by CKR
The Washington Post today gives us a lament on newspapers from David Simon, a Baltimore Sun reporter from 1983-95, and now executive producer of HBO's "The Wire."
Or perhaps it’s a Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall…
Frankly, I find this more coherent than Simon’s lament. The angelheaded hipsters of his generation passed through universities with radiant cool eyes looking toward a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express. But what has happened? Unknown powers, not understood, seem to be moving newsprint toward oblivion, starving hysterical naked.
It appears that Simon is unhappy with the present situation, but hasn’t bothered to understand the internet (of which the very currency is celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation, he tells us) or, perhaps, even newspapers. Or, shall we call it “the news” because newspapers have migrated to that shallow medium, the Terror through the wall.
It comes down to this for Simon:
Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?He explains how he comes by this despair, or cynicism, through a reading of the contortions of the Baltimore Sun to market itself. Not so much the news, but itself. And that seems to have been the problem for many news outlets. I can hardly bear to watch the nightly national or the morning local news for the interruptions, the vacuous choice of stories beyond the most obvious headlines, and the commercials, commercials, commercials. They’ve forgotten that the news is what they were about.
Two newspapers are showing signs of taking their missions seriously, though. The Los Angeles Times tells us why they stopped endorsing candidates after Richard Nixon and Watergate. Tony Day was a part of that story, moving the Times away from an unthinking Republicanism. Having known Tony for a short time here in Santa Fe, I can just imagine some of the, er, discussions that must have taken place. Tony was intelligent and meticulous in making a case, in contrast to David Simon. But Otis Chandler’s disgust with Nixon’s antics was part of the Times’s decision not to endorse, too. Now the Times has a new owner and a new policy. Times and the Times, they are a’changin’.
The Los Alamos Monitor’s editoral board signed (collectively, as the editorial board) an editorial today on the decision by the National Nuclear Security Administration to award three-quarters of the management fee to the private entity that manages the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After a year of reports of safety and document handling problems, including the transmission of classified information by a member of that private entity’s board, three-quarters of the fee seemed a bit much to me, too.
The Monitor takes on the secrecy in which the performance was evaluated and the possibility that the NNSA just might bear some responsibility for the problems. It also implies that nothing has changed.
Many realized only after the laboratory’s highly publicized meltdowns in recent years the deep-seated problems went completely unnoticed in evaluations at the time. Those evaluations were laughed at as political and expedient, but the outcome resulted in a competition for the contract.The current evaluation, assigning the managers profit for a C performance that seems to come under conditions of near zero accountability, makes us wonder if anything has been learned at all.
It’s refreshing to see the Monitor, which is often regarded as captive to the powers-that-be in Los Alamos, taking a critical stand.
So, David Simon, the news isn’t dead, and there are many of out here who thrive on it. The newspaper corporations are having some difficulty, and they may well have forgotten that the commodity they sell is the news and its value. The internet has complicated things, coming on the scene with the assumption that all it purveys must be free and an active antipathy to all that gets in the way of that very valuable news. I certainly wouldn’t want to surf without my ad blocker.
The newspapers and television networks haven’t figured out their relationship to the news in this new day. They could start by learning more about how the internet really works; hire someone from Google, maybe, instead of the folks who remain safely within their comfort zone.
And hey, Los Alamos Monitor: Paragraphing is really nice, and I suspect it needs to be done differently on the intertubes, and it’s even nicer to be able to link directly to your stories. For just one example of newspapers moving outside their comfort zone.