Chris Hedges: The Death of American Journalism
Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in “The Death and Life of American Journalism” argue correctly that the old models for delivering the news are dead. They see the government as the savior of last resort. The authors cite the massive postal and printing subsidies that lasted into the 19th century as a precedent for government intervention. And they propose building a new generation of journalists and publications from new government subsidies and from programs such as their suggested News AmeriCorps, which would train the next generation of journalists.
The authors offer a series of innovations including “citizen news vouchers” and low-cost, low-profit newsrooms. They write: “The government will pay half the salary of every reporter and editor up to $45,000 each. Assuming most daily and weekly newspapers go post-corporate and employment returns to the high-water mark of two decades ago—the latter is a very big assumption, we know—this would cost the state $3.5 billion annually. If employment stayed at current levels it would run half that total. Newspapers that benefit from these subsidies would also be prime candidates for News AmeriCorps rookie journalists.”
As utopian fantasies go, this is pretty good. But it ignores the critical shift within American society from a print-based culture to an image-based culture. It assumes, incorrectly, that people still value and want traditional news. They do not. We have become unmoored from a world of print, from complexity and nuance, and with it information systems built on the primacy of verifiable fact. Newspapers, which engage rather than entertain, can no longer compete with the emotional battles that hyperventilating hosts on trash talk shows mount daily. The public, which has walked away from newspapers, has embraced the emotional carnival that has turned news into another form of mindless entertainment. And the authors, with whom I have a great deal of sympathy, mistakenly believe that the general public values what they value. Their cri de coeur for a return to reason, logic and truth is the last cry raised by the forlorn representatives of a dying civilization. Cicero did the same in ancient Rome. And when his severed head and hands were mounted on the podium in the Colosseum and his executioner, Mark Anthony, announced that Cicero would speak and write no more, the crowd roared its approval. The plan proposed by the authors would work only if the public, and our corporate state, recognized and cared about journalism as a vital public good. But without public outcry and visionary political leaders, neither of which we have in abundance, there is little hope that the government or anyone will save us....
American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy. The rise of a totalitarian capitalism will follow, and we already have many of the new system’s information networks in place. Corporations, as the authors point out, “will be better positioned than ever to produce self-promotional ‘information’—better described as ‘propaganda’—that can masquerade as ‘news.’ The technology actually makes it easier. A major development in the past decade has been video news releases, PR-produced news stories that are often run as if they were legitimate journalism on local TV news broadcasts. The stories invariably promote the products of the corporation which funds the work surreptitiously.”...
The solutions proposed by McChesney and Nichols to save journalism would work if we lived in a culture that placed primacy on truth and beauty. The failure to recognize America’s profound cultural shift into collective self-delusion makes the book stillborn. The authors, who know and understand journalism and the news industry, have a lot to say about the history of journalism and its decline that is worth reading, but their fatal flaw is to propose solutions that are no longer culturally relevant. They grasp the terrible consequences of a culture disconnected from a world of verifiable fact. They admirably look for solutions to save us from a world where opinions and facts are interchangeable, where lies become true. I applaud their effort, but I fear it is too late.