Newspapers should have
no friends – Joseph Pulitzer
Sometime in the past few years, nearly everyone in
Connecticut, with the possible exception of the state’s ebullient left leaning writers,
became a cynic. And cynicism has increased in direct proportion to the
inability or unwillingness of status quo progressives in the General Assembly
to confront the state’s most pressing economic problems. “We've been sitting
through the last days of the legislative session doing everything BUT paying
attention to the state's economy and fiscal situation,” Representative Gail
Lavielle notes on Facebook. Procrastination is the typical response of a do-nothing
politician to a serious problem.
Given the state of the state – perilous – the unheeding
joyful crowd may remind some people of Voltaire’s mercilessly flayed Candide,
the eternal optimist who, despite rough treatment at the hands of an
unforgiving world, continues to insist that, in spite of his manifold
humiliations, this is still “the best of all possible worlds.”
Voltaire knew whereof he spoke. Hounded from country to
country by his targets who sought to shove him into prison for the
unpardonable crime of discomforting the comfortable, Voltaire had taken the
measure of life’s cruelties and absurdities. To protect himself from lawyers
waving defamation suits, the attorneys general of the day, he threw his
cynicism into fiction that spared him prison time and disarmed the menacing
optimists; had Voltaire been caught in their jaws, he would have suffered a
fate not unlike that of Candide.
At almost exactly the same time in England, Alexander Pope,
a hunch-backed Catholic, was creating a similar havoc among brethren belle
lettrists. The art of journalism was still in swaddling clothes. Under Pope’s
hand it grew up, very quickly. Pope threw his satires into poetry. His Dunciad was a poetic torture chamber for
those with whom he did polemical battle.
After much huffing and puffing, the two gave birth to modern
journalism, the animating spirit of which is perfectly suggested by Pope’s
boast:
“Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to seeMen not afraid of God afraid of me.”
Moderns may be surprised to hear that it is only a hop, skip
and jump from Voltaire and Pope to Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the much coveted
Pulitzer Prize is named. Pulitzer’s vision of a press independent of political influence,
one that lives or dies fiercely guarding its prerogatives, is at opposite ends
from what Sharyl Attkisson has called, disdainfully, transactional journalism,
which is at least as great a danger to journalism as fake news.
Pulitzer advised that good reporters should have no friends, and there were in the
golden age of journalism reporters willing to confront, at great personal and
professional costs, the considerable powers arrayed against them. Attkisson, who bailed out of CBS News two decades ago
because she felt she would no longer be able to pursue stories inconvenient to
the political friends of major news outlets, talks very sensibly about fake
news.
There are two kinds of fake news. There is fake fake news
and real fake news. Many politicians who find themselves on the receiving end
of proper denunciation will denounce as “fake” news that is objectively true,
although even objectively true news may be slanted. Real fake news cannot be true, but true news
can be faked. And that is the boat that brings Attkisson to the shore of
transactional journalism.
The transaction in
transactional journalism is a business arrangement agreed to informally among
politicians and friendly journalists, an arrangement possibly more damaging to
good journalism than fake news because
it cannot be as easily detected. Or rather, it can be detected and verified
only by reporters in the field who have succumbed to the allure of powerful
politicians, or by editors, publishers and owners of media outlets who have
developed over the years a mutually supportive business relationship with
politicians and their own valued sources upon which the prosperity of the media
outlet in some sense depends. News depends upon sources and access; sources,
whose primary loyalty is to the reigning powers, can dry up. Access can be
denied.
There has been during the Malloy administration a great deal
of objectively true evidence that Connecticut has entered an economic death
spiral. The abandoning of the ship of state by those most responsible for
Connecticut’s present economic condition – perilous – certainly suggests a
flight from the past. The race for
governor on the Democrat side has so far involved the party’s junior varsity
politicians. Ned Lamont, said to be the leading Democrat gubernatorial
contender, is no Ella Grasso or Abe Ribicoff.
Indeed, Lamont is no Dick Blumenthal or Chris Murphy, both of whom appear to be
content to remain in Washington D.C. where, as U.S. Senators, they spend their
days seeking to sink President Donald Trump’s boat, at a time when the Democrat
ship of state in Connecticut is sending up bubbles.
The cry of alarm
coming from editorial boardrooms across the state is hardly ear-piercing. Where
is the media hullabaloo? A thoroughgoing
cynic may be forgiven for putting down the guarded optimism of political
commentators in the state to Attkisson's transactional journalism.
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