I caught a little of authors Chris Hedges and George Packer at the Miami Book Fair on C-Span yesterday.
Hedges is inspiring, an American transcendentalist for our age. His father was a minister and he has the bearing of a blue-eyed religious political savant. I disagree with most of what he says on analytic grounds--the America he says he loves and the corporations are now destroying is a romance-- but it is thrilling, and he has been a leader on Middle East policy. When Hedges holds forth, the other two panelists have nothing to say.
Packer attacked the internet. He said at the end of his panel that democracy depends on long-form journalism like the stuff he writes. That the people on the internet offer only opinion, they steal other people's reporting, and so when city hall bureaus are being closed and newspapers fold, he fears for democracy. Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times somewhat echoed him, saying that he is fearful about the way writers are now writing. Apparently, the internet is introducing bad habits.
I don't know about that. People have always written, and literacy is always changing. I have trouble reading Shakespeare. If I turned in an article written in Elizabethan prose, it would be killed. Today people are absorbing ideas in new ways. I wager that they are better-informed than ever (i.e., pretty ignorant, when all is said and done).
As to Packer's points, well, it's where you sit, isn't it? There is actually a lot of reporting on the internet. I'm about to post a piece of shoe-leather of my own later today. And as for democracy, Packer needs to explain how it helped democracy that the mainstream media lined up almost universally in favor of a disastrous war. We can talk about corporate ownership, about editorial groupthink, about writers who make enough to own country houses, about the construction of elites and consensus, but whatever the reason, the mainstream media lined up in favor of a disastrous war, including Packer, who in 2003 caricatured the opposition as grayhaired hippies, and later said that the big mistake was disbanding the Iraqi army. That's a grave mistake. Regimes have fallen over less. And it's one reason the internet is demolishing newspaper readership.
Packer is a puzzlement. The section in his book on the neocons, their Israel feelings and their Iraq war role may be better than anyone’s–good as journalism because he was close enough to them to describe them accurately. Maybe it’s that he started writing that book before the war went south, so he thought he was giving them credit.
Print newspapers have repeatedly given us unnecessary wars. The Spanish-American war was started by the press, they inflamed passions prior to WWI helping to rally the country into that disaster and Henry Luce of Time advocated continuously for war over a 10 year period before the Vietnam war started big time. Now we can lay the Iraq disaster at their feet. I would say good riddance.
I agree completely. Where it really counts print hides and slants information and your examples are excellent. What good is inside information and lots of capital behind you if all you do with it is commit propaganda to enhance your career and tell us about the political horse races like Chris Matthews? Most internet writers do not have capital backing but they milk the mainstream tidbits here and there, and compare and contrast them, and also bring in information from the foreign press. The internet is the sheet nailed to a tree in the public square in the middle of the night. It’s free speech and not just gossip about the Mayor’s mistress.
“I disagree with most of what he says on analytic grounds–the America he says he loves and the corporations are now destroying is a romance…”
Now all you have to do is convince your compatriots in regard to this…lol