Posted on Jun 27, 2011
By 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.
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 pressâ€
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.
I, like many who cared more about truth than news, was pushed out of The New
York Times, specifically over my vocal and public opposition to the war in Iraq.
This is not a new story. Those reporters who persistently challenge the
orthodoxy of belief, who question and examine the reigning political passions,
always tacitly embraced by the commercial media, are often banished. There is a
constant battle in newsrooms between the managers, those who serve the interests
of the institution and the needs of the advertisers, and reporters whose loyalty
is to readers. I have a great affection for reporters, who hide their idealism
behind a thin veneer of cynicism and worldliness. I also harbor a deep distrust
and even loathing for the careerists who rise up the food chain to become
managers and editors.
Sidney Schanberg
was nearly killed in Cambodia in 1975 after staying there for The New York Times
to cover the conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, reporting for which he
won a Pulitzer Prize. Later he went back to New York from Cambodia and ran the
city desk. He pushed reporters to report about the homeless, the poor and the
victims of developers who were forcing families out of their rent-controlled
apartments. But it was not a good time to give a voice to the weak and the poor.
The social movements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War had
dissolved. Alternative publications, including the magazine Ramparts,
which through a series of exposés had embarrassed the established media
organizations into doing real reporting, had gone out of business.
The commercial press had, once again, become lethargic. It had less and less
incentive to challenge the power elite. Many editors viewed Schanberg’s concerns
as relics of a dead era. He was removed as city editor and assigned to write a
column about New York. He used the column, however, to again decry the abuse of
the powerful, especially developers. The then-editor of the paper, Abe
Rosenthal, began to acidly refer to Schanberg as the resident “Commie†and
address him as “St. Francis.†Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost
weekly for lunch along with the paper’s publisher, Arthur “Punch†Sulzberger,
grew increasingly impatient with Schanberg, who was challenging the activities
of their powerful friends. Schanberg became a pariah. He was not invited to the
paper’s table at two consecutive Inner
Circle dinners held for New York reporters. The senior editors and the
publisher did not attend the previews for the film “The Killing Fields,†based
on Schanberg’s experience in Cambodia. His days at the newspaper were numbered.
The city Schanberg profiled in his column did not look like the glossy ads in
Rosenthal’s new lifestyle sections or the Sunday New York Times magazine.
Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of citizens were sleeping on the
streets. It was one where there were lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where
the mentally ill were thrown onto heating grates or into jails like human
refuse. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing. He lost his column
and left the paper to work for New York Newsday and later The Village Voice.
Schanberg’s story was one of many. The best reporters almost always run afoul
of the mandarins above them, a clash that sees them defanged and demoted or
driven out. They are banished by a class of careerists whom the war
correspondent Homer
Bigart dismissed as “the pygmies.†One evening Bigart was assigned to write
about a riot, drawing from the information provided by reporters on the scene.
As one reporter, John Kifner, called in from a phone booth rioters began to
shake it. Kifner relayed the distressing bit of news to Bigart, who, sick of the
needling of his editors, reassumed Kifner with the words: “At least you’re
dealing with sane people.â€
Those who insist on reporting uncomfortable truths always try the patience of
the careerists who manage these institutions. If they are too persistent, as
most good reporters are, they become “a problem.†This battle, which exists in
all newsrooms, was summed up for me by the Los Angeles Times reporter Dial
Torgerson, whom I worked with in Central America until he was killed by a land
mine on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua. “Always remember,†he once
told me of newspaper editors, “they are the enemy.â€
When I met with Schanberg in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side he
told me, “I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance
provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was
not going to the museum. I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would
the Times investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time
was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.â€
But Schanberg also argues, as do I, that newspapers prove a vital bulwark for
a democratic state. It is possible to decry their numerous failings and
compromises with the power elite and yet finally honor them as important to the
maintenance of democracy. Traditionally, if a reporter goes out and reports on
an event, the information is usually trustworthy and accurate. The report can be
slanted or biased. It can leave out vital facts. But it is not fiction. The day
The New York Times and other great city newspapers die, if such a day comes,
will be a black day for the nation.
Newspapers “do more than anyone else, although they left out a lot of
things,†Schanberg said. “There are stories on their blackout list. But it is
important the paper is there because they spend money on what they chose to
cover. Most of the problem of mainstream journalism is what they leave out. But
what they do, aside from the daily boiler plate, press releases and so forth, is
very, very important to the democratic process.â€
“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos
is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,†Schanberg added. “That
is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the
Establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print
texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to
do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are
a positive force. I don’t think The New York Times was ever a fully committed
accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the
phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means
you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it
in your own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers
official Washington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of
the Establishment.â€
“Newspapers do not erase bad things,†Schanberg went on. “Newspapers keep the
swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We
discover the civil rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We
go at it hellbent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been
neglected and treated like half citizens. And then when things calm down it
becomes easy not to do that anymore.â€
The death of newspapers means, as Schanberg points out, that we will lose one
more bulwark holding back the swamp of corporate malfeasance, abuse and lies. It
will make it harder for us as a society to separate illusion from reality, fact
from opinion, reality from fantasy. There is nothing, of course, intrinsically
good about newspapers. We have long been cursed with sleazy tabloids and the
fictional stories of the supermarket press, which have now become the staple of
television journalism. The commercial press, in the name of balance and
objectivity, had always skillfully muted the truth in the name of news or
blotted it out. But the loss of great newspapers, newspapers that engage with
the community, means the loss of one of the cornerstones of our open, democratic
state. We face the prospect, in the very near future, of major metropolitan
cities without city newspapers. This loss will diminish our capacity for
self-reflection and take away the critical tools we need to monitor what is
happening around us.
The leaders of the civil rights movement grasped from the start that without
a press willing to attend their marches and report fairly from their communities
on the injustices they decried and the repression they suffered, the movement
would “have been a bird without wings,†as civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis said.
“Without the media’s willingness to stand in harm’s way and starkly portray
events of the Movement as they saw them unfold, Americans may never have
understood or even believed the horrors that African Americans faced in the Deep
South,†Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, said in 2005 when the House celebrated the
40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. “That commitment to publish the truth
took courage. It was incredibly dangerous to be seen with a pad, a pen, or a
camera in Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia where the heart of the struggle took
place. There was a violent desperation among local and State officials and the
citizens to maintain the traditional order. People wanted to keep their
injustice a secret. They wanted to hide from the critical eye of a disapproving
world. They wanted to flee from the convictions of their own conscience. And
they wanted to destroy the ugly reflection that nonviolent protestors and camera
images so graphically displayed. So when the Freedom Riders climbed off the bus
in Alabama in 1961, for example, there were reporters who were beaten and
bloodied before any of us were.â€
Our political apparatus and systems of information have been diminished and
taken hostage by corporations. Our government no longer responds to the needs or
rights of citizens. We have been left disempowered without the traditional
mechanisms to be heard. Those who battle the corporate destruction of the
ecosystem and seek to protect the remnants of our civil society must again take
to the streets. They have to engage in acts of civil disobedience. But this time
around the media and the systems of communication have dramatically changed.
The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print
who believed the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that
it will be harder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public.
The preoccupation with news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting
will effectively marginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy
established power. Protests, unlike in the 1960s, will have a difficult time
garnering the daily national coverage that characterized the reporting on the
civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and in the end threatened the
power elite. Acts of protest, no longer covered or barely covered, will leap up
like disconnected wildfires, more easily snuffed out or ignored. It will be hard
if not impossible for resistance leaders to have their voices amplified across
the nation, to build a national movement for change. The failings of newspapers
were huge, but in the years ahead, as the last battle for democracy means
dissent, civil disobedience and protest, we will miss them.
