Epstein on the death of newspapers
Joseph Epstein has a terrific essay in Commentary about the ongoing death of newspapers. As you might expect, it's filled with conservative disdain for what he sees as a media overcome with liberal bias. But never mind. The writing is literate and elegant, and it closes with this wonderful passage:
The time of transition we are currently going through, with the interest in traditional newspapers beginning to fade and news on the computer still a vast confusion, can be likened to a great city banishing horses from its streets before anyone has yet perfected the automobile.Via Arts & Letters Daily.
Nevertheless, if I had to prophesy, my guess would be that newspapers will hobble along, getting ever more desperate and ever more vulgar. More of them will attempt the complicated mental acrobatic of further dumbing down while straining to keep up, relentlessly exerting themselves to sustain the mighty cataract of inessential information that threatens to drown us all. Those of us who grew up with newspapers will continue to read them, with ever less trust and interest, while younger readers, soon enough grown into middle age, will ignore them.
My own preference would be for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage, and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions. I imagine such papers directed by editors who could choose for me -- as neither the Internet nor I on my own can do -- the serious issues, questions, and problems of the day and, with the aid of intelligence born of concern, give each the emphasis it deserves.
In all likelihood a newspaper taking this route would go under; but at least it would do so in a cloud of glory, guns blazing. And at least its loss would be a genuine subtraction. About our newspapers as they now stand, little more can be said in their favor than that they do not require batteries to operate, you can swat flies with them, and they can still be used to wrap fish.
posted by Dan Kennedy @ 7:38 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
The trouble with the piece is his lack of concern over jobs. As the biz becomes tabloid (like the UK)lots of people are going to be hurt along the way, as desired profit margins require small,overworked,and mistreated staffs.
Kind of scary. The post-literature society...easily manipulated...like with the radio speakers hung from street corners in 1930s Germany. A younger general population easily stampeded...
I like the London papers. I depend on the Independent, the Guardian...et al for my news from the Middle East...And al Jazeera for that matter...US press too cowed...or too concerned over 20 % profit margins...Won't cover the Whale Wars in Antarctic waters either...As an old icebreaker sailor and environmentalist, this interests me.
This is such vain nonsense. A longing for newspapers to cover "the serious issues ... of the day " from a rightist ideologue who would attack those same papers for deeming any actions by the Bush administration (for example) worthy of critical-minded coverage. It's amusing how every rightist attack on newspapers carries as its evident subtext the idea that newspapers are failing because they are not "conservative" enough. Newspapers are shrinking because the are facing broader competition from free media, not because they've fallen from some mystical perch. Rightists have slyly crafted the illusion that the decline in newspaper circulation is a political reaction to newspapers' "entrenched biases." It sounds so brainy! People who believe this arrant hokum might just as well believe newspapers are shrinking because of voodoo or UFOs.
If the "death"of newpapers lies with their liberal bias, then how come the readership of the the self-styled conserative papers (WSJ, IDB, Chicago Tribune, Sun Times, Boston Herald, Wash Times etc) isn't growing either?
My gut reaction to this exerpt was to think of the Christian Science Monitor, which I do read daily online.
How're they holding up?
A mighty wind!
"Much cogitation has been devoted to..."
"Another theory holds that..."
"Whatever the value of this theorizing, it is also beside the point."
Then why is it in your essay? Paid by the word, I suppose. Bloviate me, Joseph!
He explains at length how he reads the Times, then complains about it the way we complain about the Globe. (First I read the op-ed, then I read the sports...) Too much TV coverage, not enough ballet. Big deal.
It looks as though he's going to make a connection between investigative journalism and declining readership, but he only gets as far as showing that many journalists are liberal. Maybe so, but what's the relevance? He's just using it as a setup so he can then say that the papers whose politics he doesn't happen to agree with "deserve" their fate. As Mike mentions, what about conservative papers--do they deserve the same fate?
Then the reverse-snobbery money quote:
Pre-university-educated journalists did not, I suspect, feel that the papers they worked for existed as vehicles through which to advance their own political ideas. Some among them might have hated corruption...But they subsisted chiefly on cynicism, heavy boozing, and an admiration of craft.
You suspect? I suspect you are not exactly such a two-fisted hard-drinking guy yourself. Where do you work? The Literature Dept at Northwestern University! Not exactly ink-stained wretch territory. More of a Chardonnay and brie crowd. No wonder you complain that the arts section in the Times has too much about TV.
But you don't want your journalists to get any of that college-larnin that you and your friends have. And which is, after all, the business that you are in. Because being exposed to a given set of ideas taught in your very own workplace causes people to emerge with "locked-in political views". Really? That doesn't give college students much credit.
Of course, if they don't go to college and instead learn their craft from covering fires and "whorehouse raids", then you shouldn't complain if they write too much about TV and truck pulls and rasslin, and not enough about your beloved Symphony.
Whorehouse raids yes, but TV, heavens no! Are you with the common man Joseph, or are you a "fine arts" kinda guy? You're one of those New York Times reading, white-wine drinking, cheese-eating college intellectuals that conservatives make such sport of. Yet you disapprove of the New York Times and of going to college. You walk the tightrope of the conflicted snob.
And your preference is that a few serious papers do what you want even if it means going down in a cloud of cliches, I mean "guns blazing". Doesn't matter to you if the workers lose their jobs. What do you care, you have a secure perch from which to dispense glib advice to others about how they should put themselves out of business.
Yes a mighty wind's a blowin, blowin you and me...
There's a certain segment among the left-of-center set that really needs to wake up and grasp that it isn't just conservatives dissatisfied with the job newspapers are doing. Plenty of progressives feel like newspapers are doing an utterly lousy job covering issues of substance as well. This is not an us vs. them issue.
A self fulfilling prophesy? Or, wishful wandering? Either way, there's quite a bit here that tickles the repository; familiar to the extreme.
Newspapers in the US are enamoured with hari-kari. News is the operativer word.
A cloud of glory???? Block that metaphor Mr. Epstein.
Too much fluff.
A mile wide, inch deep.
Focus-group-driven.
That's about how I would describe today's major newspapers, and I work in the biz. Liberal, conservative doesn't matter. From the reader's perspective, it's all about how quickly can the newspaper get to the point. And it's about a term I hope to get credit for coining someday: Community Voyeurism. This is the concept of reading the obits, social news and coplogs of a newspaper before turning to the opinion or front pages. Most people don't care about process or government. They care about what people are doing. That's why Hollywood is such big news. Whether we want to admit it or not, our society is more accepting of a London tabloid than a boring broadsheet.
It also has to do with time. People want to read headlines and see if there is anything that interests them. If they see something, they might read four grafs. If the journalist has them after the fourth graf, then it must be a good story.
Of the news consuming public, how many people read beyond the fourth graf of today's lead stories? Ask around. I read two, and both were local (Boston) news.
If newspapers are going to survive in print for much longer, they are going to have to cut things like arts coverage (save those for Saturday's paper), and bloated sports payrolls (at least for print content) and start charging for certain online content. World and national news should be a page or two each, and the local sections should be augmented. This would be a return to the types of papers printed 50 years ago. They were maybe 20 to 30 pages for a daily plus classifieds (Since when did a big paper equate with a respectable one?).
Once the publishers admit this, and once readers come to accept it is a worthy news source, some will come back to newspapers. But most of all, it is about market position and the product. If Procter and Gamble had a dog, it would either repackage it, somehow make it (seem) better or dump it altogether. When newspapers learn how to do this, they will adapt to the changing market.
Sorry for the long post. I could probably write my own bloviating essay evidently.
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