Follow the money.  Apparently it was more profitable
for CBS News to pay its CEO $40 million/year than to
run its entire Baghdad news bureau on $7 million/year? 

Of course I can’t explain the ‘profit’ to CBS News it
realizes by its outrageous $40 mil to its CEO, but
obviously, judging by the piddling amount paid for the
actual business of news, CBS News is not in the news
business.

litlpeep:
WTF is Lewis Hyde and why would you be quoting somebody who obviously doesn’t know jack s*** about the need for a free press in a democracy as an expert?

Chris Hedges writes:
“Those who battle the corporate destruction of the ecosystem and seek to protect the remnants of our civil society must again take to the streets. They have to engage in acts of civil disobedience.”

Hedges keeps saying this, in his last few essays, but ... the thrill is gone, especially when the “civil disobedience” prescription is hung on nostalgia for the New York Times’ better days.

“Civil disobedience”—nor “nonviolence”—isn’t going to stop “corporate destruction” (which has a human face, and works with human hands), and everybody knows it: what worked in the still-democratic sixties ... is a memory.

You might gain a better grasp of the revolution you are witnessing by reading Lewis Hyde: Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

I suggest this because the inside story is not always the best one at the moment when we need to step outside our selves, the world inside which we are born, live, and die, and take a bit longer historical look at the socio-cultural forces sweeping this whole world along.

The newspapers will be less “missed” than marveled at as museum effluvia - not because they sometimes tolerated decent reporting (which they apparently only did when necessary to sell that odious advertising), but because they were so popular in spite of being so nasty in almost every imaginable way.

Thanks for visiting my page, Tao Walker.

Good article, Chris, and I can’t help but agree with you.. But if it’s any comfort, local newspapers are thriving in your old Upstate NY homeland, with dailies surviving in Troy, Schenectady, Gloversville, Amsterdam, Herkimer, Little Falls, Glens Falls – all within about a 60 mile range of Albany.  The Times Union in Albany has a larger and statewide impact, and its survival is less of a mystery. A lot of the success of the small local papers may have to do with an ageing population that still relies on the paperboy’s daily delivery. But also, these papers provide real communication on local politics and sports, even if they are always careful to avoid offending advertisers. And some of these newsrooms would warm your heart if you ever care to visit. (Try the Gloversville Leader Herald) By the way, I’ve enjoyed your writing ever since that piece you did on the Schoharie hill people years ago.

Of course!!! If the media were to really cover the problem—our corrupt politicians giving away the store to the Fat Cats that fund their elections—they’d no longer have a political base willing to show up for an interview.

Jack Lohman
http://MoneyedPoliticians.net

Come on Don Low. Can you not give Chris an A+ for brilliant and incisive
eloquence too?

ways of reporting events as well as what-how to report then change. ways of declaring war
and why of it also change. however the invarience, THE WHY for it all, never changes.

but the structure of society and u.s system of rule [governance] basicly never change an
ioata in all lands and empires; and not just in u.s.

and, of course, expect further massive changes in the ways ‘knowledge’ wld be imparted to
children first of all and then adults.

we can expect also changes in how a person [ab]uses, exploits, sends to death another
person, but the invariant stays the same: me master, u serf! tnx

surfnow (and others here) - Your comment:

“The only thing my students are more aware of is how to gossip about each other more quickly and efficiently.”

You are channeling the uber-prophetic words of Neil Postman in his incredibly brilliant book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He says precisely what you’ve observed. Even in 1985 when he wrote his book, he noted that the news was becoming nothing more than gossip. I sometimes wonder if Postman were alive today what he would think?

Anarcissie—
I think they are praising the reporters, not the capitalist owners. Read more slowly.

Anarcissie,

Sent you an email last week re: new article on BC.

link: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/of-mice-and-men-and-other/#comments

Chris Hedges comes not to bury “journalism”....but to praise it.  Trouble is, his
praise is too late.

The corporate grave-diggers’ve all but finished their dirty work, and are pleased
to’ve gotten rid of an outmoded mechanism which not only doesn’t adequately
serve their profit-driven purposes anymore, but by its very CONcrete nature (as
described by Hedges and commenters here) has come to pose an unacceptable
risk to the entire “money for nothin’” criminal enterprise.  Effigies of the ‘corpse’
will of-course be on public display for awhile yet.  These hollowed-out husks
are still somewhat effective as distractions, at-least, for the relatively few who
still look at them.

The false promise of “the internet” is becoming more evident, as well, to those
who had (and may yet) put such ‘stock’ in this terminal-stage apparatus as an
instrument of ‘liberation.’  By its very nature, though, this ephemeral technology
is even more easily (and inexpensively) compromised and corrupted than its
newsprint-based predecessor.  It is, at the same time, so tenuously CONnected
to our actual Living World, while giving “users” (interesting epithet, that) such a
CONvincing illusion of having real substance, that its potential for
perniciousness is orders-of-magnitude greater than that of its dead-letter late
‘rival’.....sort-of like the difference, in effect, between home-grown cannabis
and industrially processed crack cocaine.

The “good news” is that these newfangled devices presently imprisoning their
own devisers will’ve soon come-and-gone one helluva lot quicker than all the
heavy machinery of “the newspaper racket” did…..may they rest in peace. 

HokaHey!

Anarcissie,

Sent you an email last week re: another BC article. 
the link: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/of-mice-and-men-and-other/#comments

Goodness, it seems there is no one more conservative—I might even say reactionary—than those who call themselves ‘progressives’.  Once again we’re to bemoan the decline of the mainstream media, owned and operated by capitalists and almost always entirely reflecting their interests and point of view.  Why?

Most people have no means of determining truth. Think about that carefully. If you read a story that took place in NY, are you able to verify it by talking with the actors in that story? No. Can you travel every day to verify anything? No. Truth is elusive, if it even exists.

What people do is trust. That’s how they form beliefs. They can’t verify, so they trust. You may choose to trust a reporter or a paper or a newsreader, or a program or a web site or any number of sources. But in the end it is trust that prevails. Truth lives with itself.

Trust is almost as relative as truth. In most cases, people trust those who “look like themselves.” Now, when I say “look” I mean more than appearance. People trust others who have the same beliefs as they do! The churchman trusts the churchman, and so on. As you can see, this isn’t a likely road to the truth. It is simply the fastest road to confirmation of one’s beliefs. And let’s face it, that is what people want - confirmation they are right.

Most cities had at most two papers. So, you had two choices. The Internets are a million papers or more. So, what people do is keep searching until they find the voice which is most like their own and call that home. If you were say a radical neo-nazi, there were no newspapers to support you. You were knowingly outside the system. But there are plenty of Internet sources for neo-nazi, so they can confirm their truths and rightness. They can legitimize their positions. That’s a big difference between newspapers and the Internet.

Hopefully, the hackers will persist—and along the way they will develop a sense of integrity to match the importance of their work.  WikiLeaks exposed more
secrets and authentic information in a split second than all the newsprint of the last hundred years.

Problem is, the sheer astounding amount of information available electronically, and how to sort if out.  Means there’s an even greater need for good public education—which is also deliberately under attack. 

The one saving grace is the faith that truth has an uncanny tendency to reveal itself even in the most disadvantaged circumstances.  For every messenger killed, two spring up in his/her place. Truth slips through the bars of every prison.

In 1900 there were 95 daily newspapers in New York City- most of which were owned by different publishers, with opinions that ran the gamut of the political spectrum. The final nail in the coffin of media consolidation came with the 1996 Telecommunications Act-signed by the biggest political phony in history- Bill Clinton. That act made it possible for 80 percent of all information to be controlled by just five corporations. No one interested in real democracy could believe this is a good thing.

Hopefully the hackers will persist.  Manning, with the help of Assange and WikiLeaks released more authentic “news” in a split second than newspapers would have uncovered and printed in years.  It’s hackers who are now going to be in the front lines working against secrecy and crime.  Protect them. Defend them.  Chances are, they are a good deal smarter than the people trying to shut them up, but they’re going to need help from “the public sector.”

At least there’s still some investigative pieces on 60 Minutes. Last night, I saw a
story on families living in hotels and it was heart wrenching. At made me furious
all over again at these bankers and wall streeters. I wondered if any of these
villains watched the 60 Minutes story, and if so, how could they possibly sleep at
night?

We do need newspapers—a mainstrem medis source—to function as the “castor oil” of previous generations.  As in, what some wiser and forceful person in your life gave you “for your own good”.

Most of us live in rarified air where we go to hear what we believe in and what reinforces what we believe in already.  I read Truth Dig and Commondreams.org for that very reason.  I guess the right wing-nuts go to Rush Limbaugh and Faux news for the same reason.

I cannot overstate how going to commondreams and truth dig and similar sites were my first breath of fresh air.

But the question is how do we get some of these broader ideas into the MSM.  They are SO TIMID.  Commondreams printed a piece on a an upcoming environmental action.  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/23  Now this piece carried the signature of a local person int he Kansas community I lived in.  So I forwarded the link to the local editor thinking that maybe they would carry information about it simply because of this local person. 

Too many of us will not be surprised to know that the silence has been deafening.  Even medium sized local media outlets won’t cover this stuff as a local interest story.  Neither do they cover the locals that go to the School of America’s protests.  The local Tea Party yahoos do get covered.

This local media silence is a tough nut to crack.  As Hedges writes, this local media silence, the complicity with the mainstream “story” is the most deadly aspect because it creates so little awareness of bigger issues.

Yes I am relieved about the fact that I can flee to fresh air web sites but how do you make some of this information more commonly heard?  This question is profound and falls to us locals. 

The answer is “however you can”.  But it enjoins us to do it.  Not someone else.  What small moment of personal courage can we look engage in?  Then do it.

This begs the question, how effective will acts of civil disobedience be if there is no traditional press to cover the story? Certainly citizen bloggers can be everywhere and anywhere but will there be any coordinated news organization able to harness this cacophony of information?

As a high school social studies teacher, I can tell you from experience that the more communications technology that students have, the less informed they are. The biggest myth is the one being perpetrated by these educational gurus who are behind the push for the privatization of the public school system- that somehow spending on expensive computer software and laptops for all will translate into more gobal awareness. Bull! The only thing my students are more aware of is how to gossip about each other more quickly and efficiently.

For Kerryrose:

You are correct in your assessment of where truth can be found. But this truth is available only to those who have the means and methods to seek it out. I find this statement of yours, while honest and well meant, to be a middle class vision of life, one that excludes the millions of working class folks who have neither time nor computer in many cases.

The times that Hedges reminisces so eloquently about were so important because of the investigative journalists access to the public through the public newspaper, one that everyone read. The news one accesses on TV, the single most popular source of “news” these days, is so biased and subtly so at that,with no investigative skill sets whatsoever, resulting in the uniformed public we find today.

Internet and cable news has allowed us to remain within our comfortable ‘bubble.’  This wasn’t possible when civic discourse revolved around the narrative of the major newspapers.  We were speaking and arguing in the same ‘language’ and small, dissident papers would self-publish in opposition.

Now we have documentary journalists.  Since professional video cameras and video editing programs are widely available, there is a huge amount of investigative documentaries available.  You just have to look for them.  ‘Gasland’ was eye-opening for me.  I knew about fracking, but the fire-water and sickness of its victims was not reported.

Look for independent documentaries.  They are the new investigative journalism.