You May Be Able to Get There From Here

In Harpers, Richard Rodriguez writes about the decline and really the end of newspapers: Twilight of the American newspaper.

Rodriguez discusses the history of The San Francisco Chronicle, formerly The Daily Dramatic Chronicle. The story of the Chronicle, Rodriguez says, is also the story of the Gold Rush city:

“The city very early developed a taste for limelight that was as urgent as its taste for red light. In 1865, there were competing opera houses in the city; there were six or seven or twelve theaters. The Daily Dramatic Chronicle was a theatrical sheet delivered free of charge to the city’s saloons and cafés and reading rooms.”

From the example of San Francisco, points out that American newspapers are about cities:

“In truth, the noun “newspaper” is something of a misnomer. More than purveyors only of news, American newspapers were entrusted to be keepers of public record—papers were daily or weekly cumulative almanacs of tabular information. A newspaper’s morgue was scrutable evidence of the existence of a city. Newspapers published obituaries and they published birth announcements. They published wedding announcements and bankruptcy notices. They published weather forecasts (even in San Francisco, where on most days the weather is optimistic and unremarkable—fog clearing by noon). They published the fire department’s log and high school basketball scores. In a port city like San Francisco, there were listings of the arrivals and departures of ships. None of this constituted news exactly; it was a record of a city’s mundane progress. News was old as soon as it was dry—“fishwrap,” as Herb Caen often called it.”

To some readers this may be an apparent observation, but it was a revelation to me. Rodriguez explains what has changed:

“In the nineteenth-century newspaper, the relationship between observer and observed was reciprocal: the newspaper described the city; the newspaper, in turn, was sustained by readers who were curious about the strangers that circumstance had placed proximate to them. So, I suppose, it is incomplete to notice that the San Francisco Chronicle has become remiss in its obituary department. Of four friends of mine who died recently in San Francisco, not one wanted a published obituary or any other public notice taken of his absence. This seems to me a serious abrogation of the responsibility of living in a city and as good an explanation as any of why newspapers are dying. All four of my friends requested cremation; three wanted their ashes consigned to the obscurity of Nature. Perhaps the cemetery is as doomed in America as the newspaper, and for the same reason: we do not imagine death as a city.”

“We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.”

Related

In an interview with New American Media, Rodriguez discusses the decline of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Note: this is the first post in an on-going discussion of Carl Bernstein’s work, including “A Woman in Charge”.

This week, Carl Bernstein spoke at Indiana Purdue University Fort Wayne.

Bernstein addressed the dysfunctional state of contemporary politics and journalism. He focused much of his critique on media that lost an appropriate sense of newsworthiness, which he argues is the symptom of a deep problem, the acceptance of untruths, or what Stephen Colbert has mocked as “truthiness”. When the system- the exchange of power between the public, Washington, and the press– works, Bernstein says there is a demand for “the best, attainable version of the truth,” not indifference to it.

Today, Bernstein echoes the warnings of his 1992 piece in the New Republic, “The Idiot Culture”:

“We do not serve our readers and viewers; we pander to them … giving them what we think they want. In this new culture of journalistic titillation, we teach our readers and viewers that the lurid and the loopy are more important than real news,” he noted. Then, he charged that the media — “probably the most powerful of all our institutions today” — wastes that power by ignoring their responsibility to challenge, inform and educate people about what really matters.

Instead, “the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal. The consequence is the spectacle, and the triumph, of the idiot culture.”

But more than mourning the rise of the phenomenon, as he did in 1992, he says that we reached the apogee of a press culture submerged in celebrity culture, in news of the weird, maudlin, inane, and stupid. Along with this lament, Bernstein anecdotally discussed his treatment on a local new affiliate. He says the reports had little idea who we was and what his book about Hillary Clinton is about. Midway through the interview, “I thought, what the hell am I doing here,” Bernstein said.

Bernstein is not a purist about the content of news, he contends that there has always been quirky celebrity news, and that there is a place for this. But he says the dominance of such news, or lack of news, has lead to a state of journalistic dysfunction. A dysfunction that is partly to blame for the brokenness of the system during the Bush administration.

It’s the tragedy- a failed presidency unmindful of the real cost of war and contemptuous of checks and balance- of the last seven years that most troubles Bernstein’s analysis of a broken system. He does not blame the press, alone, for this problem, but suggests that if the real reporting that has been done on the Iraq war had an outlet, the war would be different or would not have happened. Bernstein also says that if real reporting was done on George W. Bush before ran in 2000, than he would not have been elected. This later accusation, while probably true, does seem to be a plug Bernstein’s latest book, “A Woman in Charge: the Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton”.