Newspaper people spend a lot of time thinking about their business and their places in it. Sometimes, thinking about their business actually gets in the way of doing their business.
Often, such self-reflection is unhealthy because it leads to generous grants of dispensation for past slip-ups. Taking one's own measure, at least by newspaper types, also leads to vast expressions of high-mindedness and greater purpose, which in the day-to-day run of the work have little to do with anything. And, nowadays, it can lead to whining, especially about how the Internet has mugged the newspaper industry.
I have in mind testimony by David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, before a Senate committee on May 6. Senators, whose motives, as always, require intense and skeptical scrutiny, are apparently worried about their friends in the media.
"When you hear a newspaper executive claiming that his industry is an essential bulwark of society," Mr. Simon told the Senators, "and that it stands threatened by a new technology that is, as of yet, unready to shoulder the same responsibility, you may be inclined to empathize. And indeed, that much is true enough as it goes. But when that same newspaper executive then goes on to claim that this predicament has occurred through no fault on the industry's part, that they have merely been undone by new technologies, feel free to kick out his teeth. At that point, he's as fraudulent as the most self-aggrandized blogger."
And, later in his testimony, "When locally based, family owned newspapers like The Sun were consolidated into publicly owned newspaper chains, an essential dynamic, an essential trust between journalism and the communities served by that journalism was betrayed."
Some journalist observer/participants - Mr. Simon is one - take stock in honest terms, and their reviews can be refreshing, if a little flattening.
Or, for instance, writing about columns such as this one I suppose, Russell Baker, the long-time New York Times OpEd Page humorist, wrote, "It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade."
Now, you will probably join me in thinking that Baker may have gone a bit far in these remarks, especially about the little or no knowledge thing, but nevertheless there is a grain of truth there.
The comment that follows, written by a one-time United Press International Washington bureau manager, seems exaggerated of course, but - well, you judge for yourself.
"A newspaper is not the place to go to see people actually earning a living, though journalists like to pretend they never stop sweating over a hot typewriter. It is much more like a brothel - short, rushed bouts of really enjoyable activity interspersed with long lazy stretches of gossip, boasting, flirtation, drinking, telephoning, strolling about the corridors sitting on the corner of desks, planning to start everything tomorrow.
"Each of the inmates has a little specialty to please the customers. The highest paid ones perform only by appointment; the poorest take on anybody. The editors are like madams - soothing, flattering, disciplining their naughty, temperamental staff, but rarely obliged to satisfy the clients personally between the printed sheets."
Naturally enough, I suspect some of this may ring true to you.
Or, you may favor the views of H. L. Mencken, who swung his battle axe with gleeful abandon. "The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer," Mencken wrote in 1941.
Mencken could be harsh, but he knew enough to confront pretension and that "newspaper of record" hogwash we hear so much about.
Here's a slice of Mencken, the newspaper editor, that sounds familiar. "I welcomed the letters that came in," he wrote, "and, in fact, edited them. I was in charge of the letter column, and always let anyone who denounced me violently get in - because I believe that people like to read abuse."
In my experience, letter writers represent a fraction of a newspaper's readership. This time of year The Martha's Vineyard Times circulates 17,000 copies, and we get 20 to 30 letters a week. It is comforting to think, as I do, that the other 16,970 readers, plus the 2.5 times that number who read the paper according to pass-along statistical figuring, are delighted with what we've published. If any of this vast readership horde had a beef, wouldn't they, like the 20 or 30 who weekly communicate with us, announce their dissatisfactions? Of course they would. To be denounced as often as he was, Mencken must certainly have irritated a great many readers. His view was that readers, like citizens in a democracy, know what they want and "deserve to get it good and hard."
But, are there newspaper readers who will sit still for getting it good and hard, daily or weekly? Are there newspapers that remain willing to deliver it that way? The news across the nearby continent is inconclusive, but gloomy. Mr. Simon, the former reporter - "head and heart," he says - who was bought out of his job after 18 years when the paper changed hands, could not tell the Senate how to help the collapsing industry. He wasn't even clear that government ought to be propping papers up. But, he told them what journalism is and why it's valuable. "High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper - for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper."
