Lies Become Truths: The Demise of the Newspaper Leaves Americans Dumber, Blinder and

Prone to Ideological Manipulation

The loss of print journalism is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us.

June 27, 2011 |

Bt Chris Hedges

I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.

Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets.

The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, Murray Kempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats, crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in Africa and the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and forgotten in our urban slums or Appalachia. These presses churned out raw lists of data, from sports scores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of the city or the world we would never otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters and critics reviewed movies, books, dance, theater and music and covered sporting events. Newspapers printed the text of presidential addresses, sent reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall and followed the courts and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the lurid and the macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion.

We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.

more . . . http://www.alternet.org/media/151432/lies_become_truths%3A_the_demise_of_the_newspaper_leaves_americans_dumber,_blinder_and_prone_to_ideological_manipulation

When I was growing up, I was always reading a book, and so were my friends. We were pretty poor, but our schools required it, and, well, books are fascinating! Now? Now kids are playing video games, texting, online writing a barage of incredibly stupid things on Facebook, sending photos of themselves around the tech world, spending an incredible amount of money on things that don't truly make them happy, and they'd be hard pressed to answer any questions on anything related to any current event. No wonder they're failing in schools. Kids are a mess. What will happen when these kids grow up, is exactly what we are expecting. We'll have a nation of incredibly stupid adults who will know absolutely nothing, and understand even less.

:wow:

Perhaps some "colleges" do, but that would be the minority. I could be very wrong but I hope not.

they can't feed us the bullshit and we don't just take it without asking questions that make sense. That hate the fact that citizens can now really talk back and do a better job than they do.

From my point of view, the world is filled with bullshit swallowers whose questions never make sense. All they do is make Roger Ailes richer.

that are worth reading. They do their own research and then report the turth, whatever it might be. I guess you can add Matt taibbi to the list. But it's very small.

Articles like this are why newspapers are failing. Who wants to pay money for pompous arrogant self absorbed BS?

You guys sucked at your jobs and we dont' need you anymore. Good Riddance!

The problem, as he rightly says, are the mandarins at the top. The "...careerists who rise up the food chain to become managers and editors."

I find his writing and his liberal voice of conscience to be anything but pompous and arrogant.
Wingers and conservadems alike can be pretty much counted on to despise him, though, based on the flavor of his past writing and activism, I'm, sure. Or anyone who doesn't want to read more than 6 paragraphs of anything in one sitting on the internet. His article was 5 pages.

chooses it's information according to ones bias.This bodes well for no one. Good article.

(William Allen White grad school as you know, proud2BlibKansan...In fact, the Star paid for my scholarship)

And Hedges is saying what I've been saying on DU for years...

The news industry as we used to know it was burned down from the inside...Deregulation from Reagan to Clinton culminating with the Telecom Act of 1996 set the stage for the mostly uncritical, sensationalist fluff we see today...Once upon a time this country used to break up monopolies instead of happily enabling them to get bigger, but once the ownership rules were slashed, major corporations scrambled to buy every outlet they could -- Newsrooms cut thousands of jobs, doubled the workload on those remaining, and newsworthy coverage became uniform and homogenized (no more multi-part investigative pieces or being a thorn in the side of City Hall, unless the publisher had a personal axe to grind)... Of course this leads to a decline in news quality, leading to lower circulation and ad revenues, which leads to more jobs being cut (the most experienced reporters and editors are let go first, because there is always a recent grad willing to work at a third of the salary), which leads to even shittier news quality and the cycle continues to the point where people now question even the very relevance of what was for generations a widely respected and essential field (which is what's happening to public education now)...

I know it's an era if instant news now, but print journalism used to be about more than just news...A well-run major daily was like a public trust. It made people feel more connected to the community and each other...It was a watchdog for the proverbial 'little guy', and having more than one well-run daily in a city helps keep the papers themselves honest and diligent...

But of course, all those high-minded ideas were sacrificed one-by-one at the altar of "quarterly profits" and "shareholders", and the race to the bottom is speeding up...

This is part of the problem as well, and one has to wonder if this is a chicken or the egg scenario. We aren't really about communities any more. It's so much of every man for himself. When I was growing up, the neighborhood parents knew that other neighborhood parents would watch out for their kids. Not so much nowadays. In my "community" it's against the bylaws to actually have any type of seating in front of our town homes. How does one get to know their neighbors, if they aren't allowed to see them or chat with them as they come and go? Of course, I break the rules and have a chair out front that I sit in and that is the only way I've gotten to know the neighbors I do know. For example, I was sitting outside one night and the elderly woman who lives across from me couldn't get her rented car lights to go out. If I hadn't been out front breaking the rules, I wouldn't have been able to assist her.

We've become an insular society and that causes many problems in and of itself.

in the manner of Thomas Paine.

Where he refers to the retreat to the internet's nurturing of whole vast intellectual wastelands so many inhabitants never seem to want to depart from any more, once they find a comfortably reinforcing one..."ideological ghettos.."

"A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true."

In addition to killing papers by deregulating the media, Repukes killed at least some papers from the inside.

I worked as a newspaper reporter from 1972 to 1997, including a major daily, the Newark Star-Ledger.

The last paper at which I worked was a small liberal daily in the Washington DC suburbs. Bob Woodward once worked there. My last year there, the nutcase publisher (who got caught flashing a couple of times) brought in a new managing editor, whose goal appeared to be purging the place of lefty liberal media types. He got rid of people on any pretext: one guy's hair was too long to suit him. This creep wore his hair greased back like Ray-gun, nasty little bow ties and suspenders, but you didn't need to look at him to know he was a wingnut.

He sat near me, monitored everything on my screen, and forced me to rewrite stories from a right-wing slant. I quit because I could not stand his manipulations or his personal nastiness. I'd worked for a far larger paper before moving to the DC area, and had never been subjected to that kind of crap. The staff turnover at this small paper was ridiculous: 13 people in one year. The people he brought in were all GOP-bots.

Just before I left, another staffer discovered that the new editor had once worked for the Washington Times, the right-wing Moonie-owned joke of a paper. While there, he covered the Reagan White House, and got personally entangled in a White House call boy, call girl scandal, for which he was fired. It did not surprise us in the least.

After he destroyed the paper I'd worked for, he went on to some cushy post at the Heritage Foundation. Mission accomplished - another liberal paper killed.

I wonder if anyone else in the news business saw this kind of thing happen in the 1990s?

It is about half the size it once was, full of mainly AP stories. There is no longer a reporter for The Star in Topeka or Jeff City.

And every day, over and over, the wingnuts invade the online version and criticize it as a tool of the far left. You can see their impact on the editorial page. They fired reporters but publish twice as many editorials as they used to.

It's both sad and bizarre.

I stopped reading our local papers back in the 1980s because the quality of the writing and presentation was going downhill, fast. Instead, I switched over to our weekly, The Houston Press where they still understand what the phrase "investigative journalism" means and how to implement it. I haven't looked at a local (daily) print paper since :)

Our local daily is the corpocratic Washington Post. They own the local weekly, Gazette Newspapers, which is blatantly Republican and anti-union.

and they have many other weeklies around the country. Not like Hearst, but maybe there's one in your general area. See if they have any plans on starting up a weekly there. Maybe they'd hire you :)

Great little flash from some years ago that was ahead of it's time.
I've posted this at DU a couple times before in the past 6 or 7 years, but it really fits perfect here.

It was around at least as far back as 2005:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/roberdan/archive/2005/04/10/406933.aspx

We're almost there.

EPIC: In the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline.
http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

another Watergate style probe. Reagan and Bush1, especially Bush1, should have been outed as traitors after their IranContra/BCCI treason and its long list of crimes against the Constitution.

That was said in 1931:



I don't think there was a magical age of newspapers; Joseph Pulitzer and and William Randolph Hearst were running appalling, and popular, newspapers over a century ago.

consolidated ownership across all the media spectrum.

miss the days of scrolls. Whole monestaries of monks plying away at small, uncomfortable desks atop hard, unforgiving stools. The dank, dark odor of the limestone room forever closing in around them. The work was only interupted for wine breaks and the occassional nap. You only hoped that Brother Thadius wasn't in charge of crushing the grapes with his foot issues and hygeine problems. The smell of parchment paper and the unmistakable stench of black ink wafting through the air made it all the more memorable and makes one long for the days of such intricate writings.

I can live without newspapers.