Gerard VanderLeun takes the editor apart.
McCumber is from the Hunter-Thompson-Envy school of journalism and, of course, this is a brain-echo of the Scoop Nisker dictum: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Alas, McCumber is mired in the Thompson/Nisker/Pacifica/NPR Memorial Tarpits and fails to understand that making news about not liking the news is exactly what is going to happen to him and his ilk in this era. They never thought that not liking the news would come to include newspapers themselves. They thought, for decades, that they were immune. Alas, as we learn in the Holy Book of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, "Nobody is immune from a bust."[...]
after showing pictures of bare breasted women and a man running a drill down his nostril, Gerard observes:
Presumably, these citizens of Seattle, having no dignity, have no expectation of privacy. Still, they might be among those who would be very upset should they find themselves on an exploding and sinking ferry in the middle of Puget Sound. But, according to The Decider, "That's not the way a free press works. If everything any government authority handed us was automatically unquestioned "news," we would be a state-run newspaper."
You can file that under the heading "No Sh*t Sherlock?" Or you can look it up in the first year, first semester notebook of the thousands of young people currently dumb enough to be attending the numerous and hapless "Schools of Journalism" busy separating kids from money these days from coast to coast. The Decider's "boogyman warning" about an American newspaper turning into an organ of the state has as much basis in reality as, well, the boogyman. But this dreck is always hauled out whenever a paper fails its readership -- which is why your hear it a lot these days.
[...]
This is what we are seeing more and more of as the aging mavens of the media wander down the narrowing trail to the bone-yard; "The willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information." The P-I "reports" that the FBI is looking for two men, but does not publish the supplied picture of the same two men. Out of a fear for their privacy but out of a greater and utterly paranoid fear that they might be perceived as "a state-run newspaper."
That anyone would mistake the P-I or any other American newspaper as even remotely "a state-run newspaper" shows not only a profound lack of a real frame of reference, but a huffed-up sense of the P-I's own importance and relevance to America today. Does anybody outside of the flatulent bubble of the media's own scent of itself think that the newspapers of America are going to turn into Pravda? Or have they already turned into a Pravda for their own inner world, struggling to sell their justifications and their Deciders' decisions to a world that has little need for them and less care?
I think, regardless of McCumber's puerile justifications -- which would not be out of place in a second rate college's paper -- that it is the latter that is the case.
When you attend various street festivals and other crowd drawing activities in Seattle, you often see the booths of the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times set up to offer you subscriptions for something equal to twenty-five cents and two Wheaties box-tops. I pass them by since I don't want to be part of a chain of people that stains bleached wood pulp only to return it to the recycling bin.
There are some Seattle mornings -- fewer now -- when you can step out of your house and see that the Seattle P-I or the Seattle Times is so desperate to get your attention, it has thrown a newspaper onto your lawn even thought you never, ever asked for it. I just sigh and shuffle out onto my lawn, pick it up, and then walk to the alley and place it directly into the recycling bin.
I can't recall the last time I actually sat down and read a newspaper. I can't recall the last time, until today, I was actually interested in what the all-too-predictable Seattle newspapers had to say. And now that's over. As the kids would text, Sippican Cottage: I'm Not Interested. Period. "C U Wudn't Want to B U."
When I read these arcane "free press uncorrupted by a fascist state" justifications like this one from The Decider at the P-I, the line that runs through my mind is from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance are being pursued by the implacable forces that are hunting them unto death and Butch comes up with one of his insights. Sundance just looks at him with a flat look and says, as one might say to The Decider, "You just keep thinkin' Butch. That's what you're good at."
The Asshats at the Seattle PI are good for the blogosphere. Where would we be without complete jerks like these to kick around?
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