The death of the American newspaper

The other day Doug Henwood posted a link to Harris Poll research that found Just Two in Five Americans Read a Newspaper Almost Every Day. Those findings helped me to think through some ideas I have had about the “death of newspapers” for some time, especially since the poll findings appeared at the very time that the New York Times announced that it was discontinuing free access to its website:

Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering.

Starting in January 2011, a visitor to NYTimes.com will be allowed to view a certain number of articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the print newspaper, even those who subscribe only to the Sunday paper, will receive full access to the site without any additional charge.

Well, I am not sure that this link on the new policy (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html) will get you past the firewall it is reporting on, but give it a try.  Sorry if it doesn’t, but I imagine that might not make much difference to you if you are one of those numbskulls described in the Harris poll:

Just two in five U.S. adults (43%) say they read a daily newspaper, either online or in print almost every day. Just over seven in ten Americans (72%) say they read one at least once a week while 81% read a daily newspaper at least once a month. One in ten adults (10%) say they never read a daily newspaper.

One reason for the dying of the daily newspaper is the graying of the daily readership. Almost two-thirds of those aged 55 and older (64%) say they still read a daily newspaper almost every day. The younger one is, however, the less often they read newspapers. Just over two in five of those aged 45-54 (44%) read a paper almost every day as do 36% of those aged 35-44. But less than one quarter of those aged 18-34 (23%) say they read a newspaper almost every day while 17% in this age group say they never read a daily newspaper.

I guess the graying of the daily readership describes me fairly well. I remember when I was first informed that reading the N.Y. Times was a necessity for understanding the world, as opposed to the cheesy tabloids that my father and his friends read each day, most of which have disappeared—like the Daily Mirror, a competitor to the N.Y. Daily News.

It was Gussie Kasofsky who gave us that lecture on the Times. She was our school librarian whose husband Rafael had launched the Grine Felder bungalow colony in the 1940s as a haven for Yiddish-speaking leftists. One bungalow was named after Emma Lazarus, another after Sholem Aleichem. Gussie was also the person who introduced me to “outside” literature in 1959 after figuring out that the whole American Graffiti thing was not happening for me. After reading James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, I finally felt that the rest of the world was nuts, not me.

No matter how rancid the N.Y. Times can be (I’ll never forget the biased reporting on the strikes I participated in as a welfare worker and a schoolteacher), I continue to value the paper highly for articles like the one that appeared today about the misuse of radiation therapy. It appears that because the machines have become so much more complex and because hospitals refuse to allocate money for proper training, one out of twenty cancer patients end up getting either under or overdosed. Two of those who were overdosed are described in grim detail:

As Scott Jerome-Parks lay dying, he clung to this wish: that his fatal radiation overdose — which left him deaf, struggling to see, unable to swallow, burned, with his teeth falling out, with ulcers in his mouth and throat, nauseated, in severe pain and finally unable to breathe — be studied and talked about publicly so that others might not have to live his nightmare.

Sensing death was near, Mr. Jerome-Parks summoned his family for a final Christmas. His friends sent two buckets of sand from the beach where they had played as children so he could touch it, feel it and remember better days.

Mr. Jerome-Parks died several weeks later in 2007. He was 43.

The article contains over 6500 words, a mammoth undertaking that required five reporters to research and write. This is the newspaper of record fulfilling its duty as watchdog for the public interest. I strongly suspect that the Times will continue to publish such stories until it is forced to go out of business. The driving force for this kind of stellar reporting, I would argue, cannot be equated simply to the bottom-line mentality of the people who are anxious to see the share price of the newspaper go up. The ruling class intelligentsia quite rightly understands that they have an obligation to report on such matters, even if they compromise the reputation of the various hospitals responsible for such abuse. They have a social need to fulfill, namely preventing capitalism’s tendency toward excess from undermining the overall viability of the system. After all, the management at the N.Y. Times might suffer cancer at some point in their life and are wary of getting maimed or killed by poorly maintained systems.

This is the same need that forces the newspaper to report accurately on imperialist war and exploitation. It has a responsibility to its elite readers inside the beltway to inform them about the developing quagmire in Afghanistan all the while that it repeats administration propaganda about the war on terror and the need to spread democracy.

This is one of the reasons I believe that there will always be a need for a New York Times, a Washington Post and a Wall Street Journal. These kinds of newspapers are like dossiers for the ruling class that help it decide policy. You simply cannot expect the Huffington Post to pull together an investigative reporting team that can get to the bottom of a radiation therapy scandal or the growth of the Taliban. Such “aggregation” websites are totally reliant on the Times, the Washington Post and other “graying” print publication for all their content. The readers of the Huffington Post are spared the expense of buying a daily newspaper, even if as a result it undermines the long-term viability of the print medium, which relies almost exclusively on advertising revenue to make a profit. When you go to an article from a Huffington Post link, you miss out on a full-page ad for mattresses at Macy’s after all.

The decline of the American newspaper is about as good an example of the contradictions of capitalism that one can imagine. For the most part, the newspapers serve as propaganda to keep the citizenry corralled by the hegemonic ideas of society. As Noam Chomsky once pointed out in the 1980s, the people who read the New York Times tended to come down on the wrong side of the wars in Central American than those who did not. But for those who have learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff in such newspapers, they are indispensable for radical research as Chomsky also pointed out in an interview with David Barsamian:

… Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American educational system some years back… pointed out that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part that’s directed toward working people and the general population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for elites can’t quite do that. It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won’t be able to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press. That’s why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and Business Week. They just have to tell the truth. That’s a contradiction in the mainstream press, too. Take, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. They have dual functions and they’re contradictory. One function is to subdue the great beast. But another function is to let their audience, which is an elite audience, gain a tolerably realistic picture of what’s going on in the world. Otherwise, they won’t be able to satisfy their own needs. That’s a contradiction that runs right through the educational system as well. It’s totally independent of another factor, namely just professional integrity, which a lot of people have: honesty, no matter what the external constraints are. That leads to various complexities. If you really look at the details of how the newspapers work, you find these contradictions and problems playing themselves out in complicated ways….

With the decline, and possibly the death, of the great American newspapers, the capitalist system will surely lose one of its main ideological props. It is interesting that this decline was accelerated by the introduction of the Internet that some view—perhaps a bit too optimistically—as a harbinger of the communist society we seek since it represents the impulse of information to become free. By following the contradictions even further down the road, the Internet itself was a byproduct of military research around the feasibility of surviving a nuclear war. All this beggars the imagination, including my own.