Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
Death of the Liberal Class (24 page)
“During my last few years at the
Times
, I joked with my wife that my work there was all about making the world safe for millionaires,” McGill told me. “There was no moral problem during the years when I was learning how to be a reporter, how to write a story, how to get published, etc. But when I finally saw what the
Times
as a corporate and political structure stands for, and the privileged constituencies that it serves, I had to ask whether I wanted my life and skills put in service of those particular people and values - and I did not.
Times
, I joked with my wife that my work there was all about making the world safe for millionaires,” McGill told me. “There was no moral problem during the years when I was learning how to be a reporter, how to write a story, how to get published, etc. But when I finally saw what the
Times
as a corporate and political structure stands for, and the privileged constituencies that it serves, I had to ask whether I wanted my life and skills put in service of those particular people and values - and I did not.
“I was unconscious to the very powerful interests I was serving,” he said:
I had never bellied up to the challenges to whether I wanted to serve power in this way. There were points during my ten years at the
Times
when I was writing about government. Power can be construed directly in those articles, but primarily I was a culture reporter for a long time, a metro reporter and then a business reporter. I was basically always a pawn in the big game. I had never thought through whether I was using the skills I had amassed for the best possible moral outcome. I knew people at the
Times
who literally got sick every time they walked through those revolving doors. I got that way. And I didn’t know what was hitting me. I felt physically ill. It was my conscience. It was strong enough that I knew I needed to escape. When you work at the
New York Times
, it is like working at the White House. Nobody should have that power permanently. They should have it for a while and drop it. It is not the real world in there. I was getting too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call me up, as if I were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press releases and have me describe them in glowing terms. And this happened over and over. I wrote critical pieces. The former chairman of Christie’s [auction house] lost his job because of me. The former head of the New York City Historical Society lost his job because of me and my reporting of how he squandered the endowment and let priceless treasures at the museum get rained on and destroyed. I did my bit. I did the investigative part. But overall, the
New York Times
is an entrenched source of power and does not serve those who are the neediest in society well or at all. When you have that amount of power, you need to spend a lot more time thinking about people who really need help.
And yet McGill, for all his problems with the paper, was quick to add that “the world without the
New York Times
would be a poorer place.” He said that when the paper covered the U.S. government, New York City, or Washington, the moral problems he increasingly encountered as a reporter reached their apex: “That is when the conflicts of interest are the strongest.” He said that the need for access to the powerful rammed news through “a weird distorting force field, to the point where it is difficult for readers to know where the story is coming from.”
New York Times
would be a poorer place.” He said that when the paper covered the U.S. government, New York City, or Washington, the moral problems he increasingly encountered as a reporter reached their apex: “That is when the conflicts of interest are the strongest.” He said that the need for access to the powerful rammed news through “a weird distorting force field, to the point where it is difficult for readers to know where the story is coming from.”
But despite these impediments, McGill fears, as do I, the loss of papers and liberal institutions as “a counterweight to government and corporate power.” Newspapers, he said, were powerful enough to stand up to lawsuits and harassments and threats:
No amount of blogging and Web sites, even when added up together, will equal that kind of counterweight. That is being lost. Journalism was born and reared in newspapers. Not in TV. Not in radio. There is so much institutional memory and practice and good that came up in newspapers that it will be a tragedy if it is lost, and it is being lost.
“The further you get from these distorting power sources, like New York City or Washington, and can write national or foreign stories, you can get indispensable reporting done by the same reporters who, in other realms, work in these distorting force fields,” he said:
There are two kinds of objectivities. There is one in quotes and one outside of quotes. The one in quotes is the corrupted objectivity of mainstream journalism. It is an ideology. It does not have an underlying rigor. It means a lot of things, with many of those things being contradictory. It can mean neutral, fair, balanced, and impartial. But you can have a story that is factual
and
unfair. You can have a story that is impartial but not factual. It is a bunch of practices adopted over time and lumped under this big word. When you look at the ideology, you see that unfortunately it is often serving laziness, rationalization, and, above all, the commercial purpose of the newspaper, and not the discovery and presentation of the truth. The objectivity outside of quotes is a method of inquiry that assures that the researcher gets as close as possible to the truth. It is patterned after scientific objectivity. It has its rules and its discipline. It requires verification through corroboration or through direct observation or any number of means. These are guidelines a reporter follows to get at the truth. And yet, it requires the utmost humility towards the idea of truth. The truth claim is the very last thing you arrive at, and only after intense methodological rigor and soul searching. Whatever you present is not going to be “objective,” whatever that means. It will be your best effort, but it will not be the truth, and it will be as slipshod and methodically easy as the he-said-she-said formula. There are two types of objectivity, and, like cholesterol, we want more of the good kind and less of the bad. Maybe there never was enough of the good objectivity to say that it is being lost with newspapers, but there are an awful lot of great reporters who are being lost. These great investigative journalists and reporters covering government, even if they were fighting with their newspapers, against the things we talked about, they worked to get the truth into the paper. And the best ones are being cut because the expensive forms of journalism are being cut. We are losing this culturally.
John Steinbeck, after visiting squatter camps filled with impoverished migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley in California, filed a story for the
San Francisco News
. The poverty and filth in the camps appalled him. He found the people crushed, without hope, and on the brink of starvation. He wrote in his story about one family he had seen. The mother and father had built a hut by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds. They had flattened tin cans and paper against them. The parents and three children, including a three-year-old with a distended belly caused by malnutrition, slept together on an old piece of carpet inside the crude hut. The youngest child had a gunnysack tied around his waist for clothing, had not had milk for two years, and was slow in his reactions. In the
News,
Steinbeck wrote:
San Francisco News
. The poverty and filth in the camps appalled him. He found the people crushed, without hope, and on the brink of starvation. He wrote in his story about one family he had seen. The mother and father had built a hut by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds. They had flattened tin cans and paper against them. The parents and three children, including a three-year-old with a distended belly caused by malnutrition, slept together on an old piece of carpet inside the crude hut. The youngest child had a gunnysack tied around his waist for clothing, had not had milk for two years, and was slow in his reactions. In the
News,
Steinbeck wrote:
He will die in a very short time. The older children may survive. Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet. It was born dead, which was just as well because she should not have fed it at the breast; her own diet will not produce milk.After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, the mother rolled over and lay still for two days. She is up today, tottering around. The last baby, born less than a year ago, lived a week. This woman’s eyes have the glazed, faraway look of a sleepwalker’s eyes.She does not wash clothes any more. The drive that makes for cleanliness has been drained out of her and she hasn’t the energy. The husband was a share-cropper once, but he couldn’t make it go. Now he has lost even the desire to talk.He will not look directly at you, for that requires will, and will needs strength. He is a bad field worker for the same reason. It takes him a long time to make up his mind, so he is always late in moving and late in arriving in the fields. His top wage, when he can find work now, which isn’t often, is a dollar a day.The children do not even go to the willow clump any more. They squat where they are and kick a little dirt. The father is vaguely aware that there is a culture of hookworm in the mud along the river bank. He knows the children will get it on their bare feet.But he hasn’t the will nor the energy to resist. Too many things have happened to him.
26
Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
was born at this moment out of profound human pain, injustice, and Steinbeck’s capacity for empathy. It was an act of journalism, the best kind of journalism. His reporting flowed seamlessly into fiction, as it did with other great reporters, from Charles Dickens to George Orwell. In
Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck brought to life the Joad family’s journey west from the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. The Joads were not, in the sense of journalism, based on a single real family. They were a composite. But the ability to marry factual details with empathy and art effectively transmitted a reality, an experience, that has become part of our collective memory. Steinbeck’s novel was the chronicle of the struggle of people to endure, made understandable by a mixture of allegory and fact. It took reality, as the Federal Theatre Project did, and transformed it into art. It challenged old myths and stereotypes—those who fled the Dust Bowl were scorned by many Americans—by appealing to human emotions.
The Grapes of Wrath
was born at this moment out of profound human pain, injustice, and Steinbeck’s capacity for empathy. It was an act of journalism, the best kind of journalism. His reporting flowed seamlessly into fiction, as it did with other great reporters, from Charles Dickens to George Orwell. In
Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck brought to life the Joad family’s journey west from the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. The Joads were not, in the sense of journalism, based on a single real family. They were a composite. But the ability to marry factual details with empathy and art effectively transmitted a reality, an experience, that has become part of our collective memory. Steinbeck’s novel was the chronicle of the struggle of people to endure, made understandable by a mixture of allegory and fact. It took reality, as the Federal Theatre Project did, and transformed it into art. It challenged old myths and stereotypes—those who fled the Dust Bowl were scorned by many Americans—by appealing to human emotions.
Liberal institutions were created to make the world a better place. They were designed to give a voice to those who are shunted aside, abused, and ignored by the larger society. Throughout their history, they have promised to protect the common good, educate, and fight injustice. These institutions, when they function, keep alive qualities that defy the raw greed of unchecked capitalism. I am a product of these liberal institutions, in particular the church, the university—where I spent eight years, as an undergraduate and graduate student—and the media. I was, while a working journalist, a member of a labor union. The sermons preached from my father’s pulpit, the study of literature, history, theology, the classics, and moral philosophy in college and graduate school, gave me a language to make sense of the world and define my place in it. It was journalism that permitted me to roam the world for two decades, every new foreign assignment the equivalent of another undergraduate degree. The languages I speak, the cultural literacy I possess, the grasp I have of political and economic systems, would not have been possible without these liberal institutions. I defied them in the end, but I am also deeply indebted to them. My anger is not directed against these institutions so much as those within them that failed when we needed their voices. These liberal principles were egregiously betrayed to protect careers, to preserve access to the powerful. Liberals conceded too much to the power elite. The tragedy of the liberal class and the institutions it controls is that it succumbed to opportunism and finally to fear. It abrogated its moral role. It did not defy corporate abuse when it had the chance. It exiled those within its ranks who did. And the defanging of the liberal class not only removed all barriers to neofeudalism and corporate abuse but also ensured that the liberal class will, in its turn, be swept aside.
The disease of the liberal class is the specious, supposedly “professional” insistence on objectivity. Before the rise of commercial newspapers, journals of opinion existed to influence public sentiment via arguments—not to stultify readers with lists of facts. Our oldest universities were formed to train ministers and inculcate into students the primacy of the common good. Labor unions had a vision of an egalitarian society that understood the inevitability of class struggle. Artists from Mark Twain to John Steinbeck sought not only to explain social, political, economic, and cultural reality, but also to use this understanding to fight for a social order based on justice. Movements that defied the power elite often started and sustained these liberal institutions, which were created as instruments of reform. One by one, these institutions succumbed to the temptation of money, the jargon of patriotism, belief in the need for permanent war, fear of internal and external enemies, and distrust of radicals, who had once kept the liberal class honest. And when it was over, the liberal class had nothing left to say.
In 1834 the
New York Sun
reported on a woman whose husband came home drunk and abusive once too often. It wrote of the event in a manner that would be impossible in today’s cold, stripped-down reliance on fact: “As every sensible woman ought to do who is cursed with a drunken husband, she refused to have anything to do with him hereafter—and he was sent to the penitentiary.” For comparison, here is the final sentence of a 1995 item from the
Ann Arbor News
, about a man who assaulted a prostitute after she refused to have sex with him: “Employees at the Ramada Inn Ann Arbor, 3750 Washtenaw Avenue, said the man and woman checked in around 2 a.m. Friday.”
27
New York Sun
reported on a woman whose husband came home drunk and abusive once too often. It wrote of the event in a manner that would be impossible in today’s cold, stripped-down reliance on fact: “As every sensible woman ought to do who is cursed with a drunken husband, she refused to have anything to do with him hereafter—and he was sent to the penitentiary.” For comparison, here is the final sentence of a 1995 item from the
Ann Arbor News
, about a man who assaulted a prostitute after she refused to have sex with him: “Employees at the Ramada Inn Ann Arbor, 3750 Washtenaw Avenue, said the man and woman checked in around 2 a.m. Friday.”
27
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