Thursday, October 20, 2011

IS PRINT MEDIA DEAD? NOT IF IT REPRESENTS AND INFORMS THE COMMUNITY!

Harry Targ

I have lived in West Lafayette, Indiana for over 40 years. During much of that time I have been a regular subscriber to the Lafayette Journal & Courier. The Journal & Courier reports it has a daily circulation of approximately 115,000 readers. It is part of the Gannett Corporation, the largest newspaper mega-corporation in the United States.

The J&C editorials, editorial policy, story selection, celebration of local heroes and heroines, and coverage of regional, national, and international events usually have been conservative. While my own politics are very different, generally I had high regard for the professionalism of the J&C, and found the editorial statements and columns to be clear-headed and fair minded. Some reporters made a point of covering labor issues and events, student activism, and sought the opinions and research findings from professors of Purdue University, the largest employer and educational institution in the area.

But about four years ago, the paper began to shift in content and political predisposition to the right. The small group of local Tea Party advocates gained visibility through the newspaper, while those with different political agendas received declining attention. The paper has become a source of disinformation and advocacy for those who in the national political context would be a distinct minority. Recent examples below tell only a small part of the story of what gets ignored and what gets covered in the local paper and how the J & C political agenda intrudes on its obligations to inform and reflect the community.

Thirty postal workers and supporters of the post office rallied in front of the local Congressman’s district office two weeks ago to demand that the U.S. Postal Service be saved. About 150 passers-by signed petitions to save the Postal Service. The event, held three blocks from the newspaper office, was not covered.

Sixty men, women, young and older, white and African-American, rallied at the same Congressman’s office last week to urge him to support job creation legislation. The sponsoring organization was the newly created Indiana Rebuild the American Dream Coalition. Again, no reports announcing the event or describing its occurrence appeared in the paper.

A month ago, 75 people attended a panel on the campus of Purdue University on the impacts of 9/11 on United States foreign and domestic policy. The event was sponsored by the university’s Committee on Peace Studies, the Lafayette Area Peace Coalition, the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church, and a Purdue student chapter of Amnesty International. Again the event was not covered.

Professor Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University, who published a new book entitled The Fall of the Faculty spoke on campus last week. One hundred twenty five faculty, students, and administrators came to hear about his claim that the ratio of administrators to faculty at most universities is increasing. He asserted that educational costs, including tuition, are rising as the number of administrators go up and class size increases. Although campus events are usually covered; not this time.

On the other hand, the participation of some Purdue students and Lafayette area residents at a recent “Occupy Indianapolis” rally was covered by a veteran J& C reporter. The first half of his story informatively covered the rally and provided an in-depth interview with a Purdue student attendee.

However, at least half of the story consisted of interviews with two chiefs of police, Purdue and Lafayette, about community security. Nothing in the experiences of Indianapolis, Lafayette, or Purdue would suggest a need to interview police officials, unless, of course, the reporter wished to instill fear or to delegitimize protest activities. This reporter was the same reporter who collaborated with Tea Party activists two years ago to ostracize campus organizations and faculty for bringing retired Professor William Ayers to campus.

The new editorial page editor wrote two scurrilous brief articles ridiculing a university employee who is alleged to have engaged in shoplifting. The inappropriate comments came a few days after the newspaper published an article essentially convicting the person charged before the judicial process has been initiated.

The front page of the newspaper highlights some non-news, so-called human interest stories, and big local sporting events. Significant portions of the paper every week are given over to local sports and religion.

Editorial page community contributions have been reduced. Those that appear consist largely of a handful of commentaries of the life and times of religious fundamentalists and rugged individualists who despise government, unions, professors, public employees, and politicians. While they despise Democrats more than Republicans, several of the regular contributors disdain the political process most of all.

Fortunately, a new alternative monthly newspaper, the Lafayette Independent began publication a year ago. It has two editors, 17 regular “contributors and facilitators,” guest authors, a treasurer, a distribution manager, and an advisory board. No one is paid and the paper is sustained by contributions and advertisements. It is truly a community enterprise.

So far LI publishes 3,000 copies per issue but readers are enthusiastic, and given the unprofessional and biased character of the major newspaper today, LI production and consumption might grow.

The October issue of LI included articles on the consequences of Governor Daniels’ long-term lease of the Indiana Toll Road to foreign investors, analyses of the media, reports on the state and local labor movement, the ‘shock doctrine” and neighborhood schools, local city council candidates, consequences of poverty, the mayors’ for peace campaign, Libya, breast cancer awareness, Medicare, ozone dangers, and the problems of reliance on nuclear energy. In addition, LI publishes stories about local restaurants, good recipes, and the jazz scene. Advertisements come from local businesses, political and social groups, artists, and writers.

LI assumes readers are intelligent and informed. It publishes articles on significant economic and political issues from a variety of points of view. It emphasizes stories from local authors. It seeks to provide updated information about significant sectors of the community: labor, environmental, civil liberties, women’s, and grassroots political groups.

This print media report in one small community is probably similar to stories all around the country. Some commentators suggest that print media is a dying institution. They say that the internet will sooner or later totally replace the press.

Perhaps what is becoming obsolete is not print media but rather print media that represents mega-corporations and local power structures. It may be that newspapers like the Lafayette Independent, a small newspaper distributed free by community activists, targeting working people in the community, are the wave of the future. They could parallel the occupations, mobilizations, and celebrations of grassroots politics that have become part of the growing national and global political landscape.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

DRONES, BANKS, AND MULTITUDES

Harry Targ

In this age of tweets, sound bites, and short-hand references to broad and complicated swaths of history, what political scientist Murray Edelman called “symbolic” politics, becomes “real” politics. Three symbols represent politics today; “drones,” “banks,” and “multitudes.”

Drones refer metaphorically to state-directed murder, often using the latest technology to target and assassinate those who have been defined by officials as the enemy or as threats to society, or just plain criminals. Based on recommendations by key decision-makers, civilian, military, and police, the U.S. has increasingly relied on new high-tech instruments of murder. Drones, smart bombs, and chemicals are used to kill, maim, and disable people abroad and at home with little or no threat to the safety of the personnel pushing the buttons, dropping the bombs, or spraying the victims. These newer forms of murder continue to be paralleled by a variety of police beatings and shootings and executions sanctified by governments attributing crime to the poor and people of color. The 21st century nation-state, to paraphrase sociologist Max Weber’s original definition, is the organization that holds the monopoly of the “legitimate” implementation of murder.

Banks are real but as symbols refer to a capitalist economic system which organizes workers to generate wealth which is increasingly appropriated by the few. In reality, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century saw huge manufacturing corporations mobilizing working classes and stealing the wealth that they produced. When rates of profit began to decline the corporate elites collaborated with the heads of banks, institutions which at one time served as the accountants and vaults for accumulated profits. Great mergers of manufacturing and banking capital in the early twentieth century and more so since the 1970s contributed to a new kind of capitalist economy based on finance. Most transactions now are speculative: buying and selling stocks and bonds, the creation of hedge funds, and real estate and insurance investments. Banks and investment houses are global. They produce enormous profit without creating useful products for people to use or consume. And, the banking metaphor represents a vision of an economic system that has become grotesquely unequal.

The third metaphor, the multitudes (borrowed from abstract formulations by Italian theorist Antonio Negri) refers to the rising up of masses of people-- the traditional working class, the unemployed, youth without hope, youth with vision, women long oppressed, people of all races, and people who clean streets or live on them, serve coffee at Starbucks, and even write software programs for big corporations. The multitudes, Negri suggests, represent the underside of a new global order, an economic empire that traverses the earth bursting out of its national and sovereign boundaries.

Drones and banks represent both the coercive and the manipulative power of capitalism. Americans see examples of each on television or computer screens every day. Just in the last two weeks U.S. drones killed U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen. Troy Davis, despite evidence raising reasonable doubt that he was guilty of a murder, was executed by the state of Georgia. And, the Bureau of the Census reported the rise of rates of poverty not seen in the United States since the 1990s and numbers of persons living in poverty larger than any time since the 1960s.

What is also becoming a regular feature of our electronic experience is resistance, anger, and collective mobilization. This is occurring all across the globe--Arab spring; student protest in Santiago, Chile; angry Israeli citizens; workers in Athens, Greece; students and public workers in Madison, Wisconsin, Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana--and now undifferentiated groups occupying Wall Street and metaphorical Wall Streets around the United States.

It is unclear what will come of all of this except that the contradictions between drones and banks versus the multitudes is becoming more clear and that the transformation of society that is so desperately needed just might be emerging. Hope so.

The Bookshelf

CHALLENGING LATE CAPITALISM by Harry R. Targ

Read Challenging Late Capitalism by Harry R. Targ.