Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010

Radical Media Renewal

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM: THE MEDIA REVOLUTION
THAT WILL BEGIN THE WORLD AGAIN
by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
Nation Books, 2010

Review by Paul Buhle

Not long ago, before the Obama administration plunged into the crisis of bad luck and bad decisions that is threatening to wipe out the accumulated hopes of several generations, the "media revolution" sometimes seemed the only topic of public conversation. That is fairly natural, because the commentators are anything but bystanders. Or rather, there are many thousands of journalistic bystanders who lost their jobs and are standing by, blogging and hoping.

Meanwhile, new communications devices seem to appear every week. Adept corporations are set to earn billions of dollars from their sale, but no one really knows what these new gadgets will mean for journalism.

Of all the writers who have tackled these and related issues, Robert McChesney and John Nichols can rightly claim to have the track record that counts. The two of them, respectively a distinguished media scholar (and radio show host) and one of the sharpest political journalists in the United States, have been at the beating heart of Free Press (www.freepress.net) from its inception. This social movement, epitomized by the radio show Democracy Now, was created to fight corporate media domination and the Bushies' effort to quash human rights discussions, and it seems to have peaked in the midst of that administration's blundering bloodthirstiness. The nomination and election of Obama threw a spanner into the works for some months because the worst of the problems, it was hoped, might now be passed. Sad reality: we need this kind of movement as much as ever.

The Death and Life of American Journalism is, at its most innovative, a historical analysis with a programmatic conclusion. So many books on U.S. history have appeared in recent decades that the actual story of journalism has remained a remarkable mystery. McChesney and Nichols reveal the surprising fact that without government subsidies, there would have been no penny press (an innovation way back in the 1820s); no blood and thunder fiction weekly papers (the television or Web of the day) in the 1840s; no vigorous arguing over slavery; and for that matter, no utopian, free love, and women's rights papers.

Forget for the moment that the huge mass of newspapers and, later, magazines, have historically been profit-driven, morally corrupt, racist, and tied to a corrupt two-party system. All the way back to Thomas Jefferson, elements of the elite found a dissenting press useful to themselves and expressive of the democratic promise of the new nation. The Post Office Act of 1792, opening up "Post Roads" across the country (and soon making the Post Office the nation's largest employer), was accompanied by a heavy subsidy of rates for sending printed matter. Printing subsidies of various kinds followed as well.

Go forward to the twentieth century, and newspapers are peaking in circulation with a staggering variety in many languages, local, regional, and national -- not to mention the comic pages (always favorites, along with sports sections). The press of the 1910s featured muckraking revelations of corruption and called for political reform. Again, never mind that by the end of the decade, papers and magazines favoring the U.S. entry to war had been favored, those opposing the war suppressed (mostly by the loss of postal rates, though sometimes by mobs of American Legionnaires wrecking offices and Red Squads dragging staff members off to jail). Subsequent bursts of lively journalism, the scandal sheets of the 1920s, the left-leaning minority of papers (including much of the secular foreign-language press and of the African-American press), foreshadowed the Pentagon Papers' revelations and belated criticism of the CIA by the liberal press.

By the 1980s and ‘90s, of course, the heavily centralized newspaper industry was raking in profits by cutting staffs and news pages while loading up on ads, much to the delight of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton regimes. The opposition press, such as had existed, virtually ceased to exist outside of some weeklies and a handful of left-leaning magazines. The PBS commentaries by Bill Moyers were to the point but after the fact, and as the great newsmen (there were few newswomen) of the World War II generation passed from the scene, they were largely succeeded by centrists like Dan Rather, ever eager for another Democratic-led war, or others with no particular views at all, just an eagerness to get in on the profits. The Right heavily subsidized its own, from the Moonie-funded Washington Times to the neocon Weekly Standard, while liberalism largely disappeared from the pages of reliably hawkish publications such as The New Republic. Meanwhile the margin on the left, including Tikkun, courageously but barely hung on.

Then came the new century and with it the consolidation of the latest media revolution: the Web and all of its ramifications. Actually, that consolidation occupies the first several chapters of The Death and Life of American Journalism, which is admirable for its thoroughgoing rundown of newspaper collapse, monopoly-fed profit gouging among the moguls, and the subsequent sinking sense that the daily press will soon go dead. This is a good treatment but will be more familiar to most readers. What's new is the proposal to do something about it all, a concrete plan that offers a ray of light and lots of room for serious discussion.

The authors advise the careful subsidization of the printed press, support for local competition and diversity among surviving dailies, and the subsidization of opinion magazines by way of postal reductions and special care paid to protect the high school newspapers and assorted media of young people. To make these kinds of developments possible, they propose some government oversight, e.g., in offering a transition from corporate to post-corporate, a term sufficiently vague for all kinds of alternatives, positive and negative. The low-profit, limited-liability corporation (L3C) seems the most promising, because a newspaper, literally paper or not, can take investments as well as grants from foundations. Could this offer a model for the newsroom of the future? Well, maybe. A plausible argument for related alternatives would be National Public Radio, which has doubled its audience during the last decade.

The other proposal centers, inevitably, upon the Web and the democratic use of cyberspace. Vouchers would be made available to operations without any advertising, building upon donations repaid via tax benefits; web-based journalism of the most grassroots kind would be off and running, funded by further vouchers as media sites took hold of a local, regional, or national audience. This "evolutionary force" would, the authors admit, create a great deal of trivia-based "news" and probably Sarah Palin fan clubs as well. McChesney and Nichols offer the hope and expectation that out of this burst of new journalism, good would outweigh bad. Further tax-created funds could be created, they argue, through taxing commercial broadcasting, taxing consumer electronics (as little as 5 percent on new media purchases), taxing advertising, and several other means.

Critics of The Death and Life of American Journalism are certain to point out that ostensibly public broadcast resources such as NPR, to take a crucial case in point, were no less eager to rush into war with Iraq than the New York Times or the conservative papers, and likewise just as eager to embrace the official narratives on a wide range of other issues (these days, notably the misguided offensives in "Afpak"). Progressives were moved to the margins long ago, with a partial exception in the realm of cultural coverage, and show few signs of being permitted back in the door. How do we get beyond the viewpoint of the hegemonic center and near-Right as the "alternatives" that prove "democracy is working"?

Others would opine, no doubt, that the sorry tale of the corporate press, taken with the track record of who guides government programs, is also an unhappy object lesson in social control. Those in power, to judge from the first year of the Obama administration, work just about as effectively in Democratic as Republican outfits, and especially when it comes to openness and accessibility from the Left. Perhaps only an economic-social crisis as large as the Great Depression could prompt changes on the scale necessary; barring that catastrophe, the real elites -- corporate suits and their military-industrial-political partners -- have no reason to agree to the blueprint that the authors lay out. Unsentimental about the printed press except as it serves their interests, and still firmly in control of the political system, these elites make democratic communications proposals daunting to implement.

Still, McChesney and Nichols make a case for media democracy -- a case based on real political experience and plenty of knowledge -- that no one else is likely to make as well. The Death and Life of American Journalism should set off alarm bells and also inspire a new generation of activism. Let's hope so.

Paul Buhle's latest books of nonfiction comic art include The Beats, Studs Terkel's Working: a Graphic Adaptation, and a biographical picture-book, The Art of Harvey Kurtzman. His next comic is entitled Yiddishland.