Do We Genuinely Need News?

The current issue of The New Republic features an interview of New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson. The lead-in to said interview, as might be expected, is absolutely on the Times's side ("With the recent sale of The Washington Post, The New York Times remains the only major paper in the hands of a storied publishing family [the Sulzbergers]...The Times has played the vaunted long game, largely resisting the impulse to cull the newsroom and actually improving the paper in the midst of the industry's austerity"), and the interview itself is quite detailed, with side suggestions from Times staffers as to how to "improve" the publication. I am in no position to comment concerning the quality of either the aforementioned staffers' urgings or of the interview itself, having not read either (I have long made it a point to put and keep a considerable distance between the Times and myself, as it's little more than a print megaphone for publisher Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger's fancy-pants hairshirt guilt). What shall be taken up here is the issue raised by said interview title's subtitle: "Long Live The Embattled, Essential New York Times." The Times may be "embattled," but is it really and truly "essential"? Indeed, to ask a sharper question: Is most journalism itself really and truly "essential"? The fact is, I have reached the conclusion, based on undeniable evidence, that, pace the often-overheated claims of media practitioners and cloistered academics, mainstream journalism is not and has long not been all that necessary in regard to the American landscape, that there have been many, many times when it just wasn't all that vital to us as a country. First off, let's look at the very nature of how we consume news. For all the talk regarding "the power of the press" and all the references to "the Fourth Eatate," the cold, hard reality is that the press has the aforementioned power (itself a highly dubious thesis, as I shall later demonstrate)because...we have willfully ceded it to them. Yes, the Constitution mandates "freedom of the press," but in truth that is literally the only constitutionally-protected right the press has. There is nothing, NOTHING in the Constitution or the law that says we, the public, MUST partake of them. In his much-discussed media chronicle "What The People Know: Freedom And The Press," the greatly-respected political reporter-writer-author Richard Reeves twice quoted the then-"Nightline" host Ted Koppel giving a speech at the end of a 1997 dinner of the Committee to Protect Journalists wherein Koppel aggressively urged his brother and sister newspersons to maintain their integrity and not succumb to commercial lures. But, in point of fact, we could have turned off Koppel--or, for that matter, Katie Couric or Dan Rather or Bill Moyers or any of their television-news brethren--at any time, even in mid-sentence, and there wouldn't have been a damned thing any of them could have done about it. And the same thing goes for the print media. During Watergate, Time magazine published a poll it had taken that revealed, among other findings, that since most folks saw no way to get rid of Richard Nixon without severely damaging the country, they were flat-out tired of the entire matter. In a later issue, the aforementioned magazine flatly asserted: "The public simply has no right to get tired of Watergate." Now this was an outright damn-foolish statement for them to make because--and, indeed, a letter writer openly pointed this out to them--if we had wanted to fully tune out Time's and all the other media's Watergate coverage, we could have--and neither Time nor any of the other media could have struck back in any way (It was the veteran TV commentator David Brinkley who freely pointed out to TV Guide, concerning the media's "power": "There are numerous countries in the world where the politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. There is no country in the world where the press has seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians"). A personal note here. For quite some time now it has been a truism that virtually the only media I majorly and regularly partake of are the fourth hour of the "Today" show with my girls Kathie Lee and Hoda Woman; American Curves magazine; theatrical films; books; and DVDs. And, frankly...I've never felt better in my life! Not only have I not for one minute regretted not having any "curiosity" but I have never been sued, I have never had my possessions commandeered, I have never been put behind bars. And, as mentioned, I FEEL TERRIFIC! That's the first point. Secondly--and I've dealt with this previously--the reality is, for all the huffing and puffing to the contrary, The Mainstream Media do not have and have never had any genuine power. As such esteemed columnist-journalists as Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill have pointed out, words turned out by a writer have never by and of themselves brought about significant change. I know what you feel like saying: "Wait a minute! What about the media's role in bringing about an end to the Vietnam war? Didn't all that journalistic coverage, especially on television, have a major part in concluding that insanity? And what about journalism's role in the success of the racial-equality struggle? Didn't media coverage, particularly televised media coverage, have a very large hand in enabling blacks to get on a more equal plane with whites?" In response to both queries, I say: "Shit, no!" In concern with Vietnam, what turned us, the public, against that viciousness was, as, ironically, Dan Rather ("with" Gary Paul Gates) pointed out in his much-snapped-up Nixon-presidency chronicle "The Palace Guard," was the simple fact that it was our brothers and husbands and sons who were losing their lives over there--a truth that, needless to say, we already knew full well and didn't need the media to tell us about. In regard to black equality--and, again, I've taken this up before--the decisive factor here was...Barry Goldwater. When he squared off against Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential campaign, LBJ (greatly assisted by Goldwater's own statements) made him out to be an unstable reactionary loon. Thus Goldwater was massively defeated, his extremism-is-no-vice style of conservatism sent other Republican office-seekers into the electoral toilet along with him, and, hence, with so many Democrats installed in so many public offices, the Great Society was launched, and, therefore, there was all that landmark racial progress during the 1960s. In point of fact, I shall go so far as to contend that if The Mainstream Media were, en masse, wiped out, if this nation's major newspapers (the Times, the Post, et al) went out of business, if this nation's major newsmagazines (Time, et al) went out of business, if the Big Three television networks stopped broadcasting news altogether, confining themselves to presenting only entertainment programming and sports, if all news were literally left to radio (which is, in fact, is and always has been where most blacks get their information and their entertainment) and the Internet and to the all-news cable-TV networks (CNN, MSNBC), most of us...wouldn't care a crap. As long as men could continue to watch their baseball games and their football games and their basketball games and women could continue to watch their daytime soaps and their Lifetime films and read their romance novels, there would, by and large, be no public outcry over the vast reduction in news. It was a reviewer of David Halberstam's much-debated media study "The Powers That Be" who nakedly said that, while it has been considerably useful in the past, much of the time we as a nation get along perfectly well without mass communication. So let us not call the Times or any other journalistic organ or, for that matter, journalism itself "essential." A wholly honest look at American history will very quickly lead to the conclusion that, when used in reference to the mainstream reportorial community, that word is monumentally misapplied.