Re: [Marxism] Winners and losers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I suspect something else is involved here in this editorial.  The key 
> might be in
> the opening statement: "I've heard it said that I should try, just once, 
> to write
> something upbeat."

Speaking of NY Times pressure on journalists, I strongly urge everyone to 
look for John Hess's "My Times: a Memoir of Dissent". Hess is a national 
treasure. For over 25 years at least, he has been a strong voice of the 
left. Most recently he has been contributing commentaries on the Pacifica 
evening news in a quavery voice as befits his advanced years, but with 
polished steel in the words. Here's the introduction:

Hold the press. As these pages go to the printers, the world of journalism 
is transfixed by the drama at The New York Times. Its integrity has come 
under challenge, most severely within the paper itself, and its two chief 
editors have been obliged to resign. As an old Timesman myself, I was 
saddened, and bemused. Clearly, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd had committed 
a misjudgment in nurturing a pathological blowhard. But Jayson Blair's 
misdeeds, as recounted at staggering length, caused no real harm to 
anything but the credibility of the Times. Ironically, the sin that led the 
list of his trespasses was a fictitious description of the farm where Pfc. 
Jessica Lynch lived. So? But the Lynch saga did matter. It helped to 
glorify a preemptive war (which the Times supported), and it was a fiction 
from beginning to end. She was not caught in an ambush, not wounded in an 
exchange of fire, not abused by her captors, not rescued by gallant 
commandos; she had fallen from a truck and was cared for kindly by Iraqi 
doctors, who managed with difficulty to deliver her to nervous American 
troops. The Times did penance for its false sketch of the Lynch farm, but 
not for its role in relaying the Lynch saga. The BBC broadcast a day-by-day 
account of the preposterous fabulation, all citing unidentified sources in 
the Pentagon, but finally concluded that it was a put-up job. A Times 
article angrily accused the BBC of charging a conspiracy, and demanded that 
it produce documentary evidence. Just so, during this internal agony of 
soul-searching, the Times continued to feature the possible discoveries of 
suspected weapons of mass destruction by unidentified informants to 
anonymous sources who confided in Judith Miller.

Surely, Raines and Boyd meant well. Most Times people mean to do well, and 
sometimes they do well, but they still don't quite get it. That's what this 
book is about, so let me get on with it. As I was about to say?

For my sins, my first assignment at The New York Times was to edit Fin-Biz 
copy, which was so slugged after the hostile merger of two news desks, 
Financial and Business, whose jurisdictions were never clear; it had 
sometimes happened that both would report the same event on the same page. 
One day a sports editor and I spent a lunch break debating which of us had 
to cope with more appalling material. My colleague called it a scoreless 
tie, then conceded a point. He said he'd asked a friend who was a bank 
officer what he thought of the Times's business coverage. The banker 
replied that it was excellent, authoritative?"except in banking, where they 
don't know their ass from first base."
That is the conventional view in a capsule: The Times is great, except on 
anything one happens to know something about. It dominates even those who 
should know better, like the authors of the unintentionally devastating 
biography of the Times Family, discussed in Chapter Four. As I note 
therein, the Times was never "the greatest newspaper in the world," nor 
even very good except, like the vicar's egg, in spots. What it was and 
continues to be is the most influential newspaper in the world, the most 
relied upon source of information in the most powerful nation in the world.

A bedrock axiom of market analysis holds that the public is always wrong. 
This is not cynical, at least not very, but rather a statement of the 
obvious: the public is the last to learn of any significant development, 
and by then it's too late. It follows that the press, on which the public 
relies, is always wrong. Not necessarily on details like yesterday's 
closing prices, though even these may be rigged or misleading, but on the 
cutting edge of history, which a line that Gibbon pinched from Voltaire 
calls the tale of man's crimes, follies, and misfortunes.

These days the news is depressing enough. To take my observation literally, 
that our guiding light is always wrong, would be to abandon hope. A more 
optimistic outlook sees the media as a battlefield, though hardly a level 
one. For fifty-seven years in journalism, I have sought to even the 
balance, by my lights. This book is a further effort. It is not primarily 
about me, but about what I witnessed, particularly in my twenty-four years 
at the Times as an editor, rewrite man, foreign correspondent, 
investigative reporter, and food critic. To indicate my bias, let me 
precede my memoir of dissent with a sermon I preached to the National 
Conference of Editorial Writers in its organ, The Masthead, in the spring 
of 1982.

ARE WE THE TOWER OF PISA?

For an outsider, it was hard to tell the candidates apart. It was hard for 
the voters, too. They split so closely that nobody can be sure who won. But 
the publishers had no problem; every daily in New Jersey backed the 
Republican for governor.

So in a manner of speaking, one might say that half the electorate voted 
against the press.

The situation was much the same around the country. It was not particularly 
new; way back in New Deal days, the overwhelming majority of newspapers 
upheld the traditional values (now known as supply-side economics) against 
the overwhelming majority of their readers. Nor is it surprising, for 
publishers reflect the sincerely held views of the business community. But 
it is disturbing today, perhaps frightening, because in the typical market 
there is only one daily left.

There are television and radio, to be sure, but they cannot replace the 
press as media for thoughtful information and analysis. In any case, their 
owners vote the same way as the publishers, when they are not the same 
people. Such a onesided outlook in a near-monopoly situation can only 
promote mistrust and moves toward judicial and legislative curbs.

Somebody has likened the American media to the Tower of Pisa, narrow and 
tilting. For us who dwell in it, it may seem that it is the world around us 
that is aslant. (We could not, for example, understand why a passing remark 
by President Reagan about nuclear strategy, which was ignored by the U.S. 
editors who heard him, was front-page news in Europe.)

Why can't everybody see that we are standing straight and tall? If 
anything, we lean over backward to be fair. Don't we publish letters, op-ed 
pieces, and columns by a wide range of pundits?

Well, how wide?

"In the field of opinion writing, conservative syndicated columnists now 
dominate the field," bragged Hugh C. Newton, lobbyist-publicist for the 
Heritage Foundation. There followed a list of a score of (to me) dreary 
Right-thinkers, a couple of ex-centrists now sliding to the right, and a 
ragtag remnant of "hard-line" liberals.

I am forced to agree. Beginning perhaps with Spiro Agnew's attack on the 
nattering nabobs of negativism, editors made a more or less conscious 
effort to cultivate right-wing columnists, for balance. With the Reagan 
victory of 1980 and the so-called conservative tide, many editors predicted 
there would be a pickup for liberal columnists. The contrary occurred. My 
own column, which might be described as hard-line dissent, has gradually 
added subscribers, but the hawks and supply-siders have picked up more. 
[United Features did not renew my contract; it invited my surviving 
subscribers to substitute the "liberal" Morton Kondracke, a Reaganite bore.]

One might say that liberalism is old hat. In fact, that is precisely what 
one says: "Only the conservatives have new ideas." Well, I admit to a bias, 
but I cannot see what is new about proposals to cut taxes, repeal a century 
of social legislation, and 20 nose-to-nose with the Russkies.

New ideas are surely needed. But like generals, journalists are often 
fighting the last war. What is Ronald Reagan's "window of vulnerability" 
but a remake of John F. Kennedy's "missile gap"? Yet many have accepted the 
former as they did the latter.

Look up your own files of a generation ago on nuclear energy, on tobacco, 
and on DDT Read the learned arguments of the establishment, and compare 
them with those used today on similar issues. We are often wrong.

News is, after all, what the public does not know. The press should always 
be pushing against the wind, rebutting the established truth?if not in our 
editorials, then in our news columns, and if not there, then in our op-ed 
pages. If we must be a leaning tower, then that's the way we should lean.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org