Played On.”) Phase Two of this madness came when the described-above Phase One behavior, which went on for some time, could no longer be supported, though Phase Two was closely but quite crazily related to it. As you may recall, Dr. Robert Gallo had discovered the AIDS virus, though there was talk that it really had been discovered first by a French team and/or that Dr. Gallo had even “stolen” the French team’s discovery. So in Phase Two, that Pulitzer-winner emigree investigative reporter from the Times came up with a vast series, which the paper promoted fiercely, that claimed in great detail that Gallo was an outright thief and this, implicity, was THE story of the AIDs crisis. Now our paper’s existing science-medical writers, two of whom later would win Pulitizers themselves, thought that this former Times guy’s reporting was a crock and tried to express that view to editorial higher ups, all of whom told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about and needed to shut up. This when in fact –as would be the case at many very good papers — the editors making that judgment didn’t know enough about medical science to have an opinion in the matter (if the subject were politics, they might have) but were instead caught up in permutations of power and self-image, having for one thing been caught up from the first with the cachet of “our inner-circle people are anointed TIMES guys, so of course they’re right” — all this, as you might have guessed, being a function of the upper-level editors own fears and insecurities. As a result, this paper seriously disfigured itself, in public to some extent and even more so internally; and the consequences of this are at work to this day. First, I would say that this story is typical of the sort of problems that I saw, and that none of the others, just to be clear, involved significant social issues like AIDS. Rather, the essential issue in every case was that a certain “edgy” tack to packaging the news or telling (or even, as above for a while, not-telling) a particular story had come to be all bound up with upper management’s own urgent, anxious, threatened sense of its power, wisdom, and necessity. Yes, in one sense this might be about money, because some of the sense of anxiety and threat and bluster was rooted in fears that the outlook for the industry was not good and SOMETHING needed to be done (something highly visible and that one could take credit for), but I would say that the ectoplasmic convolutions of bureaucratic power and self-image were always gist of it.
I’ve seen similar behavior at large companies outside the newspaper business, particular before and after takeovers, where the quality of everyone’s network shifts seismically. I’ve frequently worked with executives who knew less than they should about important topics, and who went to great lengths to pretend that didn’t matter – instead of just working farther up the learning curve.
Oh, I was not implying that money is the only, nor necessarily even the biggest, factor; just that at the national level, it is likely a factor. You don’t have these book concerns, cable appearances, reputations, intermixing among the power elites, etc., at least best as I can tell, in any level except the top level national media. There, however, it does seem to be an ever increasing factor and part and parcel with the cause and effect. So, I am not sure I am quite as contra as you may think.
The power of technology to create instant research in your pajamas is empowering. While this is not necessarity pure research, it is quick information gathering giving a more informed outcome. It save impacts to the environment that printed media does (toxins that pollute and pulp).
Editorial policy is owner driven as when Murdoch and others with agendas aquire the “Liberal” media to shift the PR paradigm. But what is most alarming to me is that these conglomerates control all the effective media, radio, TV, cable and cellphone as well as the wirelines. (Big Brother)
Consolidation of the info system into corporate congloms (if I may create a label) gives Big Brother a very large foot on the information scale that is had by the general population essentially keeping it disinformed.
Netroots is most effective as a lobbying tool not mass media as a small percentage of voters are acessing us compared to Main Stream Media. having said that let me say this.
The netroots has expanded my consciousness broadly. I do not have the mind of an academic never getting out of grad school, but we am afforded an opportunity to enter in a dialogue with better minds with greater intelectual tools than I possess. What is important about that to us all is that perspective is being disseminated from more erudite impacting more of society. All that is required is critical thinking skills to evaluate what is shitpile from the more informed opinion. Now I am in deep dodo.
BB, I don’t see the critical factor being: (A) the number of degrees a person has; rather (B) it appears to rely openminded and willing to listen to the views of others. (Your comment suggests that you have B, so not having A is not such a big deal.)
If it’s any help at all, I often remind myself that Jane Austen — who(m?) I regard as one of the finest writers in the English language — never went to university and certainly didn’t have a graduate degree. She was observant, smart, witty, and willing to learn.
There are people with advanced degrees who lack those qualities.
Hope this makes sense to you.
Sensible and sensitive comment.
This has been a great thread to read. I just sent a letter this past week to Gary B. Pruitt, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of McClatchy and cc’d it to Patrick J. Talamantes, Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer of McClatchy. The letter addressed this very dialogue as part of my personal request for McClatchy to “grow” their newspaper business, which they have been doing as of late. I would love to reprint the letter – it had a great deal of specific newspaper data I pulled together to make my points on the growth of THEIR print news in terms of it’s impact on informing citizens.
Within the letter I did share a personal conversation I had over 25 years ago with a Dean of a top rated journalism school in this country. At the time, I had received a full-ride scholarship to go to the journalism school of my choice. The opportunity to meet personally with Dean’s and/or Chairs of top journalism schools was quite overwhelming and left a lifetime of impressions. However, my questions regarding the role of the Fourth Estate and the effort to achieve “balance” in carrying out the functions of the Fourth Estate threw me. I was suddenly faced with Lippman-like perceptions of media’s role and I was “Dewey” minded.
As I learned what $$ backed the various journalism schools I was hoping to consider, my heart sank. I realized the incredible battle ahead to try and “shine light” in dark corners through writing.
The point I am trying to make through sharing my personal experience is this: to make print journalism true, balanced and accessible to citizens, the journalism schools have a need to be honest about the elite $$ funding them and start rethinking “how” journalism and journalism management education is done.
I could go on about your post EW. A wonderful, thoughtful query.
How one is treated as an open records requester, especially in assessment of fees, can depend on whether one is classified as a journalist, as a blogger, as primarily a citizen, or as some combination. In The Bloggers’ FAQ, EFF has some information on the issue in the FOIA context.
Concerning open records requests at the state level, laws and behaviors of the states vary in the treatment and classification of requesters. The necessity of going through a private company’s log-in to gain full electronic access to state statutes, as some states have established, makes it harder to keep up with such matters.
Also, completely agree with klynn @ 51 that J-Schools need to rethink their curriculum. I took several courses in a J-School on the West Coast (upper division, one grad level) and they were a waste of my time. I’ve have been far better off taking art classes (scientific illustration, anatomy) or computer science courses — many topics are better explained by illustrations and diagrams than by words. J-Schools don’t seem to get that yet, but perhaps because those subjects aren’t esteemed by their faculties.
(A family friend was a J-School prof in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and emphasized international reporting – believed that without local, community papers ‘democracy’ could not exist. He’d have pointed out on this thread that European nations tend to be more ethnically homogenous, which makes journalism simpler than it is in the U.S. The corporate ownership of papers in the 1980s under Reagan/Bush nearly killed him, and he predicted the kind of lethal nastiness we’ve seen the past ten years. Today, he wouldn’t obtain a university faculty position because he loved teaching and getting students started with internships, but he’d lack the research background for a tenured post at a J-School. He was a news Jedi.)