The Memory Hole
A shocking example of how major newspapers downplayed a call to sedition by a major figure
Democracy fails without a genuinely free press. In order to get out of this dark moment in American history, we need to hold the press accountable for how we got into it. We need to restore the primacy of truth—or at least a desire to speak the truth— in politics, in business, and in journalism. We also need to change the conditions that facilitated the decline in journalism and help journalism climb out of the hole it is in. As well-plowed as is the field of media criticism (e.g.,Bagdikian, e.g., Alterman), this diary proposes ideas that you may never have before considered.
It’s easy to take cheap shots at the media, of course. The right does little else, and even the left can be reflexively negative, forgetting that there are great journalists still active not just at non-profits like ProPublica and Pew Research, but also at corporate news outlets (Suzanne Craig of the NYT and Carol Leonnig of the WaPo come to mind), small outlets like The American Prospect and Mother Jones, and blogs.
Remembering what is still healthy in journalism should not deter us from excising what is fetid and corrupt. We got to this moment in our national history in large part because the press has never been an especially strong institution. Throughout our history, our media have largely been partisan, prone to sensationalism (it helps sales!), and—because journalism costs money— tilted toward the wealthy. Since the 1970s, however, there has been a well-funded, determined and amoral movement determined to end the ability of the average person to have a say in what our nation does.
One attempt to describe the movement that Powell hoped to create is Nancy McLean’s Democracy in Chains which, despite its flaws, seems prescient in light of the events of recent years. Referring to a comment by Tyler Cowen, she wrote: “Changes underway in the media offered still more promise for the cause. Television’s new fixation on private pecadilloes, as seen in the Clinton era, could leave citizens jaded and suspicious, thus sowing helpful mistrust of government….The emerging Internet, for its part, ‘appears well suited for rumor, gossip, and talk of conspiracy.’”
The path to wrecking democracy requires corrupting and degrading the press. They right is all too close to its objective. Consider how we got here and what we must do.
How we got here
A history of the newspaper, from Jill LePore, The New Yorker:
The daily newspaper is the taproot of modern journalism. Dailies mainly date to the eighteen-thirties, the decade in which the word “journalism” was coined, meaning daily reporting, the jour in journalism. Early dailies depended on subscribers to pay the bills. The press was partisan, readers were voters, and the news was meant to persuade (and voter turnout was high). But by 1900 advertising made up more than two-thirds of the revenue at most of the nation’s eighteen thousand newspapers, and readers were consumers (and voter turnout began its long fall).
To give some historical context of how weak an institution the press has always been, consider that William Randolph Hearst (and Joseph Pulitzer) famously used the probably-accidental explosion of the battleship Maine to inflame public sentiment in favor of the Spanish-American War. Walter Duranty of The New York Times covered up the famine that Joseph Stalin caused in Ukraine, resulting in millions of deaths. Senator Joseph McCarthy told what all journalists had good reason to suspect were lies, but neglected to do even basic due diligence to check, setting off a public panic that weakened America*, turning American against American and shutting down necessary public discourse. Judith Miller’s use of the New York Times to promote the illegal invasion of Iraq is yet another shameful example. And let it never be forgotten that the press was used by the CIA and possibly even by the Nixon dirty tricks squad to undermine democracy. As the Founders recognized, a free press is necessary for a democracy. But the only implementation they provided to make it a reality was the Post Office, which allowed for low-cost distribution, and the protections added much later in NYT v. Sullivan.
American journalism did improve after the McCarthy era. It had a golden age in the 1960s and 1970s, as journalists challenged the government and business in ways they had not previously. The education and pay of journalists rose. Ethical standards such as those enunciated by the Society of Professional Journalists started to be defined.
And yet, just as the quality of journalism was improving, social and political forces were gathering to undermine that. Consolidation started to shrink the workforce, the scope and depth of reporting shrank** as electronic media started to displace print media and reactionary moneyed interests used General William Westmoreland and funded attack groups like Accuracy in Media to cow the media. The 1990s saw the rise of right-wing media like Fox and Limbaugh.
In recent years, what had been a decline has accelerated into a collapse. As of 2019, only 28 % get their information from news sites or newspapers; 18% rely exclusively on social media; 16% from cable TV where Fox dominates; and 16% from local TV, a source that provides the worst-informed citizens, according to Pew Research. Disinformation thrives in the darkness created by ignorance. Can a free people sustain a democracy if it’s almost impossible for the average person to learn the basic facts about issues?
The problem can be broken down into three areas. First, systemic problems such as the concentration of more and more outlets for information into fewer and fewer hands, the difficulty of monetizing news to make sure that journalists get paid while keeping it affordable for all citizens, and means to legally distinguish constitutionally-supported speech (news) vs. entertainment and propaganda. Second, there needs to be a consistent source of pressure to improve the quality of journalism. Media criticism, professional societies, and journalistic awards are the only current levers to raise quality levels. Third, even if great journalism is freely available, if citizens do not understand basic civics, geography, economics, and history, they will be unable to use what they read or hear to be members of a genuinely free society.
The Systemic Issues
Revitalizing America’s News Deserts, Victor Pickard, The Progressive, 11/30/22
A dwindling number of newspapers failing to produce even the bare minimum of news that society requires isn’t just a journalism crisis—it’s a democracy crisis.
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Americans have been slow to respond to the crisis in part because they misunderstand its structural nature.
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This dismal outlook notwithstanding, glimmers of an alternative news media system are flickering from the wreckage. … In New Jersey and California, for example, state governments are directly subsidizing local journalism initiatives, and New York City is deploying local government advertising to help support ethnic media and other small publishers.
Soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, in a 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce:
Most of the media, including the national TV systems, are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the enterprise system to survive.
As LePore pointed out and Powell underlined, news outlets are hostage to how they are financed. There are two main models, namely the advertiser model and the subscription model. Under the advertiser model, advertisers have a major say on what gets published or broadcast. The subscription model requires that news consumers have sufficient income to pay for the costs of producing the news. In a democracy, that means that everyone, even the very poor, should have equal access to news. In practice, the very poor usually have access only to broadcast news and radio, neither of which— with the exception of public broadcasting— is terribly good at its job (see the Pew Study). Public broadcasting, on the other hand, used to be publicly funded and therefore independent. Now it is supported by—and influenced by—corporations and very wealthy contributors. The first step in making the news media independent should be to fully and reliably fund public broadcasting. Access to news should be treated as a right necessary to democracy.
Because governments can also bend news to their purposes, we also want a vigorous private media to ensure a diversity of viewpoints, including those of corporations and political partisans. The simplest way to accomplish this is to provide a subsidy to every citizen (an approach briefly taken up by the Biden Administration in Build Back Better) and let them pick which news sources they prefer. As with any subsidy, careful oversight would be needed to ensure that the subsidy is used for the intended purpose. It would probably be necessary to create a legal distinction between news vs. entertainment and propaganda. If that process helped to end public subsidies of propaganda mills like The Heritage Foundation and the Taxpayers Union, that would be a bonus.
A recent case in Arizona, Gateway Pundit v. Sellers, illustrated the First Amendment issues that would be involved. Gateway Pundit, which is perhaps best described as a sorry excuse for a propaganda outlet, was denied a press pass by Maricopa County because, to gloss the legal opinion, they lie. The Ninth Circuit Appellate Court disagreed with the reasons Gateway Pundit was given for denial, holding that that the denial was “impermissibly content- and viewpoint-based.” This is good as far as it goes, since we wouldn’t want, say, Daily Kos writers barred based on the viewpoint of this site. But obviously some lines have to be drawn or any member of the general public could demand a press pass, and there isn’t enough room in most venues.
But there’s another issue: for private news companies to survive, they need to monetize their content. This not just necessary; it’s fair. As any investor knows, accurate information has value. Just as inaccurate information cost the nation trillions of dollars by failing to warn against the Iraq invasion, accurate media pays for itself many times over in ways large and small. Paywalls have plainly not worked and websites that rip off and re-publish content are everywhere. PressReader is an an example of an attempt to monetize content by the story rather than by the publication, a useful but clearly insufficient step. Advertising, which for a time made journalism profitable, has collapsed (due to social media) as a source of revenue, while subscription revenue has been stagnant.
Subsidies would probably help monetization, because the incentive to get around them would be less. But it might be necessary to go a step further and require a small payment for fair—or especially unfair—use of content. Alternative means of financing include the endowment model relied on by The Guardian many years and the member model, in which a group of members pledge long-term support for a news outlet. Pickard says that another means of financing, Amy Klobuchar’s Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, would provide a windfall for major corporations.
One systemic issue that is frequently raised is the Fairness Doctrine, which required that there be some diversity of opinion in government-licensed broadcast stations. Indeed, extremist indoctrination of any kind relies on the exclusion of alternative points of view. Re-instatement of the Fairness Doctrine would help with broadcast media, but additional legislation would have to be required for cable.
There are other reasons that news consumers suffer a lack of diversity. One major reason is the concentration of media ownership, with fewer than a dozen major corporations responsible for producing much of the content a typical person will see in a day. While the picture is more complicated when one considers distribution and packaging, we still don’t see proportional representation of the viewpoints of tens of millions of Americans, notably unions, teachers, scientists, feminists, Black Lives Matter or anyone else on the moderate left, so clearly content generation shows signs of excessive concentration. Concentration issues are far worse in rural areas. Getting universal broadband to them is vital.
Accountability also requires archives. It was a lot harder to lie when the sources were printed. Nowadays, news outlets sometimes simply disappear articles or edit them without acknowledging errors. Accessing electronic archives is often expensive or impossible. Tweets disappear. Whole news organizations disappear. The Wayback Machine and other internet archives have been very important in preserving a record of what was said, but even they are patchy. We need much better tools.
Finally, there is no excuse that American news fails to include a reasonable amount of reporting on events abroad. The claim that the US is the leader of the free world is made ridiculous by how little Americans know about what happens outside our borders.
Holding Journalism Accountable
Some well-known journalistic sins include:
- Plagiarism or, more broadly, failing to credit researchers who do the hard work of identifying and framing an issue, as well as providing substantiation. Ironically, crediting others is a way of building community, while stealing ideas just creates enemies.
- Pack journalism. Aside from being a good way of getting things wrong, as happened with predictions of a red wave in the 2022 election, pack journalism reduces diversity in reporting, which makes it less interesting.
- Feeding frenzies. Obsessive coverage of stories is boring and, as with Whitewater, Benghazi, and the Clinton e-mails, very often wrong.
- Stenography. Reporting assertions without screening them for truthfulness is a long-term problem in journalism. As Jill LePore summarizing Matthew Pressman notes, Sen. Joseph McCarthy got away with his lies because journalism of that day just reported facts, without any interpretation. Indeed, that is a problem that began in the 19th century. There’s still no excuse for reporting obviously false claims without labeling them false.
- Access journalism. A lot of stenography is not accidental. It’s a deliberate and corrupt means of gaining access to sources.
- Anonymous sourcing. The Washington Post has a policy against anonymous sourcing. It violates that policy, for example, whenever criticizing Democrats. It should know better. Anonymous sources enabled Janet Cooke’s deceptions should be limited to cases when protecting identity is really important.
- Bothsiderism. Truth is found through debate, not negotiation. Especially pernicious is the assumption that compromise can be found mid-way between two points of view. The Republican lie over voter fraud was able to persist over a decade or more because the press refused to point out every time they raised it that there was no evidence for their allegations.
- Whataboutism. Nor is it acceptable to say that the wrong committed by one side justifies wrongs by the other. Yes, Warren Harding had an affair in the White House, but that does not excuse Bill Clinton’s having done the same (even if mentioning Harding does help to silence sanctimonious scolds).
These sins are explained by a few basic facts. First, many journalists are not highly educated, while many stories require high levels of knowledge about law, science, medicine, economics, history, international affairs, and other specialties. The better sort of journalist deserves enormous credit for being self-taught in fields that take others year and decades of schooling and practice.
Second, journalists are worked hard and more often than not don’t have enough time to meet deadline and produce quality journalism. Long-form journalism and investigative journalism are not rewarded except for a very few, even those kinds of journalism are the most valuable to a democracy.
Finally, journalists are under unfair pressure from editors afraid of offending advertisers or the political right while demanding stories that will bring advertising revenue. They also suffer unjust pressure from abusive members of the public and even from their peers. They take shortcuts and pull punches. The result is mediocrity.
Holding the Public Accountable
Even good, affordable, accessible journalism is of no use if citizens don’t or won’t use it. The United States does a poor job of educating its citizens in civics and history. Skills essential to critical thinking—everything from understanding fallacies to knowing how to read a chart—are poor even among supposedly well-educated people...or, as proven by the inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, aren’t transferable from one discipline like engineering to another, like anthropology. Worse, just as half the public doesn’t believe that it’s their obligation to vote, all too many who do vote don’t think it’s their job to listen respectfully to opponents before voting.
The Solutions
Critics have done their best to improve journalism, writing letters both critical and supportive to journalists and to editors, supporting journalism through donations, membership fees, and subscriptions, and even undertaking the job of doing journalism. The continued decline of the democracy, which is the bottom line in this, makes it clear that those efforts have failed. So here are some solutions, many of which have been mentioned above and all of which are achievable.
Increase access and reduce the influence of powerful interests:
- Fully fund public broadcasting with oversight at the board level from professional journalists, not David Koch or anyone else who wants to shape broadcasting to fit an agenda. Congress is especially poor at oversight and should treat public broadcasting with the deference afforded the Federal Reserve
- Subsidize access to the news
- Limit advertising on anything labeled news
- Use antitrust principles to break the monopolies in media wherever they occur
- Make broadband universal
- In the Covid pandemic, some of the worst decisions were made by politically-minded people placed in health policy positions. People in senior decision-making positions, especially judges, should be required to have relevant training.
- The enforcement mechanism that is so badly distorted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should protect bloggers just as much as it protects major corporations.
- Anti-SLAPP needs to be the law of the land, while mechanisms to promptly resolve disputes about defamation need to be established.
Reduce the power of propaganda
- Eliminate the charitable deduction for so-called think tanks and other “educational” organizations; the Trump tax changes have already eliminated any benefit to most taxpayers anyway
- Require full disclosure of funding by major donors of so-called think tanks and other “educational” organizations
- Require full disclosure of media by foreign influence operations, political parties, and financial interests
- Require diversity of opinion in anything calling itself news. Enforce it through a licensing process that continuously collects and evaluates public complaints
- Anything calling itself national news should include international news
Increase professionalism in journalism
- Require basic accreditation of all journalists through free online courses; require continuing education. Include bloggers who want to be treated as journalists
- Require that all journalists complete a course in journalistic ethics
- Establish professional oversight of journalists through the professional organizations and universities
Hold the Public Accountable
...government of the people, by the people, for the people... — Abraham Lincoln
Norms and rules can be broken. Justice can be bought. Institutions can fail. If we have learned anything from this terrible era, it is that a democracy’s only real defense is its citizens: their visceral feeling that they benefit from having a say, their willingness to sacrifice to maintain an edifice that constantly decays, their commitment to defend and elevate one another. Democracies are stronger than other forms of government only to the extent that the People are engaged in the life of the polis. Therefore, among the most urgent and powerful reforms is reform at a very fundamental level: we need to start talking to one another.
- Those who have power, especially the very wealthy and those in government, need to be shamed for how they have misused it. They have been given so much by this democracy and have delivered a world groaning under pollution and a public talking of—or trying to engage in— civil war
- Politicians need to use their communications to educate voters.
- As for improving the public’s abilities to process news, solutions lie mainly in the educational system. The US is perhaps the only major nation without national standards. The US is certainly the only major nation where local school boards ban books based solely on crackpot complaints, rather than professional judgments. At a bare minimum, high school graduates ought to be able to pass a test in basic civics.
- Requiring training in relevant areas for decision makers in government, including judges, might help to end the campaign of contempt against intellectuals that has been part of the campaign to destroy democracy.
- Recognition of the value of accurate information has to be recovered. As much as we all love getting free information from blogs and Tweets, it would be far better to compensate authors and their publishers; the American people just need to be able to afford it. Plagiarism and abuse of Fair Use devalues information and needs to be stopped.
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I’m sure I have forgotten important points. Mention them in comments and I’ll add them in updates.
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* As an example of how the Red Scare weakened America, consider that Lyndon Johnson escalated the intervention in Vietnam because he was afraid of being accused of being weak on defense and soft on communism—and that was a decade after Joseph McCarthy had been disgraced. McCarthyism also damaged American science: even Albert Einstein was accused (by Rep. John Rankin) of disloyalty; the roots of modern Trumpist attacks on intellectuals today are traceable to McCarthy.
** Consider how many different stories are covered in a half-hour broadcast news segment vs. the first section of a newspaper.
