Russell Baker has an interesting piece at The New York Review of Books about the future of newspapers. He rehearses many of the obvious things about the negative impact of corporate chains–how it destroyed the Los Angeles Times, threatened to destroy the New York Times, and now threatens to destroy the Wall Street Journal. But one of the more interesting points it makes is to remind us that it’s not information that makes the difference; it’s the will to act:
Like so many who comment on journalism these days, the authors of When the Press Fails—three journalism professors—are angry about the press’s flabby performance at the time when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. were stoking public appetite for war in Iraq. Everyone, including most journalists, seems to agree that the press did a rotten job, but whether a superb job would have defeated the neocons’ determination to have their war is another question. Following events fairly closely at the time, I thought nothing could stop them. For one thing, the lust for war had the public in its grip. For another, Congress, the one force powerful enough to resist presidential follies, though not always to prevent them, had ceased to function as an effective arm of government and was utterly useless for much of anything beyond cheering the President on. Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, accurately described Congress’s position as "supine."
As if to prove his point, most Democratic senators with presidential ambitions, including Hillary Clinton, to her continuing mortification, voted for war. They were simply responding to the political necessity of a moment when patriotic demand for battle was running high. At such moments politicians almost always decide they would rather be president than right.
Finally, credit the administration with a masterful job of deception. It fooled its own secretary of state, Colin Powell. It even fooled itself about enjoying a swift flower-strewn triumph. Despite Congress’s humiliating performance, the idea that the press could have averted the disaster is slow to die. When the Press Fails does not endorse the notion but certainly flirts with it. It is "most interesting" that the press "remained a silent if often uncomfortable partner" in the "reality-bending exercise" with which the administration sold the war, the authors write.
The ideal of press independence does not mean that the resulting open public debate will necessarily shape or improve the course of policy. At the very least, publicizing credible challenges to dubious policies may give large numbers of citizens more timely information. And when those citizens hear their private and sometimes ill-defined concerns aired and clarified in the legitimating space of the mainstream press, they may begin to act as a public, instead of suffering in isolation with their own shock and awe as events unravel.
In such statements the book’s authors expect more of the press than it is built to deliver. Airing and clarifying Washington activities is surely healthy, but it is also a tedious process that may yield nothing better than public indifference. The Washington Post began airing and clarifying the Watergate affair in the summer of 1972, yet six months later Americans were still so uninterested that they reelected President Nixon with one of the biggest landslides in history. Were it not for the intervention of the little-known lower-court judge John Sirica, the Watergate scandal might have expired unnoticed.
The actions of Daniel Ellsberg, John Sirica, and others were far more important than what the Press did or did not do back in the seventies. Nothing has changed in that regard. So let’s not overestimate the importance of the Press. We have access now to more information than at any time in our history, and yet as citizens we are as confused and powerless as we have ever been. The challenge lies in not just having more information but in having a narrative that organizes the information in a way that inspires fruitful, positive, political action.
As I’ve frequently pointed out here, the Libertarian meme is one of the primary obstacles toward the achievement of an action-oriented political narrative. Libertarianism is not a philosophy; it is a noxioius, debilitating mood. It and its religious devotion to market solutions promotes narcissism and self-absorption, and in doing so institutionalizes fragmentation and division. It keeps us supine, divided and conquered, and plays right into the hands of the already powerful. It neuters the collective political will to work for the public good–and even to fight for the preservation of public goods already achieved.
For all his limitations, I’ll take Michael Moore over Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman any day of the week. At least you find in him an old-fashioned common decency and public spiritedness that seems impossible for Americans today who have been sucked into the Libertarian void.
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