Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  Journalists, however, unlike academics, have to intersect with the public. They write and speak to be understood. And for this reason they are more powerful and more closely monitored and controlled than other writers and speakers. The commercial media, as C. Wright Mills pointed out, are essential tools for conformity. They impart to the public a sense of self. Media tell members of the public who they are. They tell them what their aspirations should be. They promise to help them achieve these aspirations. They offer a variety of techniques, advice, and schemes that promise eventual success.

  The commercial media, as Wright notes, also help citizens feel as if they are successful and have met these aspirations, even if they have not. They tend to neglect reality (they don’t run stories about how life is hard, fame and fortune elusive, hopes disappointed) and instead celebrate idealized identities—those that, in a commodity culture, revolve around the acquisition of status, money, fame, and power, or at least the illusion of these things. The media, in other words, assist the commercial culture in “need creation,” prompting consumers to want things they don’t need or have never really considered wanting. And catering to these needs, largely implanted by advertisers and the corporate culture, is a very profitable business. A major part of the commercial media revolves around selling consumers images and techniques to “actualize” themselves, or offering seductive forms of escape through entertainment and spectacle. News is filtered into the mix, but actual news is not the predominant concern of the commercial media.

  Pick up any daily newspaper. At most, fifteen percent of the content in its pages is devoted to news. The rest is devoted to ways to feel or become a success. “This,” Mills wrote, “is probably the basic psychological formula of the mass media today. But, as a formula, it is not attuned to the development of the human being. It is a formula of a pseudo-world which the media invent and sustain.” 24

  Those who work inside commercial media outlets are acutely aware of the manipulation, even as the media publicly laud themselves for courage, honesty, and independence. This does not mean there is never any good journalism, just as the corruption within the academy does not preclude good scholarship. It means that myriad internal pressures, hidden from public view but faced every day by workers in the media world, make the production of good journalism and good scholarship very difficult. Reporters who persist in raising inconvenient questions, like academics who practice moral and independent scholarship, do not usually advance within liberal institutions.

  “I’d written an article about Colgate-Palmolive having gone through a process to rebrand a type of toothpaste that they had bought in Asia that was named Darkie,” remembered former New York Times reporter Doug McGill, who spent a decade at the paper:

  Proctor & Gamble had bought this company, Hazel and Holly, which made the Darkie toothpaste. It was the best-selling toothpaste in Asia. The problem was that the brand mascot was a blackfaced minstrel. It was plastered over the toothpaste boxes. They obviously could not sell this in America, so they tried to find a name and an image that did not completely replace Darkie. It was too valuable as a brand, a name, and an image, but of course they wanted to erase the racist overtones. They eventually came up with Darlie. Instead of a minstrel in blackface, they used a silhouette of a Victorian dandy that looked a lot like the original Darkie. The story ran on the front page of the business section. The morning that the piece appeared in the paper, I got a telephone call. I was sitting at my desk in the business section. It was the head P.R. guy for Proctor & Gamble. I noticed the phone connection was scratchy. I asked him where he was calling from. He said, “I’m in a limousine. I’m going to the airport with Mr. Mark,” meaning Ruben Mark, who was the CEO of the company. “I just want to let you know we really liked the article that you published. We like working with you as a journalist. As long as you keep writing stories like that, we would be very happy to work with you. Mr. Mark was wondering if you might be open for lunch some time.” Then he proceeded to give me Ruben Mark’s home telephone number. I said, “OK, well, thanks a lot, talk to you later,” and I hung up the phone.25

  “This was one of the first stories I had written for the business section,” McGill remembered. “I had never heard anything quite so direct, the quid pro quo laid out so baldly: ‘If you keep writing good stories, you will keep getting access to the CEO plus perks like lunches and home telephone numbers for future stories.’ This is a signal example of what underpins a lot of big-time mainstream journalism.

  “I wrote a story in 1983, while working as a reporter for the New York Times, about a proposed telephone rate hike in New York State,” McGill went on:

  The story had great interest in the New York area because it meant a rise in rates for New York customers. I was a metro reporter. I didn’t know anything about rate hikes or telephone companies. I was smart enough to ask questions and write down answers. I had a street sense of accuracy and fairness, enough to get a story written. I got the information from the telephone company. I knew enough to call the people who were against the rate hike who were the consumer advocates. I got what they thought about the rate hike. Then I called the phone company to get their response to the critics of the rate hike. It was formulaic. It was the standard he-said-she-said formula. The Times published it on the front page of the paper. That night I was walking with the news editor to Grand Central Station. The editor asked jokingly: “Did you really understand the story you wrote today?” “Not a word of it,” I said. And we both had a big laugh.

  But inside, I didn’t feel so good. It was a kind of arrogance. I was painting by numbers. I had written the story by calling up legislators who were sponsoring the proposal, and then calling up citizens’ groups who were raising hell about it, and then getting back to the legislators for their reaction. I then stitched all the quotes together under a grand-sounding theme, and voilà! I’d been dutifully “objective” and gathered both sides of the story and made a “fair and balanced” front-page story for the New York Times. The point is, if anything unfair or truly nefarious was being done by the legislators, lobbyists, or citizens’ groups in the process of getting this rate hike passed, I would have been blithely unaware of it. The principal actors in this story could have driven a bribe or a lie or a loophole or a simple unfairness right under my nose, and I wouldn’t have suspected a thing. The he-said-she-said formula was all I needed to get on page one.

  “During my last few years at the Times, I joked with my wife that my work there was all about making the world safe for millionaires,” McGill told me. “There was no moral problem during the years when I was learning how to be a reporter, how to write a story, how to get published, etc. But when I finally saw what the Times as a corporate and political structure stands for, and the privileged constituencies that it serves, I had to ask whether I wanted my life and skills put in service of those particular people and values - and I did not.

  “I was unconscious to the very powerful interests I was serving,” he said:

  I had never bellied up to the challenges to whether I wanted to serve power in this way. There were points during my ten years at the Times when I was writing about government. Power can be construed directly in those articles, but primarily I was a culture reporter for a long time, a metro reporter and then a business reporter. I was basically always a pawn in the big game. I had never thought through whether I was using the skills I had amassed for the best possible moral outcome. I knew people at the Times who literally got sick every time they walked through those revolving doors. I got that way. And I didn’t know what was hitting me. I felt physically ill. It was my conscience. It was strong enough that I knew I needed to escape. When you work at the New York Times, it is like working at the White House. Nobody should have that power permanently. They should have it for a while and drop it. It is not the real world in there. I was getting too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call me up, as if I were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press releases and ha
ve me describe them in glowing terms. And this happened over and over. I wrote critical pieces. The former chairman of Christie’s [auction house] lost his job because of me. The former head of the New York City Historical Society lost his job because of me and my reporting of how he squandered the endowment and let priceless treasures at the museum get rained on and destroyed. I did my bit. I did the investigative part. But overall, the New York Times is an entrenched source of power and does not serve those who are the neediest in society well or at all. When you have that amount of power, you need to spend a lot more time thinking about people who really need help.

  And yet McGill, for all his problems with the paper, was quick to add that “the world without the New York Times would be a poorer place.” He said that when the paper covered the U.S. government, New York City, or Washington, the moral problems he increasingly encountered as a reporter reached their apex: “That is when the conflicts of interest are the strongest.” He said that the need for access to the powerful rammed news through “a weird distorting force field, to the point where it is difficult for readers to know where the story is coming from.”

  But despite these impediments, McGill fears, as do I, the loss of papers and liberal institutions as “a counterweight to government and corporate power.” Newspapers, he said, were powerful enough to stand up to lawsuits and harassments and threats:

  No amount of blogging and Web sites, even when added up together, will equal that kind of counterweight. That is being lost. Journalism was born and reared in newspapers. Not in TV. Not in radio. There is so much institutional memory and practice and good that came up in newspapers that it will be a tragedy if it is lost, and it is being lost.

  “The further you get from these distorting power sources, like New York City or Washington, and can write national or foreign stories, you can get indispensable reporting done by the same reporters who, in other realms, work in these distorting force fields,” he said:

  There are two kinds of objectivities. There is one in quotes and one outside of quotes. The one in quotes is the corrupted objectivity of mainstream journalism. It is an ideology. It does not have an underlying rigor. It means a lot of things, with many of those things being contradictory. It can mean neutral, fair, balanced, and impartial. But you can have a story that is factual and unfair. You can have a story that is impartial but not factual. It is a bunch of practices adopted over time and lumped under this big word. When you look at the ideology, you see that unfortunately it is often serving laziness, rationalization, and, above all, the commercial purpose of the newspaper, and not the discovery and presentation of the truth. The objectivity outside of quotes is a method of inquiry that assures that the researcher gets as close as possible to the truth. It is patterned after scientific objectivity. It has its rules and its discipline. It requires verification through corroboration or through direct observation or any number of means. These are guidelines a reporter follows to get at the truth. And yet, it requires the utmost humility towards the idea of truth. The truth claim is the very last thing you arrive at, and only after intense methodological rigor and soul searching. Whatever you present is not going to be “objective,” whatever that means. It will be your best effort, but it will not be the truth, and it will be as slipshod and methodically easy as the he-said-she-said formula. There are two types of objectivity, and, like cholesterol, we want more of the good kind and less of the bad. Maybe there never was enough of the good objectivity to say that it is being lost with newspapers, but there are an awful lot of great reporters who are being lost. These great investigative journalists and reporters covering government, even if they were fighting with their newspapers, against the things we talked about, they worked to get the truth into the paper. And the best ones are being cut because the expensive forms of journalism are being cut. We are losing this culturally.

  John Steinbeck, after visiting squatter camps filled with impoverished migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley in California, filed a story for the San Francisco News. The poverty and filth in the camps appalled him. He found the people crushed, without hope, and on the brink of starvation. He wrote in his story about one family he had seen. The mother and father had built a hut by driving willow branches into the ground and wattling weeds. They had flattened tin cans and paper against them. The parents and three children, including a three-year-old with a distended belly caused by malnutrition, slept together on an old piece of carpet inside the crude hut. The youngest child had a gunnysack tied around his waist for clothing, had not had milk for two years, and was slow in his reactions. In the News, Steinbeck wrote:

  He will die in a very short time. The older children may survive. Four nights ago the mother had a baby in the tent, on the dirty carpet. It was born dead, which was just as well because she should not have fed it at the breast; her own diet will not produce milk.

  After it was born and she had seen that it was dead, the mother rolled over and lay still for two days. She is up today, tottering around. The last baby, born less than a year ago, lived a week. This woman’s eyes have the glazed, faraway look of a sleepwalker’s eyes.

  She does not wash clothes any more. The drive that makes for cleanliness has been drained out of her and she hasn’t the energy. The husband was a share-cropper once, but he couldn’t make it go. Now he has lost even the desire to talk.

  He will not look directly at you, for that requires will, and will needs strength. He is a bad field worker for the same reason. It takes him a long time to make up his mind, so he is always late in moving and late in arriving in the fields. His top wage, when he can find work now, which isn’t often, is a dollar a day.

  The children do not even go to the willow clump any more. They squat where they are and kick a little dirt. The father is vaguely aware that there is a culture of hookworm in the mud along the river bank. He knows the children will get it on their bare feet.

  But he hasn’t the will nor the energy to resist. Too many things have happened to him.26

  Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was born at this moment out of profound human pain, injustice, and Steinbeck’s capacity for empathy. It was an act of journalism, the best kind of journalism. His reporting flowed seamlessly into fiction, as it did with other great reporters, from Charles Dickens to George Orwell. In Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck brought to life the Joad family’s journey west from the Dust Bowl of the Great Plains. The Joads were not, in the sense of journalism, based on a single real family. They were a composite. But the ability to marry factual details with empathy and art effectively transmitted a reality, an experience, that has become part of our collective memory. Steinbeck’s novel was the chronicle of the struggle of people to endure, made understandable by a mixture of allegory and fact. It took reality, as the Federal Theatre Project did, and transformed it into art. It challenged old myths and stereotypes—those who fled the Dust Bowl were scorned by many Americans—by appealing to human emotions.

  Liberal institutions were created to make the world a better place. They were designed to give a voice to those who are shunted aside, abused, and ignored by the larger society. Throughout their history, they have promised to protect the common good, educate, and fight injustice. These institutions, when they function, keep alive qualities that defy the raw greed of unchecked capitalism. I am a product of these liberal institutions, in particular the church, the university—where I spent eight years, as an undergraduate and graduate student—and the media. I was, while a working journalist, a member of a labor union. The sermons preached from my father’s pulpit, the study of literature, history, theology, the classics, and moral philosophy in college and graduate school, gave me a language to make sense of the world and define my place in it. It was journalism that permitted me to roam the world for two decades, every new foreign assignment the equivalent of another undergraduate degree. The languages I speak, the cultural literacy I possess, the grasp I have of political and economic systems, would not have been possible without these liberal
institutions. I defied them in the end, but I am also deeply indebted to them. My anger is not directed against these institutions so much as those within them that failed when we needed their voices. These liberal principles were egregiously betrayed to protect careers, to preserve access to the powerful. Liberals conceded too much to the power elite. The tragedy of the liberal class and the institutions it controls is that it succumbed to opportunism and finally to fear. It abrogated its moral role. It did not defy corporate abuse when it had the chance. It exiled those within its ranks who did. And the defanging of the liberal class not only removed all barriers to neofeudalism and corporate abuse but also ensured that the liberal class will, in its turn, be swept aside.

  The disease of the liberal class is the specious, supposedly “professional” insistence on objectivity. Before the rise of commercial newspapers, journals of opinion existed to influence public sentiment via arguments—not to stultify readers with lists of facts. Our oldest universities were formed to train ministers and inculcate into students the primacy of the common good. Labor unions had a vision of an egalitarian society that understood the inevitability of class struggle. Artists from Mark Twain to John Steinbeck sought not only to explain social, political, economic, and cultural reality, but also to use this understanding to fight for a social order based on justice. Movements that defied the power elite often started and sustained these liberal institutions, which were created as instruments of reform. One by one, these institutions succumbed to the temptation of money, the jargon of patriotism, belief in the need for permanent war, fear of internal and external enemies, and distrust of radicals, who had once kept the liberal class honest. And when it was over, the liberal class had nothing left to say.