Posted by David Post:
Another Tedious Reminder for Frank Rich:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_10-2009_05_16.shtml#1242324203
Sunday's New York Times brought us some [1]thoughts on the crisis
facing the newspaper industry from Frank Rich. He�s not, I admit, my
favorite columnist, generally speaking � but it�s actually an
interesting and thoughtful piece. The death of the newspaper may well
be upon us � though as my friend Gigi Sohn helpfully reminds me, that
doesn�t necessarily portend the death of journalism, which would be a
far more serious matter � and it should be of concern to anyone
interested in the future of "news" and the future of an informed
global community. Rich acknowledges � correctly, I think � that many
of the newspaper industry's woes are due to its own "self-destructive
retreat from innovation".
"In the Internet era, many sectors of American media have been
re-enacting their at first complacent and finally panicked behavior
of 60 years ago. Few in the entertainment business saw the digital
cancer spreading through their old business models until well after
file-sharing, via Napster, had started decimating the music
industry. It�s not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a
path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it�s
only journalism that�s essential to a functioning democracy. And
it�s not just because � as we keep being tediously reminded �
Thomas Jefferson said so."
It's that snide reference to being "tediously reminded" of Jefferson's
vision of the free press, and of the crucial importance of the free
press to a functioning democracy, that � naturally! � caught my eye.
Oh, so arch, so condescending! Who can resist a little bit of smarmy
Jefferson-bashing every so often � even when he�s on your side of the
argument?!
I am, I happily and rather proudly confess, [2]one of the tedious
reminders. Why, I wonder, is it so tedious to be reminded that it was,
in fact, Jefferson who, more than any other figure in history,
articulated and helped establish, in this country, a vision
unprecedented in human history: the government would allow people to
speak their minds freely and without hindrance. It�s not about whether
Jefferson does or doesn�t get the credit for the accomplishment � it�s
about understanding the idea, and the context from which it sprung. I
think it deepens our understanding of the principle to understand how
it came into being, and understanding how it came into being
necessarily means understanding how Jefferson helped bring it into
being. Understanding, among other thing, how long the odds were that
he�d succeed; when Jefferson wrote his justly famous epigram:
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government
without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not
hesitate a moment to prefer the latter"
the government of the United States (including a fully complicit
judicial branch) was throwing newspaper editors in jail for expressing
their displeasure with the way the Adams administration was doing
things. Had it continued, it would have destroyed the United States
before the United States had a chance to become the United States; it
didn�t continue because the people of the United States threw the
bastards out in the election of 1800; and I don�t see why it�s so
tedious to remind ourselves of all that from time to time.
Why does Frank Rich find it so �tedious� to be reminded of Jefferson's
role in that astonishing accomplishment? You�d think that journalists
like Rich would adopt Jefferson as their secular saint � he actually
believed that what they do is more important than what the government
does!
My theory is that Rich is uncomfortable with Jefferson on his side
because � ironically, perhaps � Jefferson�s vision of the primacy of
unfettered communication is a little too radical for Rich. He�s not
nearly as sure as Jefferson was himself that newspapers matter more
than the government matters; faced with the Jeffersonian choice, I
think Frank Rich hesitates, but then then goes with Alternative A. Or
perhaps what makes him uncomfortable with having Jefferson on his side
is that this is all a prelude to asking for a most un-Jefferson-like
government bailout for the newspaper industry? He claims that it�s
not:
�Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it � monitoring the
local school board, say � can and is being done by voluntary
�citizen journalists� with time on their hands, integrity and a Web
site. But we can�t have serious opinions about America�s role in
combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable
correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time
what is actually going on there. We can�t know what is happening
behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in
Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the
appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts
are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay
rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or
some new bottom-up news organism we can�t yet imagine. It�s
immaterial whether we find the fruits of their labors on paper, a
laptop screen, a BlackBerry, a Kindle or podcast. But someone � and
certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests �
must pay for this content and make every effort to police its
fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering
operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News
unless Google shells out to replace them. It won�t.�
We'll see.
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/opinion/10rich.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
2. http://tinyurl.com/jeffersonsmoose
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