{"id":1985,"date":"2022-03-10T21:38:19","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T02:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/18.217.136.120\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2024-10-11T10:12:59","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T15:12:59","slug":"news-media-chattering-classes-and-a-phantom-public","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/?p=1985","title":{"rendered":"News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Posted on March 26th, 2022 by Jim Sleeper<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Let me \u201cunload\u201d more than a bit with this longer-than-usual introduction to thematic sections on this website, in this case a section containing pieces about what\u2019s happening to the American public sphere in which I\u2019ve worked (and which I\u2019ve criticized) for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American newspapers began dying years ago, not mainly because of the sins of journalists (although there are plenty), but owing to seismic shifts in technology, ownership, marketing, reader demographics, and the civil society from which journalists come and which we claim to strengthen, even when we\u2019re also serving ourselves. The shifts I\u2019ve just mentioned are transforming civil society and \u201cthe public\u201d into a kaleidoscope of fragmented consumer audiences, assembled and dis-assembled by media corporations on whatever pretexts \u2014 ideological, religious, erotic, or nihilist \u2014 will draw more consumers\u2019 eyeballs and, with them, advertisers, and, with them<\/em>, bigger profits and shareholder dividends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As publishers and editors dumb down the news or tarted it up on such pretexts, newspapers and news programs deserve<\/em> the deaths they\u2019d been dying through not fault of their own. \u201cDemocracy Dies in Darkness,\u201d warns The Washington Post<\/em>, owned by Amazon founder and outer-space bounder Jeff Bezos. But democracy dies also in a deluge of glaring, cacophonous messages that treat citizens as impulse-driven consumers or worse. \u201cThe challenge of journalism is to survive the pressure cooker of plutocracy,\u201d said Bill Moyers \u2014 who began his adult life as a Baptist minister, became Lyndon Johnson\u2019s press secretary, and has been a true practitioner of journalism as a civic craft \u2014 in his acceptance speech <\/strong><\/a>upon receiving the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, at The New York Public Library in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
Moyers and I have corresponded over the years; Moyers & Co.<\/em> published some of my columns, including this one,<\/a> on Trump. Here\u2019s another.<\/a>)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Journalism is the only private industry named (as \u201cthe press\u201d) in the U.S. Constitution\u2019s First Amendment, which was written to protect self-governing citizens from repression by government. But the arts and disciplines of self-government need protection also from business corporations that have become almost as powerful as governments and often even more so. \u201cThe press\u201d itself \u2014 including digital speech platforms \u2014 is still housed in media corporations whose main interest is not to enlighten a deliberating public<\/em> but to assemble and dis-assemble mere audiences<\/em> in whatever way will boost profits most quickly. That\u2019s their main incentive, even (and sometimes especially) when it makes public life go badly<\/em> in ways that bypass our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and our wallets. Impulse buying, not civic strength, is most of corporate journalism\u2019s Holy Grail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under such conditions, government censorship in America is less dangerous to good journalism than <\/strong>what media critic John Keane calls \u201cmarket censorship,\u201d<\/a> <\/strong>the profit-crazed abduction of journalists from serving \u201cthe public\u2019s right to know\u201d to \u201cgiving the people what they want,\u201d instead. This is done by following a perversely uncivil model of what many of \u201cthe people\u201d can be groped and goosed into wanting <\/em>\u2014 including wanting to be lied to with simplistic but comforting fables about who to blame for their unhappiness and who to follow to \u201cfix it.\u201d In speech platforms like Facebook, the public\u2019s right to know is effectively market-censored by feedback loops of conspiracy-mongering, bigotry, and worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partly that\u2019s because platforms like Facebook insist, and market-worshipping jurisprudence affirms, that The First Amendment protects not only individual citizens\u2019 right to stand against a stampeding herd but also media managers\u2019 \u201cright\u201d to be mindlessly herd-driving and money-grubbing, in ways and for reasons I present in the following pieces. Fable-spinners on Fox News or MSNBC have ideologies, not just market interests, but, as Eric Alterman showed scathingly on his site \u201cAltercations,\u201d at The American Prospect<\/em>, <\/a><\/strong>even \u201cmainstream\u201d news organizations such as CBS News (whose former chairman Les Moonves said that Trump\u2019s rise \u201cmay not be good for America, but it\u2019s damn good for CBS<\/em>\u201d) hire professional liars as on-air news analysts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital social media have accelerated and intensified the deluge of misinformation and disinformation, as Richard L. Hasen explains well<\/a><\/strong> in a column that also recommends necessary legislative, jurisdictional, and civic curbs on a lot of what passes for \u201cfree speech.\u201d But it\u2019s equally true that the deluge of deception has been decisive ever since the emergence of mass-circulation daily newspapers in the 1890s. The Spanish-American war of 1898 and the grip of McCarthyite anti-Communist hysteria on American politics in the mid-1950s are only two examples of how the supposedly venerable gate-keepers of honest media misled readers and betrayed democracy itself. (See my Washington Spectator <\/em>essay, re-published by Newsweek<\/em>, \u201cDon\u2019t Blame Social Media for Fake News. Mainstream Media Got There First,\u201d<\/a><\/strong> and my review <\/a><\/strong>of Dean Starkman\u2019s book (pictured at the top of this section), The Watchdog That Didn\u2019t Bark.<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a tragedy in the classical sense that tragic figures \u2014 in this case, publishers, editors, and a few too many reporters \u2014 hasten their doom by the ways they\u2019re trying to escape it. We need journalists who are paid well enough and protected well enough from market pressures to keep on telling \u201cthe public\u201d not user-friendly lies that keep people reading and watching for all the wrong reasons, but hard truths that uphold the civic-republican fairness and accuracy which business-corporate moguls and their bureaucracies can\u2019t be trusted to sustain, any more than corrupt governments can be trusted to sustain. No state-directed or market-driven or bureaucratic-corporate model can substitute for the skills, resources, courage, and public trust that make journalism fair, accurate, and essential to freedom. If myopic jurisprudence and shareholder-driven priorities deplete those skills, resources, and trust while handing huge megaphones to corporations that leave civic-minded citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard, then Trump was right: Too much of what Facebook and CBS News present as news is<\/em> \u201cfake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although I was a student co-editor of my high school newspaper in 1964 and will always be grateful to its faculty advisor, John F.X. Lynch, for teaching me good values and habits, my journalism began in earnest in the mid-1970s,<\/a><\/strong> when I was in my mid-20s and newspapers were still trusted as carriers of democratic hope. From the civil-rights movement\u2019s finest hours in the early 1960s through the Watergate exposes of 1973, more than a few journalists and news organizations stood tall as tribunes of the public, as trusted resources for citizen vigilance against elected officials\u2019 and business leaders\u2019 mishandlings of public trust. Televised imagery of civil-rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War, produced and presented by practitioners of journalism as a civic craft, pierced through fogs of official rationalizations and lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When such journalism exposes public corruption and private \u201cspecial interests\u201d that are hobbling popular sovereignty, it also exposes, indirectly but inevitably, some publishers, editors and reporters who\u2019ve become sycophants to the established, corrupted forces whose investors\u2019 interests effectively run their news organizations and platforms. Trump knew that a lot of \u201cnews\u201d was \u201cfake\u201d in that way because it takes one to know one. But many Americans know it, too, only because they haven\u2019t been seduced into the networking and pirouetting that market censorship demands of many of the journalists it hires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1970s, journalists and readers who were still independent minded and \u201ccivic\u201d supported \u201calternative\u201d newspapers and magazines that provided critical information and civic-republican clues missing from most mainstream media. I remember rushing to newsstands in Boston and New York on Wednesday evenings or Thursday mornings in the early 1970s to buy copies of The Village Voice <\/em>as it tumbled off delivery trucks, bearing exposes of wrongdoing unearthed by muckrakers Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett and scathing critiques of journalism itself by Alexander Cockburn in his \u201cPress Clips\u201d column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1982 I was thrilled to become one of them, a writer of Voice<\/em> exposes and interpretations, after doing something similar for The Harvard Crimson<\/em><\/a><\/strong>(where I met the future national journalists Nicholas Lemann, Jonathan Alter, and others) and for The Boston Phoenix<\/em>, where Joe Klein, Sidney Blumenthal, Janet Maslin, and other national journalists also got their starts, thanks to The Phoenix\u2019s<\/em> editor, Bill Miller. Later, when I worked for daily newspapers in New York, I owed a lot to the wise, principled guidance of publishers such as Steven L. Isenberg and editors such as James Klurfeld and Anthony Marro at Newsday. <\/em>(A few of my Voice<\/em>, Phoenix, Newsday, and Daily News <\/em>pieces are on this site\u2019s sections, \u201cLeaders and Misleaders\u201d and \u201cScoops and Revelations.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the 1990s, editors and writers at websites, such as\u00a0Salon<\/em>\u00a0editors David Daley and, now, Andrew O\u2019Hehir, have fused wise public judgment with passionate advocacy, without descending into ranting or propaganda. Non-profit, online community journalism has been vindicated in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale\u2019s hometown, by\u00a0Paul J. Bass, founder of\u00a0The New Haven Independent<\/em><\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>whose model and methods should be studied and adapted by journalists everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"New<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

New Haven Independent<\/em> founder and editor Paul Bass at New Haven City Hall. (Brad Horrigan \/ Hartford Courant)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another public practitioner of journalism as a civic craft who reaches beyond the class-bounded interests of corporate reporters is Alissa Quart, who directs the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. This non-profit journalism organization that covers inequalities of social class that so often exclude actual voices and perspectives of daycare providers, gig workers, opiod addicts, homeless people, and even labor and community organizers from most reportage and commentary. Even when such people are quoted or depicted by Ivy League reporters who\u2019ve never really been Squeezed <\/em>in ways that Quart describes in her book by that title or Bootstrapped<\/em> in ways she discusses in her forthcoming book, they need to and can <\/em>participate in the practice of journalism itself as a civic craft. Quart makes that case also in her Columbia Journalism Review<\/em> essay, \u201cLet\u2019s make journalism work for those not born into an elite class.\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Alissa<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Alissa Quart<\/strong> <\/a>Alchetron, The Free \u2026alchetron.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When digital production began to run circles around established journalism, many observers celebrated the Internet\u2019s instantaneity and interactivity as the liberation of news gathering and commentary. But journalism\u2019s essential (and classical) virtues \u2014 of courage, persistence, creativity, and tough-minded, public-serving optimism \u2014 can be short-circuited and misdirected if journalists have ingested the steroid of profit-crazed, tech-driven sensationalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the alternative models that I\u2019ve just mentioned have struggled and sometimes prevailed, rising practitioners like Bass, O\u2019Hehir, and Quart and veterans of print journalism\u2019s supposed glory days have watched the souffle-like collapse of many proud dailies into witless titillation machines chained to conglomerate bean counters. We\u2019ve also experienced the corporate consolidation and co-optation of alternative weeklies and websites. The challenges to all news organizations aren\u2019t coming only from the deluge of tech-enabled, unfiltered, self-indulgent, ignorant, and anti-civic clickbait. They\u2019re essentially corporate<\/em>, coming from media executives\u2019 and managers\u2019 obsession with boosting their own and shareholders\u2019 dividends in whatever ways will glue customers\u2019 eyeballs to their screens and pages and to advertisers\u2019 come-ons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Publishers\u2019 and editors\u2019 political priorities, too, may hobble a website\u2019s fairness as decisively as they do a print publication\u2019s, (For example, another thematic section on this website, \u201cIsrael\u2019s Tragedy, America\u2019s Folly,\u201d presents the texts of columns that I wrote for Talking Points Memo between 2007 and 2010, but those columns disappeared \u2014 along with other TPM columns about Israel by M.J. Rosenberg and Bernard Avishai. TPM founder and editor Joshua Micah Marshall proved unable or unwilling to restore or to account for these disappearances.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Any newsroom can be a hothouse-cum-snake pit of frazzled journalists who are competing with one another as often as they\u2019re collaborating. That was as true at many of the old print-newspapers as it is at many news outlets now. But many people became journalists in the first place back then not just to see their own names in print but to master what the media critic Jay Rosen, in What Are Journalists For?<\/em>, describes as a civic craft that helps to make public life go well by strengthening public vigilance and intelligence, not paranoia and ignorance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with Paul Bass in New Haven, another master and eloquent defender of this civic craft is Dean Starkman,<\/a><\/strong> a former Wall Street Journal<\/em> reporter who meticulously, fairly documented the American business press\u2019 failures to report the oncoming train wreck of the 2008 national financial meltdown. Dean told hard truths about those failures, writing as a managing editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, <\/em>where I first read him. He told those truths again in The Watchdog That Didn\u2019t Bark,<\/em> which I reviewed <\/a><\/strong>for Dissent <\/em>magazine under a headline, \u201cReporting for the Republic\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hosted Dean Starkman at Yale,<\/a><\/strong> as I did Paul Bass, in my seminar on \u201cJournalism, Liberalism, and Democracy\u201d and, with Dean, at a class of future business leaders at the Yale School of Management. He shared his understanding of the difference between \u201caccountability\u201d journalism, which requires dogged investigation of entities that don\u2019t want to be investigated, and mere \u201caccess\u201d journalism, in which reporters expend too much of their talent on stroking powerful hands that feed them stories that are marketable but unenlightening. Dean has since worked with The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists,<\/a><\/strong> which carries accountability journalism far and wide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dean Starkman: Truth above \u2018Access\u2019<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

No one intuited the priorities of profit-chasing news organizations better than Ronald Reagan, who built his political career partly by playing self-righteously on journalists\u2019 weaknesses even while castigating ratings-obsessed media for taking the bait of sensational-sounding stories that \u201csell papers.\u2019 Here\u2019s Reagan, talking with some of my Yale classmates in 1967, <\/a><\/strong>blaming journalism for distorting public understanding in ways that he himself had been distorting it since the 1940s. Both Reagan and the press were equally to blame for this dance of the damned. The same was true of Trump and the press decades later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can journalism as a civic craft outrun this circus? The newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann doubted that it could, explaining, as early as the 1920s, why mass media were unlikely to generate anything more than \u201cmanufactured consent\u201d from a busy, distracted, and often gullible \u201cbuying public.\u201d The challenges facing public truth are much older and deeper than those driven by manufacturing and buying. I can\u2019t resist citing Edward Gibbon\u2019s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire<\/em> to convey my apprehensions about what has become of American journalism since the end of the Cold War and of the relatively egalitarian material opportunities that had followed the victory against fascism in World War II. Gibbon could have been anticipating our condition now when he wrote that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished\u2026. [T]hey no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command\u2026. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026 A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste. The sublime Longinus\u2026 laments this degeneracy of his contemporaries\u2026. \u2018In the same manner,\u2019 says he, \u2018as some children always remain pygmies, whose infant limbs have been too closely confined, thus our tender minds, fettered by the prejudices and habits of a just servitude, are unable to expand themselves, or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the ancients.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gibbon had his own 18th-century political agendas and prejudices. But several founders of the American republic had read him before they wrote the Constitution, so they knew that a polity needs to guard against slow and secret poisons. What they didn\u2019t reckon with effectively was the reality that only some of those poisons come from government and that they aren\u2019t slow or secret. Here are my accounts of some of the consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A creeping coup, a sleeping news media<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cManufactured Consent,\u201d<\/a> The Washington Monthly<\/em>, March, 2001. American news media\u2019s mishandling of the 2000 election and of the prospects for responsible civil disobedience at that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NY Times Reporters Lost a Connecticut Senate Race, Even Though \u2018Their\u2019 Candidate Won, <\/a><\/strong>Nov. 4, 2006. Ned Lamont (later Connecticut\u2019s governor) was running against Sen. Joe Lieberman partly to protest his support for the Iraq War. NYT reporters had gotten a bit too comfy with folksy Joe, and it showed in their journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Leon Wieseltier\u2019s Fall Showed About Washington\u2019s Chattering Classes<\/a><\/strong>, AlterNet,<\/em> Nov. 2011. For one thing, it revealed that they take war-mongering like his less seriously than groping. Wieseltier wasn\u2019t wrong to warn that sometimes liberals must take up the gun and fight, but he was wrong to live for and in those times. Washington didn\u2019t notice or object. His mild, mannered sexism mattered more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wieseltier, honored by Brandeis University<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


\u201cEnough With the F***ing Rich Kids.\u201d<\/strong> <\/a>The tragedy of The New Republic<\/em> in 2012-2014, when it was owned by Chris Hughes, a wunderkind of commodification. Salon, <\/em>December 9, 2014. Hughes and his kind didn\u2019t misread what journalism, politics and capitalism in America are becoming. They read it only too well. Like so many other young, market-molded Americans, they don\u2019t understand how the perversion of public life by tsunamis of marketing, financing and technological innovation has overwhelmed thoughtful writing, reading and the habits of mind and heart that sustain republican deliberation and institutions. (I don\u2019t suggest that The New Republic <\/em>was a better champion of America\u2019s civic-republican ethos when it was owned by Martin Peretz,<\/strong> <\/a>even though I wrote for it (and \u201caround\u201d Peretz\u2019s prejudices) then.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rupert vs. the Republic<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Between June, 2007, when Rupert Murdoch\u2019s bid to buy The Wall Street Journal<\/em> from Dow Jones was briefly in doubt \u2014 and August, when it became clear that he would take possession by the end of the year \u2014 I wrote four columns cautioning, cajoling, assailing, and ultimately despairing of journalists who were becoming Murdoch\u2019s apologists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Should American Journalism Make Us Americans?<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I wrote this Discussion Paper for Harvard\u2019s Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics, and Public Policy when I was a fellow there in 1998. In it I argue that conglomerate news media are more interested in niche marketing to new immigrant groups than in guiding and prodding the newcomers toward full citizenship. It\u2019s as if corporate bean-counters have displaced civic leaders at the helms of these news organizations, letting down immigrants by lavishing upon them the soft bigotry of low expectations of them as citizens. To understand what\u2019s at risk for the country, read this account of how news organizations sometimes welcomed \u2014 and challenged \u2014 immigrants more constructively and less opportunistically on bottom-lining terms than they do now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberals color the news,<\/a> and conservatives lie about it openly<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In 2002, reviewing William McGowan\u2019s book Coloring the News,<\/em> in which he challenged corporate newsrooms\u2019 cookie-cutter, \u201cdiversity\u201d-driven coding of hiring reporters and assigning them stories unofficially but effectively by race-and surname, I endorsed many of McGowan\u2019s criticisms but cautioned against overdoing them. In 2011, he really did overdo them in Gray Lady Down, <\/em>his conservative-funded, ideologically driven attack on the admittedly flawed New York Times, <\/em>prompting me to take down his take-down,<\/strong> <\/a>not so much to defend the Times <\/em>as to defend journalism more broadly against what I characterized as \u2018ressentiment\u2019 that was insinuating itself into reporting and commentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(An editor at the Columbia Journalism Review<\/em> called other journalists\u2019 attention to my warnings.<\/a><\/strong> As it turned out, George Soros and I were saying very similar things<\/a><\/strong> at that time about the public sphere\u2019s vulnerabilities.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exposing a columnist\u2019s primary colors.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Memory and judgment, not \u201cproof,\u201d led me to decide in 1996 that Joe Klein, a prominent columnist and TV pundit, was also Anonymous, the unnamed author of the novel Primary Colors, <\/em>a roman a clef<\/em> about Bill Clinton and his circle. I first identified Klein that way to William Powers, the Washington Post\u2019s<\/em> media columnist (the relevant column is the second item on this pdf<\/a><\/strong>). In a subsequent column of my own, I insisted on the validity of my finding, even though most journalists still accepted Klein\u2019s vehement denials that he was the novelist. I couldn\u2019t persuade anyone to publish yet another column of mine that began, \u201cMay I remind Joe \u2018I didn\u2019t do it\u2019 Klein of O.J. Simpson\u2019s vow that he will \u2018leave no stone unturned\u2019 until he finds Nicole Brown Simpson\u2019s killer?\u2026. If Klein didn\u2019t write Primary Colors,<\/em> let him devote his far-more-considerable investigative skills to finding its author.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only when another reporter discovered a paper manuscript of Klein\u2019s novel with his own handwriting on it did Klein confess vindicating my claim. Why had I been so sure of his authorship, despite his denials? Having read and admired many of Klein\u2019s columns in New York <\/em>magazine in the late 1980s, I hadn\u2019t forgotten his characteristic locutions and obsessions about liberals and race. So I noticed them when some of them popped up in the novel \u2014 as, for example, when he punctuated his account of some politically correct absurdity by writing, simply, \u201cYikes!\u201d Then I saw a column in the Baltimore Sun<\/em> by David Kusnet, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, that expressed similar suspicions, so I read Klein\u2019s novel again and more of his locutions leapt off of its pages. It was then that I called the Post\u2019s <\/em>Powers, who wrote about the \u201cKusnet\/Sleeper theory\u201d of authorship. That prompted Klein to leave me an exasperated voice-mail message: \u201cJim, I don\u2019t have a patent on the word \u2018Yikes\u2019!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, maybe so. We were in a gray area, where I \u201cknew\u201d a truth in my bones thanks only to good memory, some literary acumen, some political judgment, and some circumstantial evidence. When Klein finally told the truth at a press conference with the novel\u2019s publisher, Random House\u2019s Harry Evans, I faced him wordlessly from the crowd of reporters. And, in a Wall Street Journal<\/em> column (linked here <\/a><\/strong>with the Powers column), I offered my interpretation of why he\u2019d lied so vigorously, and at what cost to journalism and politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Washington\u2019s punditocracy, \u2018status\u2019 is achieved at the unspoken cost of self-esteem.<\/a><\/strong> If you want to present the whole truth in primary colors, you may also want to be anonymous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An early storm warning about moralism and arrogance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Also in the realm of predictions based on memory and judgment, I wrote somewhat nastily about journalism itself for the first time in a Daily News<\/em> column in 1994, <\/a><\/strong>predicting that the New York Times\u2019<\/em> then-editorial-page editor Howell Raines would cause problems for the paper and journalism generally. I said it again at length in 1997 in Liberal Racism,<\/em> in the chapter called \u201cMedia Myopia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But not until 10 years after my News<\/em> column was Raines brought down, partly by the scandalously false reporting of a young Times <\/em>reporter, Jayson Blair. Raines is a great journalist with great flaws, including but not limited his a penitential Southern anti-racism that can get so tangled up in itself that it clouds realistic judgments upon which true justice always has to rely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time of Raines\u2019 editorial demise in the Blair affair, I was no longer at the Daily News<\/em> but couldn\u2019t resist writing an \u201cI told you so\u201d column in the Hartford Courant<\/em> (it comes after the Daily News<\/em> column in the link above) that was widely linked and reprinted. It even wound up in The Jerusalem Post,<\/em> edited at the time by Bret Stephens, whose neo-con\u2019ish, McGowan-like inclinations inclined him to highlight a crisis at a liberal newspaper such as the Times<\/em> \u2013 which later hired Stephens, when it was running scared of conservative competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve defended and even celebrated Times <\/em>writers and editors who\u2019ve kept the better, harder faith. See \u201cWho Needs the New York Times? We all do. Still.\u201d<\/a><\/strong> It ran in TPM and was read widely by journalists at the time, but it was one of a raft of columns by me and other contributors that disappeared from that website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cheapest kind of flattery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Commentaries that break new ideas rather than news are more easily stolen that news itself. Not long after I\u2019d written this Washington Post <\/em>review of Marshall Frady\u2019s biography of Jesse Jackson,<\/a><\/strong> 18 paragraphs of my review wound up under someone else\u2019s byline a few weeks later in the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>. The reasons were instructive, if depressing. My Hartford Courant<\/em> column reflecting on them, partly in light of the Jayson Blair debacle, is the second column on this pdf.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Running scared of right-wing \u201cnoise\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When New York Times <\/em>publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. hired the neo-conservative field marshal and propagandist William Kristol as an opinion-age columnist in 2007, I sensed that Sulzberger was running scared of The Wall Street Journal\u2019<\/em>s new owner, Rupert Murdoch.<\/a><\/strong> Certainly the Times<\/em> needed sharp conservative commentators who can keep-liberal readers on their toes, but Kristol was the opposite of sharp, and his tenure there was mercifully short. Bret Stephens is much sharper than Kristol was, but no less propagandistic. Ross Douthat is more broad-ranging and engaging there, but he\u2019s so often obsessed with blaming social ills on liberal domination that I diagnosed him for the History News Network<\/em><\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/em>as a walking casualty of IDS \u2014 Ideological Displacement Syndrome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Book reviewing as ideological policing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The journalist Nicholas von Hoffman once told me that he\u2019d given up reviewing books because he\u2019d decided that \u201cIt\u2019s not worth $250 to make an enemy for life.\u201d Even just assigning and editing other writers\u2019 book reviews can earn book-review editors some enemies for life, and that danger inclines some editors and some favored, \u201creliable\u201d reviewers to cozy up to one another in unspoken ways, when it comes to picking and choosing their prospective battles \u201csafely\u201d as books and reviewers are assigned. Some book-review sections come to resemble clubhouses or royal courts, in which editors bestow assignments on reviewers who anticipate and follow their preferences instead of ruffling their feathers. Is the author of a book that\u2019s being considered for a review \u201cin good odor\u201d with the review editor? is the author acceptable ideologically? There are fairer ways to assess a book\u2019s merits and to assign reviewers to assess them. But some editors decide on the basis of the narrower inclinations and prejudices that I\u2019ve just mentioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I exposed such difficulties in this 2007 Nation<\/em> magazine <\/strong>broadside<\/a> against The New York Times Book Review,<\/em><\/strong> which, under editor Sam Tanenhaus, a self-described \u201csympathetic observer\u201d of conservatism, was running a steady stream of negative reviews of books by critics of the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007, as the reality of America\u2019s grand misadventure there was moving from triumphal to inexcusable. One day I told Tanenhaus\u2019 deputy editor Barry Gewen that the NYTBR<\/em> had become \u201ca war-hawks\u2019 damage-control gazette.\u201d Even a publication with a broad reach and civic mission will have some distinctive editorial preferences (and strengths and weaknesses), but my Nation<\/em> piece showed pretty damningly that the Times<\/em> had gone too far in favor of excusing the war and bashing its critics. By showcasing pro-war reviewers such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Brookhiser, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, and David Brooks, the NYTBR <\/em>fed public antipathy to presumptively feckless opponents of the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Guardian,<\/em> in 2007. I assessed editor Tannenhaus\u2019 writerly and political record<\/a>.<\/strong> Not long afterward, the NYTBR <\/em>seemed to adjust its course in a special issue on politics, publishing a better mix of reviewers of non-fiction, political books. At that time, I wrote a column acknowledging what seemed a welcome shift in the section\u2019s balance. <\/a><\/strong>But, even as late as 2009, deputy editor Gewen, who had essentially assigned and edited the Iraq War reviews, hadn\u2019t let go of his own inclination to skew them in favor of the war.<\/a><\/strong> Eventually I reported, in this 2020 review for The New Republic<\/em> of NYTBR<\/em> deputy editor Barry Gewen\u2019s intellectual biography of Henry Kissinger<\/a><\/strong>, that although Tanenhaus was ultimately responsible for assigning books to reviewers, the books whose reviews I\u2019d assailed had indeed been previewed and selected by Gewen, who had edited all of those reviews. (He edited some of mine on subjects unrelated to foreign policy in the 1990s, such as the pitfalls in American multiculturalism<\/a><\/strong>, and such as conservative mis-readings of Allan Bloom <\/a><\/strong>in their attacks on universities. But, during the Iraq War, we went our separate ways.) \u202f\u202f\u202f<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where to?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Given how I\u2019ve spent the last 40 years, I plead guilty to having expected more of journalism than it can deliver on its own. But in the next thematic section, \u201cScoops and Revelations,\u201d I recount some of my journalistic triumphs that I dare say did help to make public life go well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, journalists draw upon and reflect the strengths (and weaknesses) of the deeper (or shallower) civic culture that they serve (or dis-serve). \u201cThe public\u2019s right to know\u201d can become a meaningless slogan for journalism\u2019s mission if the public is demanding to be lied to because millions of its members are stressed and dispossessed enough to crave simple directions for scapegoating others and following Leaders. When Trump called journalism \u201cfake news,\u201d he was anticipating bad journalism\u2019s acceleration of such desperation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But journalism fails that way only after subtler poisons have stupefied its readers and viewers. For that, I blame the deluge of commercially over-determined, algorithmically driven, hollow \u201cspeech\u201d by conglomerates, only some of which are in the business of journalism itself. I\u2019ve outlined this challenge in the essays \u201cSpeech Defects,\u201d<\/a><\/strong> in The Baffler,<\/em> and \u201cHow Hollow Speech Enables Hostile Speech,\u201d<\/a> <\/strong>in The Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted on March 26th, 2022 by Jim Sleeper Let me \u201cunload\u201d more than a bit with this longer-than-usual introduction to thematic sections on this website, in this case a section containing pieces about what\u2019s happening to the American public sphere in which I\u2019ve worked (and which I\u2019ve criticized) for decades. American newspapers began dying years ago, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4721,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/4721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}