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Posted on Jun 27, 2011

By Chris Hedges

I visited the Hartford Courant as a highschool student. It was the first time Iwas in a newsroom. The Connecticutpaper’s newsroom, the size of a cityblock, was packed with rows of metaldesks, most piled high with newspapersand notebooks. Reporters bangedfuriously on heavy typewriters set amidtangled phone cords, overflowingashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacksof paper, many of which were in slopingpiles on the floor. The din and clamor,the incessantly ringing phones, the hazeof cigarette and cigar smoke that layover the feverish hive, the hoarseshouts, the bustle and movement ofreporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. Iwas infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for morethan two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, TheChristian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of mycareer as a foreign correspondent.

Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroomat The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, wereopen space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the wayof the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels ofnewspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones thatspat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enrichednewspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connectingsellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long neednewsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the pagecounts of daily news sheets.

The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, MurrayKempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats,crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in Africaand the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and forgotten in oururban slums or Appalachia. These presses churned out raw lists of data, from sportsscores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of the city or the world we wouldnever otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters and critics reviewed movies, books,dance, theater and music and covered sporting events. Newspapers printed the text ofpresidential addresses, sent reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall andfollowed the courts and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the luridand the macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion.

We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil

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By Chris Hedges

(Page 2)

I, like many who cared more about truththan news, was pushed out of The NewYork Times, specifically over my vocaland public opposition to the war in Iraq.This is not a new story. Those reporterswho persistently challenge the orthodoxyof belief, who question and examine thereigning political passions, always tacitlyembraced by the commercial media, areoften banished. There is a constantbattle in newsrooms between themanagers, those who serve the interestsof the institution and the needs of theadvertisers, and reporters whose loyaltyis to readers. I have a great affection for reporters, who hide their idealism behind athin veneer of cynicism and worldliness. I also harbor a deep distrust and even loathingfor the careerists who rise up the food chain to become managers and editors.

Sydney Schanberg was nearly killed in Cambodia in 1975 after staying there for TheNew York Times to cover the conquest of Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, reportingfor which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Later he went back to New York from Cambodia andran the city desk. He pushed reporters to report about the homeless, the poor and thevictims of developers who were forcing families out of their rent-controlled apartments.But it was not a good time to give a voice to the weak and the poor. The socialmovements built around the opposition to the Vietnam War had dissolved. Alternativepublications, including the magazine Ramparts, which through a series of exposés hadembarrassed the established media organizations into doing real reporting, had goneout of business.

The commercial press had, once again, become lethargic. It had less and less incentiveto challenge the power elite. Many editors viewed Schanberg’s concerns as relics of adead era. He was removed as city editor and assigned to write a column about NewYork. He used the column, however, to again decry the abuse of the powerful,especially developers. The then-editor of the paper, Abe Rosenthal, began to acidlyrefer to Schanberg as the resident “Commie” and address him as “St. Francis.”Rosenthal, who met William F. Buckley almost weekly for lunch along with the paper’spublisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, grew increasingly impatient with Schanberg, whowas challenging the activities of their powerful friends. Schanberg became a pariah. Hewas not invited to the paper’s table at two consecutive Inner Circle dinners held forNew York reporters. The senior editors and the publisher did not attend the previewsfor the film “The Killing Fields,” based on Schanberg’s experience in Cambodia. His daysat the newspaper were numbered.

The city Schanberg profiled in his column did not look like the glossy ads in Rosenthal’s



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By Chris Hedges

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But Schanberg also argues, as do I, thatnewspapers prove a vital bulwark for ademocratic state. It is possible to decrytheir numerous failings and compromiseswith the power elite and yet finally honorthem as important to the maintenance ofdemocracy. Traditionally, if a reportergoes out and reports on an event, theinformation is usually trustworthy andaccurate. The report can be slanted orbiased. It can leave out vital facts. But itis not fiction. The day The New YorkTimes and other great city newspapersdie, if such a day comes, will be a blackday for the nation.

Newspapers “do more than anyone else, although they left out a lot of things,”Schanberg said. “There are stories on their blackout list. But it is important the paper isthere because they spend money on what they chose to cover. Most of the problem ofmainstream journalism is what they leave out. But what they do, aside from the dailyboiler plate, press releases and so forth, is very, very important to the democraticprocess.”

“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos is, whatthe rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added. “That is not alwaysgood, obviously, because this is the consensus of the Establishment. But papers,probably more in the earlier years than now, print texts of things people will never seeelsewhere. It tells them what you have to do to cast a vote. It covers things like theswearing in of immigrants. They are a positive force. I don’t think The New York Timeswas ever a fully committed accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’tknow who coined the phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanismmeans you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it inyour own backyard. The Washington Post does not cover Washington. It covers officialWashington. The Times ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of theEstablishment.”

“Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on. “Newspapers keep theswamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We discover thecivil rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We go at it hellbentbecause now it is kosher to write about those who have been neglected and treated likehalf citizens. And then when things calm down it becomes easy not to do thatanymore.”

The death of newspapers means, asSchanberg points out, that we will lose


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Taking 'Bad Teacher' toSchool

'Food Terrorism' NextDoor to the MagicKingdom





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By Chris Hedges

(Page 4)

Our political apparatus and systems ofinformation have been diminished andtaken hostage by corporations. Ourgovernment no longer responds to theneeds or rights of citizens. We havebeen left disempowered without thetraditional mechanisms to be heard.Those who battle the corporatedestruction of the ecosystem and seekto protect the remnants of our civilsociety must again take to the streets.They have to engage in acts of civildisobedience. But this time around themedia and the systems ofcommunication have dramatically changed.

The death of journalism, the loss of reporters on the airwaves and in print whobelieved the plight of the ordinary citizen should be reported, means that it will beharder for ordinary voices and dissenters to reach the wider public. The preoccupationwith news as entertainment and the loss of sustained reporting will effectivelymarginalize and silence those who seek to be heard or to defy established power.Protests, unlike in the 1960s, will have a difficult time garnering the daily nationalcoverage that characterized the reporting on the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and in the end threatened the power elite. Acts of protest, no longercovered or barely covered, will leap up like disconnected wildfires, more easily snuffedout or ignored. It will be hard if not impossible for resistance leaders to have theirvoices amplified across the nation, to build a national movement for change. Thefailings of newspapers were huge, but in the years ahead, as the last battle fordemocracy means dissent, civil disobedience and protest, we will miss them.

Chris Hedges is a weekly Truthdig columnist and a fellow at The Nation Institute. Hisnewest book is “The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.”

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truthdig.comChris Hedges: Gone With the Papers - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

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