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.
