The Fundamental Disconnect and Contempt for the Audience (Hint: They’re Starting to Catch On)
Like a lot of 60s-vintage idealists, David Mitchell has an unshakeable belief in the basic honesty and goodness of the average American, and their ability to discern truth from lie. This faith runs contrary to the dominant conventional wisdom, which holds that the American people are a bunch of SUV-driving, gay-marriage-hating, schlock-reality-TV-watching, drooling morons.
The news media is in roughly the same position that President George Bush I was in 1992 – when he famously gawked at the common bar code scanner in a supermarket check-out aisle. In that instant, it became clear to hundreds of millions of people that the President had not been in a grocery store in decades; that he therefore had absolutely no clue what their day-to-day lives were like.
It has become a common observation that the news industry, which is supposed to be devoted to courageously telling the truth, is now dominated by fear. Fear of being too controversial, of offending someone in the audience and thereby losing a shred of market share, is what drives timid pack journalism. It’s what causes papers to censor cartoon strips. And it makes readers wonder – if the funnies are too risky, what happens to honest-to-god news stories?
John Giuffo, a former fellow at the Columbia Journalism Review, wrote in the Village Voice that watered-down news is “the inevitable result of the increasing corporate influence on news departments, of diminished news-gathering resources, and of an institutional tendency to place financial concerns ahead of journalistic responsibilities. Investigative journalism requires risk taking and a big commitment, which are antithetical to the financial needs of corporate news divisions.”
But the resulting slickly packaged “news product” is being rejected by an increasingly sophisticated audience (especially the young and internet-savvy), who see the Mainstream Media (derisive acronym: MSM) as just another hucksterish shuck-and-jive, akin to spam e-mails from alleged Nigerian princes in exile that promise millions in exchange for your bank account number and a wire transfer protocol. People know when you don’t trust them, when you act like a security guard in an upscale boutique shadowing a gaggle of teenagers through the store. People know that – and they don’t like it. Small wonder that in terms of perceived professional integrity, reporters and editors rank somewhere below auto repair mechanics and nursing home operators in a recent Gallup poll.
So readers go to where they can challenge themselves – online.
The online aesthetic – that the whole world is at your fingertips, good/bad/indifferent, and you can access as much or as little of it as you desire – is very much akin to one of the main guiding philosophies of the Light.
“The concept is very much like the one philosopher [John] Locke had, was that you sit around and have this debate and everyone gives it their best shot, and out of that exchange of ideas in the debate and all that, the truth emerges,” Mitchell said. “You’re much more likely to get to the truth if everyone has their best shot.
“The idea of trying to get one story that summarizes the truth is an absurdity. At least on every significant story, the truth is an emerging matter, truth is always a moving target.
“My belief is that a newspaper should be fair – in other words, you do give each side its best shot.”
It seems somehow apropos that Old School and Cyberpunk journalism meet on the common ground of ferocious intellectual integrity – sort of the newspaper equivalent of Neil Young tutoring Pearl Jam. Critics like Robert Cauthorn point to that sense of mission as being one of the key ingredients missing from the modern media landscape.
“Newspapers in their glory days, at the height of the power of modern journalism, in the 60s and 70s, when newspapers really made a goddam difference, their circulation was exploding,” Cauthorn exclaimed. “Trust me, people who were reading about civil rights stories and Vietnam and women’s rights – these people were not reading fluff stories, you know?
“The assumption that if you align yourself with your readers somehow or another you’re dumbing down, means that you think your readers are dumb. That’s the inescapable result of that logic.
“And it’s wrong!
“Our readers aren’t dumb. Our readers are great.”
Thus, Cauthorn finds a great lesson in the reader’s rescue of the Light, one that he hopes the MSM will pay attention to, because “this tells you in no uncertain terms, with a kind of heat and passion that I wish existed in the normal newsroom, that our public wants us to succeed.
“Our public wants us to survive. Our public wants us to thrive. Our public wants newspapers that matter.
“Our public is leaving us because we are chasing them away with a stick.
“Point Reyes proves it.”
Mitchell cited his experiences covering the civil rights movement, for filling him with a sense that he owed allegiance to something more than the bottom line.
“I was very much a child of the 60s. It was just understood that if you were a good person, you had a social conscience and you had to act on it,” Mitchell said. “It wasn’t enough to mouth the words, you really had to … figure out, given your own talents what can you do.
“I certainly wasn’t cut out to be a politician. But I could write. I could see that there was something I could do that would benefit society by being a newspaperman.
“I realized from the get-go, this is not the way you make a lot of money.”
It’s hard to talk about this without coming off as some awful combination of holier-than-thou and impractical. That same combination, appropriately enough, is the one that so turns off readers. So how do you get around this?
The best way I’ve been able to come up with is to follow Mitchell’s example: step up and admit it. Get it out in the open. Trust that your readers are mature enough to be able to process a little sermonizing.
This is not easy. Trust is a scary thing; a commodity in extremely scarce supply at a time when we can’t trust that someone won’t fly a plane into the building we work in, or that our government won’t lie to us about just about anything.
Mitchell had his own crisis of confidence back when he was in the midst of reporting the Synanon story. The paper was getting sued, his readers were screaming at him in the street to “leave those people alone,” and law enforcement didn’t seem to think that crimes had been committed, or even to care if they had. In the depths of despair, Mitchell said he thought he might as well chuck it all and sell the Light, because, well, what was the point? (Click here to see him on the verge of tears even now at the memory.)
But Mitchell had that 60s idealist faith – faith in his readers, faith in his work, faith in the redeeming power of the truth – and it paid off for him. It paid off for him then, and it’s still paying off for him now. It seems that respect is a two-way street.
“The heartening message, the reason that everybody should have this story pinned to their chests, is that this should remind everybody that our public gives a damn,” Cauthorn said. “While the newsroom may have contempt for the public, well guess what?
“The public doesn’t have contempt for us. If we make the right product, they’ll fight for us. They will fight savagely for us. They will fight for a free press, you know? Well, if we stop embedding reporters – nudge nudge.
"They will fight for a free press, they will fight for a free newspaper even if they disagree with the newspaper sometimes.”
NEXT: What newspapers and paranoid-schizo street preachers screaming at an invisible audience have in common
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