Hal Crowther
Stop the Presses At --30--
Two friends from different solar systems, a Manhattan litigator and a Kentucky novelist, sent me home-burned CDs that included the same song -- "James River Blues" by the Old Crow Medicine Show. A boatman's lament from the time when railroads replaced the packet boats on Virginia's James River, it's a sad song about the end of an era, a trade and a way of life. It made me think of the John Henry steel-drivin' songs ("gonna die with a hammer in my hand, Lord"), and I realized that a lot of our American folklore and folk music, from Paul Bunyan and his blue ox to the cowboy myth that never seems to die, was inspired by a common nostalgia for the work men did, and will never do again.
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The consensus is much darker. And the more senior the observer, it seemed to me, the more pessimistic the assessment. An essay by Russell Baker in the New York Review of Books (Aug. 16) pretty much sums up the anguish shared by these decorated veterans who were, in my time, American journalism's most distinguished practitioners. Baker, whom I think of as a friend and certainly a role model (strange how older role models still in fighting trim are becoming so scarce), is known as a generous humorist and a graceful memoirist of the pre-modern era when empathy and sentiment were still permissible, before the genre was overrun with wailing, whining and indecent exposure. If anyone could find a silver lining, if anyone could supply at least a thin sugar coating for this bitter pill of obsolescence, Russ Baker would be your man. But the only hint of a ray of light, which he may or may not have added himself, was the question mark appended to his article, "Goodbye to Newspapers?"
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"Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product," writes Baker, in no mood to be amusing. "Papers everywhere felt relentless demands for improved stock performance. The resulting policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting has left the landscape littered with frail, failing or gravely wounded newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community."
The villains of this drama are obvious ones, conspicuous players with nowhere to hide; Baker points his finger at myopic technophiliacs, who fail to comprehend what's happening, and corporate carnivores who know precisely and couldn't care less. He quotes a speech by John Carroll, who took the Los Angeles Times to its finest hour, in the standard terms of Pulitzers and prestige, and just months later resigned as editor rather than implement bloodthirsty staff cuts. "Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public," a chastened Carroll told an audience of his peers. "What do the current owners want from their newspapers? -- the answer could not be simpler: Money. That's it."
http://www.populist.com/07.16.crowther.html
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