Is Newspaper Journalism A Museum Piece?

America’s rich people could have saved local journalism — and perhaps democracy. They refused, writes ⁦@Sulliview⁩. https://t.co/bl0HzTHODn

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) May 22, 2021

So here's the question: if newspapers are failing because nobody is reading them, is journalism still important? If you are shouting into a room that is slowly emptying out, should your shouting be supported by...someone?

There’s a reason newspapers are failing, and the reason is simple:  no one is reading them.  How valuable are they, if nobody is paying attention?  Are journalists about to become poets?  Poets are important, but the society doesn’t broadly support them.  Some groups and charities and organizations support the publication and distribution of poetry, but most of us know poetry through its original form:  song.  We pay songwriters and singers large sums, in some cases; but we don’t expect rich people to support poets, even if poets are the curators of language and unacknowledged legislators of the world (poets said that about poets; they didn’t convince many people they were right, aside from other poets.).

I don’t mean to be mercantile or mercenary, but are newspapers essential to American democracy?  Why? Because we associate them with “the press” from the 1st Amendment?

Today people get their news from sources other than the “great newspapers,” or even local newspapers.  I know local papers, and they weren’t mythical engines of Jeffersonian democracy.  Mostly they reinforced the opinions of their readers, and their political preferences.  The Hollywood version of the curmudgeonly newspaper editor/publisher bravely printing “the truth” is as mythological as happy slaves who loved their owners.  Newspapers sold to audiences, and they were keenly aware of who their audience was.

Newspapers also, at least in the days before Pulitzer, were notoriously subjective.  They catered to particular groups, and every group bought the newspaper of their group.  I know from my readings in British literature that into the late 20th century Londoners (especially) classified acceptable from unacceptable (in jest or in truth) by the newspaper they read:  one for Tories, one for Labor; probably another for Liberals.  Amazingly, it didn’t endanger British democracy.  And the multiplicity of newspapers in this country, some written for non-English speaking/reading readers, all with various views on “reality,” didn’t threaten to strangle the American experience in its cradle.

Then came “objective journalism,” which meant to save newspapers from “yellow journalism,” but created a hegemony of its own.

As I type I’m watching a PBS show on the cultural conflicts of art in the Met in NYC.  That is, portrayals of Native Americans from 19th century American art; or the hagiography of, say, George Washington, a figure who is not the shining exemplar to every person who comes to the Met.  History is complicated, culture more so, and people’s reactions to art may challenge your complacency, even your idea of who should be honored, and why.  Fundamentally, to put it in a sentence, Native Americans and blacks don’t see themselves in paintings of George Washington bravely crossing the Delaware or standing with a slave just peeking out of the side of the portrait in the background, a real person represented by a fictional portrayal of an “exotic” type.  Does the presentation of these paintings preserve culture?  Or prohibit other cultures from becoming part of what we consider “culture”? 

Decisions aren’t meant to be hegemonic; but they can be.

“Objective journalism” was meant to save journalism from it’s worst excesses; the excesses we see now on FoxNews, and worse on Newsmax, and worse still on OAN.  But there are counters to these on the internet, and most of them are trying to promote journalism, not just repeat the reporting (or the press releases) of others.  Is this journalism?  Many of these sites struggle to monetize their offerings; but if people are getting their news there rather than through newspapers, should we preserve journalism in the ways we preserve Egyptian and Greco-Roman art?

I’m watching a woman from Jamaica talk of trying to find her ancestry, in history and in art.  Her ancestors are anonymous, because the records of them did not name them.  Art provides her some opportunity; but what, she says, of mathematics, science, engineering, that came out of Africa, came from her ancestors?  Will the NYT or WaPo provide that perspective?

I ask partly to challenge the point of view of the editorship of those newspapers.  The Times editors notoriously clashed with Molly Irvins, a clash hardly on the scale of correcting the near-erasure of non-white people from the history and culture promoted by white people.  But still, if Molly Irvins has proven more popular and accessible than the NYT, if her work did not contribute to the Whitewater non-scandal, or the “weapons of mass destruction” lies that justified invading Iran (both major NYT stories; both majorly wrong), aren’t we better of with her independent voice?  Is there any argument there for preserving the NYT, or any newspaper, just because it is “journalism”?

There’s not an argument for killing it there; but this isn’t “either/or“. It’s “Are newspapers really all that important?”  Nobody seems to be asking rich people to preserve CNN, or MSNBC, or Talking Points Memo or Raw Story.  Are newspapers really uniquely important?  “Press” in the 1st Amendment did mean newspapers, because a press was how they were printed.  We’ve long ago expanded the idea to sources of information that have no relationship to, or need of, any kind of printing press at all.  Are newspapers still sacred democratic objects which must be preserved, even if it means creating a kind of museum with money to keep them alive?

Why?

Apart from the monetary issue (if nobody’s paying for it, how valuable can it be?), which I don’t think is determinative (whether you buy a translation of Beowulf or not, it’s still an important work of literature), there’s the question of cultural value.  Poets were once the voices, literally,of their communities.  The scop would tell the stories of the tribes who listened in the mead halls; would entertain and teach and enlighten.  In Ireland poets were second only to the leaders in importance and authority.  They were the ones who knew, and who could explain, predict, analyze and elucidate, guide and judge.  They were crucial to their culture.

Not anymore.  

Maybe that’s where ‘objective journalism’ is going.  That doesn’t mean we are doomed to a future of Peter Doocys and Glenn Greenwalds, a world dominated by FoxNews and OAN.  Most people, despite what the internet says, don’t watch FoxNews and don’t want their information about the world, about government, about society and art and culture, to come from narrowly slanted sources.  But we’ve found our images and narratives of unity in literature (better in Whitman than in Fenimore Cooper, better in Twain than in Wharton), in spite of a lack of national opinion shaped by “paragons of reporting” like two major newspapers (and why are two alone sufficient to the task?  Shouldn’t we charitably support more than that?  Or is “survival of the fittest” best fitted to really large and financially stable newspapers, who just need the farm teams to be supported by someone else?).  Won’t we continue to find them, if we the people need them?

I remember the halcyon days of magazines.  My mother read several; we were a “Life” magazine household (you either read “Life” or “Look,” in my experience).  I had a subscription to “TIME” in high school, and then “Rolling Stone.”  I subscribed to Harper’s for years, keeping it up after a benefactor stepped in and saved the magazine by paying the bills because the readership just wasn’t enough to save it.  But I haven’t read Harpers for nearly two decades, and I don’t get any news or analysis from magazines anymore.  I stopped reading newspapers decades ago, too.  I used to get my news from television, and then NPR.  Now, mostly, I use internet sources.  Am I endangering democracy?  Do the newspapers I don’t read really matter anymore?

Maybe the national papers; but the local ones have been failing throughout my life time.  Dallas once had three papers; my father took one, because he wouldn’t read the other.  Both were “objective” in their journalism, but one was more conservative on its editorial page than the other.  He preferred the former.  Houston had two papers; it’s been a one-paper town for decades.  Mostly because two papers can’t make any money in these towns; the one paper in each can barely stay afloat.  Are they providing important information?  I can get most of that information from my local NPR station now.  Should local papers be preserved even if no one reads them?

What service to democracy is that?

Jesus Christ, just blow up the Tower and be done with it. https://t.co/tsf7paHYRl

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) May 22, 2021