Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?

I read the anguished valedictories to our sinking newspaper industry, the calls for some sort of government bailout or subsidy, with mounting incredulity. It's like hearing the witches in "Macbeth" evoked as if they were the beautiful Aphrodite and her rivals vying for the judgment of Paris.

Sonorous phrases about "public service" mingle with fearful yelps about the "dramatically diminished version of democracy" that looms over America if the old corporate print press goes the way of the steam engine. In The Nation recently, John Nichols and Robert McChesney quavered that "as journalists are laid off and newspapers cut back or shut down, whole sectors of our civic life go dark" and that "journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States."

I came to America in 1973, to the Village Voice, which Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer founded in 1955 to bring light to those whole sectors of civic life kept in darkness by the major newspapers of the day, starting with the New York Times. As a tot I'd been given bracing tutorials about the paradigms of journalism and class power by my father, Claud, who'd founded his newsletter The Week in the 1930s as counterbalance to the awful mainstream coverage. From Europe, I'd already been writing for Kopkind and Ridgeway's Hard Times and also for Ramparts, respectively a newsletter and a monthly founded — like much of the old underground press — to compensate for the ghastly mainstream coverage of the upheavals of the '60s and the Vietnam War.

In other words, any exacting assessment of the actual performance of newspapers rated against the twaddle about the role of the Fourth Estate spouted by publishers and editors at their annual conventions would issue a negative verdict in every era. Of course, there have been moments when a newspaper or a reporter could make fair claims to have done a decent job, inevitably eradicated by a panicky proprietor, a change in ownership, advertiser pressure, eviction of some protective editor or summary firing of the enterprising reporter. By and large, down the decades, the mainstream newspapers have — often rabidly — obstructed and sabotaged efforts to improve our social and political condition.

In an earlier time, writers like Mencken, Hecht and Liebling loved newspapers, but the portentous claims for their indispensable role would have made them hoot with derision, as did the columnist Bernard Levin, decrying in the London Times at the start of the 1980s the notion of a "responsible press": "We are, and must remain, vagabonds and outlaws, for only by so remaining shall we be able to keep the faith by which we live, which is the pursuit of knowledge that others would like unpursued and the making of comment that others would prefer unmade."

But of course, most publishers and journalists are not vagabonds and outlaws, any more than are the profs at journalism schools or the jurors and "boards" servicing the racket known as the Pulitzer industry.

The early and mid-1970s saw a brief flare-up of investigative zeal, but not long after Nixon had been sent packing, Katharine Graham, boss of the Washington Post Company, used the occasion of the annual meeting of the Newspaper Publishers Association to issue a public warning to reporters not to get any uppity ideas about shining too intrusive a searchlight on the way the system works: "The press these days should ... be rather careful about its role. ... We had better not yield to the temptation to ... see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."

Who wanted ugly talk about conspiracy and cover-up when there were broadcasting licenses to be OK'd by the FCC, postage rates to be rewritten and laws to be drafted, such as communications "reform" in 1996.

South of me in Mendocino County, Calif., is the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a weekly edited by my friend Bruce Anderson. I've written a column for it for over 20 years. The AVA does everything a newspaper should do. It covers the county board of supervisors, the court system, the cops, water issues, the marijuana industry. It's fun to read and reminds people of what a real newspaper should be, which is why half its circulation is outside the county, often the other end of the United States.

I asked Bruce about proposed bailouts of the mainstream press: "Do you like these bailout ideas?" "No, I don't. I don't even want them to rest in peace. I want them to twist and turn in their graves eternally. Why? They don't do any local reporting and haven't for about 25 years. I'm talking here about the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, owned by the New York Times Company, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

"With the drought upon us here on North Coast, the Press Democrat has yet to run a coherent account of how precarious our water supplies and delivery systems are. Why? They might get objections from the building industry and the wine industry on which they're almost totally dependent for advertising these days.

"They don't cover the way the place is run and for whom it's run. That is, the board of supervisors, the boards of education, the water districts — all of which we regularly cover with a staff, too. The Chronicle no longer serves any function. It's a museum running reprints of Herb Caen and Art Hoppe."

Does this not remind you of a paper near you? Weep not for all of yesterday's papers, for the old Fourth Estate. The ones that deserve to will make it through — vagabonds and outlaws.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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