The crisis in journalism today, and I am sure we agree there is a crisis in journalism, is most acute in the United States, in my opinion, but it seems evident to one or another degree throughout the West.
Institutional crisis of western media
This crisis has various dimensions. It is institutional. Corporate-owned media, or “mainstream media,” or “legacy media,” have reached shockingly low levels of public trust as measured by various opinion polls. The Gallup Organisation, one of the old-line polling firms, published its latest survey of trust in public institutions last summer. They do this every year. And I still find it remarkable to repeat these numbers. Gallup’s findings indicate that 16 percent of Americans believe what they read in their newspapers. The figure for television news broadcasts is even more astonishing: 11 percent of Americans take television news seriously.
I like to turn these figures upside down to get the full effect: 84 of every 100 Americans do not trust what they read in newspapers; 89 of every 100 Americans do not believe what they hear on television news programs.
This is one kind of crisis. Understanding this is very important. At the risk of reductive reasoning, at bottom I think it reflects the unhealthy, highly dysfunctional relationship of media to various kinds of power – political, administrative, corporate – financial in that these media are owned by publicly listed companies that privilege shareholders and so are concerned primarily with their stock prices and their profit margins.
And as I think I mentioned on this occasion last year, when I was among you via Zoom, in my view this crisis is also the consequence of the defensive posture the American imperium has assumed from the time of the 11 September 2001, attacks in New York and Washington. American society as a whole, in all its dimensions, reflects this defensiveness. Ideological conformity in this circumstance becomes imperative – unless, of course, one is unwilling to abandon one’s principles for the sake of safety and security.
What the crisis means
for the individual journalist
What I want to talk about today is related to this environment: There’s no question in my mind about this. But I want to look at the crisis in Western media from a very different perspective. I want to consider what this crisis means for the individual journalist. For each of us it is a psychological question, it is a social question, and also a question of identity.
Who am I if I serve as a journalist?
What is the journalist’s proper place in society?
Where does the journalist stand in relation to the powers he or she reports upon and the readers and viewers he serves?
Finally and not least, in view of the crisis I describe, how does one get good work done as a journalist in our present circumstances?
In answer to this last question, which to me seems the most interesting and important, I want to talk a little about a book from which I have drawn much inspiration. I am thinking of "Towards a Poor Theatre", which was written by Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish theater director and theorist, in 1968. This will probably seem an odd source of inspiration, and for this reason I look forward to explaining my thinking and discovering whether or not you see the validity of my idea for “a poor journalism” as a variant of Grotowski’s “poor theatre.”
Initial experience
From my earliest days in journalism, and I am going back to the early 1970s, when the U.S. was still waging the Vietnam War and America was deeply divided about it, I have taken a somewhat schizophrenic approach to my profession. My first employment was with a paper called the “Daily News”, a New York tabloid that was then the largest-circulation newspaper in America. The News could not have been further to the right politically and was a firm supporter of the war. At The News I learned craft, technique, method – whatever else one may say about it, The News was well-written and well-edited – and I continue to think a good journalist must master these technical matters if his work is to be effective.
But I also began early, almost immediately after joining The News, to work on the side for independent publications – antiwar journals, anti-apartheid journals, newspapers and magazines dedicated to questions of Third World development, the North–South divide, and so on. This work mattered to me as much or more than all the learning I was doing at The News. The principal independent paper of this kind was called the Guardian, and it had nothing to do with the British daily. The Guardian was a progressive weekly newspaper when this word, “progressive,” meant much more than it does today. Its chief correspondent was named Wilfred Burchett, who was a much-celebrated journalist noted for, among other things, reporting the Vietnam War from the North: He was the only Western correspondent to do so.
It was my privilege to edit Wilfred’s pieces when they came in, as I was named foreign editor a little while after joining the Guardian. Wilfred became a kind of model for me in those early days. I am delighted to say I am now good friends with George Burchett, one of Wilfred’s sons.
It is easy now to see what I was addressing by dividing my professional life in this somewhat schizoid manner. This was my reply to the problem of alienation, which is a common, if not universal problem in mainstream journalism. Now as then, one must accept a greater or lesser degree of alienation to survive in our major media, our corporate-owned “mainstream.” The ideals that draw so many of us to the profession come to seem, in time, as quaint as the sentiments found in greeting cards.
Alienation in mainstream-journalism
There is no resisting this alienation, not from within the mainstream. A given publication’s perspective on and portrayal of events was the business of the publisher and his or her senior editors. Journalists wrote for them, not readers. Objectivity, the profession’s semi-sacred telos for a century, degenerated into the instrument of discipline used to force journalists to write, like ventriloquists’ dummies, in the institutional voices of their newspapers.
At bottom the journalist had two alternatives: Cultivate a very unhealthy detachment from the published fruits of one’s work, or assume, for the sake of a paycheck and possible promotion, the editorial stance of one’s employer. These are not, I should add, mutually exclusive alternatives. Many are they, in my experience, who are alienated in this way but, thoroughly unaware of their condition, defend with the convert’s conviction their newspapers’ positions on politics, economics, foreign affairs, what have you.
“Holding to one’s principles”
Holding to one’s principles is a third way at the question, of course, but one learns swiftly that this is very often a pricey proposition – if, indeed, it is not fatal to one’s prospects.
By and large what one found among journalists making their ways in corporate media was an immense, collective case of mauvaise foi, Sartre’s “bad faith.”1 In philosophic terms, it was a question of being-for-others as against being-for-itself. The practice of journalism became, in other word, a matter of performance.
I understood the problem of alienation as I worked at the “Daily News”, but I didn’t wholly accept it. My response was to find my way among independent publications, where one wrote what one meant and there was no, or very little, alienation between oneself and one’s work – and, more fundamentally by far, between oneself and oneself.
I am about to publish a book taking up these questions, and I am drawing on its text here. In it I borrow from Carl Gustav Jung. Each of us has a shadow, he explained here and there in many of his works. It is that part of ourselves that is suppressed by convention, orthodox morality, acceptable taste, the exactions of employers, and other social and professional pressures. The casualty of these infinitely manifest forces is the integrated personality – the authentic, undivided self capable of judging and acting with certainty and without reference to the coercions of power or collective opinion.
“Shadow selves” – When
journalists divide their personalities
The shadow selves of journalists should be of special concern to all of us. They have been among my abiding preoccupations, certainly, since my years in the mainstream press. It is when journalists divide their personalities to secure and hold positions in corporate media that judgments are compromised and the corruptions and delinquencies that beset the profession begin.
For myself, my shadow is that part of myself I kept hidden from others. For a long time I tended to hide it even from myself – if I did not, indeed, hide from it. I earned my living at mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines because that is where you could earn a living during the years I write of. My work for independent publications, in this private way, a way there was no need for others to see, amounted to my defense against the extinction of my individuality, who I truly was.
Integrity
If we want to think about who the journalist is in our time, I propose we begin here: The work of remediating the crisis in the profession ought to begin with each journalist’s determination to reject the alienation endemic in the craft in the name of what we may as well call wholeness of self. The pastor in my small New England village taught me not long ago the relation of “integration” to “integrity.” To reintegrate the personality of the journalist is to restore him or her to a state of integrity. I will be forever grateful to my pastor for pointing out this truth, one that lay right in front of me but that I failed to see.
Any journalist who is attentive to the question of his integrated self and therefore his integrity – being one with his shadow in Jungian terms – will also consider his place in society. The closely related but separate question is where he stands in society, as between those powers he reports upon and his audience, the readers and viewers for whom he writes or broadcasts.
Outsider
To address this first question, the easier of the two, I think I. F. Stone, the wonderful independent practitioner of the Cold War era, had it exactly right. The true journalist is by definition an outsider. He is in society, naturally, as he does not live in a cave, but not precisely of it. He has his political perspectives as we all do. And this is a fine thing. It is an expression of his civic, public self not at all to be regretted. But he has a special, perhaps unique responsibility to keep his views, proclivities, opinions, and so on, out of his work. This is an ideal, the ideal of authentic objectivity, that can never be fully achieved. But it it must be striven for nonetheless, and it is a big part of what sets the journalist apart from others in society.
Izzy Stone expressed this position in every page of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the publication he wrote, edited, and brought out for decades from his dining room table in Washington. Too few journalists are willing to accept this relationship with society these days. Most desire acceptance among political and social elites.
But it was Stone, after all, who observed that every generation produces but a few genuine journalists – a truth we should never let ourselves forget.
The “Lippmann–Dewey debate”
I have just touched upon our second question, where the journalist stands in society as against who he or she is. This is a more complex question and requires more explanation.
To make my point most clearly, I will refer to a noted exchange that took place in America a century ago – in the early to mid–1920s. The two figures who conducted what we call the “Lippmann–Dewey debate” were Walter Lippmann, a prominent journalist and writer on current affairs, later among the early Cold War liberals, and John Dewey, the philosopher and educationist
In 1920, Lippmann published the first of three books concerning the place of the press and the task of the journalist in a democratic society. “Liberty and the News” was followed in 1922 by “Public Opinion” and by “The Phantom Public” three years later. These books were progressively more pessimistic as to the ordinary citizen’s capacity to understand a world that had grown more complex than any theretofore known.
“The manufacture of consent” …
Lippmann’s reply to this, the coming of the modern in a mass society, was to preach the new gospel of the expert. He devised an interesting structure wherein experts were to deploy their expertise. They had nothing to do with ordinary people and nothing to do with the making of official policy. With perfect disinterest, the expert advised the political class of scientifically determined realities, and out of this came correct policy, devoid of all special interest. The press’s task in this schema was to convey these determinations to the public. Journalists were messengers. In Public Opinion, Lippmann defined this duty as – a famous phrase nowadays – “the manufacture of consent.”
Here is Lippmann writing of “the private citizen” in “The Phantom Public”:
“Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers…. He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.”
And, two chapters on in the same volume:
“The actual governing is made up of a multitude of arrangements on specific questions by particular individuals. These rarely become visible to the private citizen. Government, in the long intervals between elections, is carried out by politicians, officeholders and influential men who make settlements with other politicians, officeholders and influential men. The mass of people see these settlements, judge them, and affect them only now and then. They are altogether too numerous, too complicated, too obscure in their effects to become the subject of any continuing exercise of public opinion.”
Lippmann termed these severe judgments “democratic realism,” though they seem to me neither democratic nor realistic. The press’s place in this arrangement derived from Lippmann’s idealisation of invisible experts and those they advised. “The creation of consent is not a new art,” he wrote in “Public Opinion”. “It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously...”
… or setting out all available perspectives?
John Dewey reviewed the latter two books of Lippmann’s triptych in The New Republic – a journal Lippmann cofounded, ironically – and published his own book on these topics, "The Public and Its Problems", in 1927. These amounted to replies to Lippmann’s work. Dewey did not differ with Lippmann as to the citizen’s limitations in a mass society, but he saw more democracy, not less, as the remedy. The necessary elite must be subject to public deliberation, based on the public’s understanding of all available perspectives on a given question. Setting out these perspectives was the press’s true task. From this would emerge democratic consent or objection, and there would be no question of the press manufacturing it:
“It is not necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry on the needed investigations. What is required is that they have the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns.”
While we term these indirect exchanges between two of the era’s prominent thinkers the “Lippmann–Dewey debate,” the two never engaged in one. It is a figure of speech.
It is possible to exaggerate their differences, but two such differences are essential to grasp as we understand the press’s failures since the Cold War, notably its deference to power in the post–2001 years, and the crisis we are considering today.
Lippmann encouraged the thought of the public as passive, the recipient of others’ decisions. Citizens were bystanders – “spectators of action.” Dewey saw the promise of participatory democracy even while he acknowledged the complexities of making it work. Nobody spectated, for politics was not spectacle; the civic self was reasserted, not extinguished.
“Places at high table” or
“embedded in the citizens’ midst?
From this distinction arises a second, having to do with where journalists locate themselves in a democratic polity. Was it in the lofty towers above, as winged-footed tribunes, the messengers of those they report upon, or embedded in the citizens’ midst, agents of an informed, infinitely sided public exchange? The question comes down to distance and proximity.
This is the divide, a very lopsided divide, that now defines American journalism. In our time, mainstream media are densely populated with dedicated Lippmannites. I can think of no outstanding exception among those employed at corporate newspapers and broadcasters. Only of those media commonly called “alternative” can one say otherwise.
This is an especially perilous position for mainstream journalists to assume in the post-2001 context. It leaves them bound in complicity with the keepers of secrets, so assigning them the task of incessant omission in the news reports they bear downward to the public. I do not think it is in any wise a wonder that a markedly high proportion of our “private citizens” now distrust the mainstream press because of these lies of omission and of secrets withheld.
It will be obvious that I think the press has made a drastic mistake in choosing Lippmann’s thinking over Dewey’s on this point. And I count correcting this error another of the tasks journalists must undertake if they are to restore their profession along with their own integrity as I am using this term.
I think it would be foolish to entertain the thought that mainstream journalism and its practitioners will take up these tasks and set about a series of fundamental reforms such that the individual journalist is restored to a state of integrity, gives up the idea that he is a member of the elite he reports upon, and stands in better relations with his audience of readers and viewers. We must of course allow for this possibility, but only as a matter of principle – as nothing is impossible – and with our eyes wide open.
Independent media as
a chance for integrity in journalism
If there is any prospect that corporate media will repudiate their numerous corruptions, it will be because independent media have either inspired or required them to do so. To put this point another way, in my view – and by many years of experience – it is in independent media that I find the profession’s dynamism. It is among them that I see the opportunity for the individual journalist to regain his or her wholeness, to advance beyond the alienation I described earlier to a state of integration and integrity.
Jerzy Grotowski
Let me talk now a little about Jerzy Grotowski and "Towards a Poor Theatre", as a poor journalism is I think the key to this crisis we are talking about today.
Grotowski’s project began with a radical stripping away. He saw modern theater as encrusted with convention, artifice, and “plastic elements” – costume, makeup, artful lighting, elaborate stage sets. Modern theatre was “rich theatre” – mere spectacle. The proscenium was a confinement for actors and audience alike. Performers were alienated not just from the house but, more poignantly, from their own thoughts, emotions, and bodies.
Grotowski often wrote of “life-masks,” the internalised conventions actors traditionally work within. To me, he was concerned with the difference between the presented self, the performing self, the self of bad faith, and, against these, the genuine self, “the face we never show the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor,” and I do not quote Grotowski here but Jung.
This is the Jungian shadow as I use this term. From Grotowski:
“If we strip ourselves and touch an extraordinarily intimate layer, the life-mask cracks and falls away.”
And:
“This defiance of taboo… provides the shock which rips off the mask.”
And:
“In this struggle with one’s own truth, this effort to peel away the life-mask, with its full-fleshed perceptivity, has always seemed to me a place of provocation.”
To transcend the roles imposed by convention, to destroy distance in favor of closeness and the most complete authenticity humans can achieve: This is poor theatre.
The concept arose from the simplest of questions. Grotowski asked: What is theater? When all that is not essential is taken away, what remains? He replied that when rich theater’s furnishings and clutter are removed, it transforms the performer-audience relationship: They enter the rawest kind of contact possible. Grotowski trained his actors – and much of this training was psychological – to connect, above all and as honestly as possible, with themselves; then could they connect most directly and effectively with audiences.
The journalist as seer and sayer
I borrowed and bent Grotowski’s question long ago. Before it is anything else, journalism is at bottom seeing and saying, nothing more. Scrape away the superfluous and all the barnacles of convention and you have observation, reporting, and writing or speaking or filming. All the accreted encumbrances – the deference to official authority, the narrow limits defining “acceptable” sources and perspectives, the dense language of bureaucrats, above all the pretense to Lippmannite professionalism and membership in political and administrative elites – all are eligible for removal. Much of this, or maybe most or all, derives one way or another from the unhealthy relations with power I have outlined. To political, corporate, and financial power I add bureaucratic power, the power of editorial hierarchies, the power of embedded ethical corruptions – altogether the inertia and lethargy draped over the profession.
The journalist as seer and sayer discards all this. The corrupting of accuracy and honesty in exchange for access is worse now than one could have imagined even a few years ago. So is the self-censorship transmitted throughout the system. A poor journalism makes it possible to withdraw all offers to bargain integrity for access or acceptance on terms other than the journalist’s own. This would mark a consequential turn in itself: It would be one step on for journalists to shed the burden of self-censorship, for the invisible mechanisms that enforce it will lose their leverage.
Money
Now I must talk about money.
Journalists have to get poor in the common meaning of the term if the profession is to recover itself. I do not propose monastic vows or penury. I do not refer to reporters and editors paid ordinary salaries for, the best of them, honorable work. I refer to the upper ranks, where extravagantly paid journalists are too invested in the elites they are supposed to cover but instead desire to join. Whatever they may have been as they came up in the craft, too much money and aggrandizement have ruined them.
I navigated the mainstream for decades and know the power of the money, the generous salary. But I have learned since the utility, and indeed the pleasure, of modest living. Here I will quote Henry David Thoreau, who said more than once, the less I want the freer I am. And then H. L. Mencken, the prominent iconoclast who wrote and edited at about the same time Lippmann and Dewey were having their “debate.”
“A good reporter used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant,” Mencken wrote. “He now makes as much as a doctor or lawyer, and probably a good deal more … He has got a secure lodgment in a definite stratum.”
I mean to suggest, as Mencken did, that something was lost as journalists began to professionalise a century or so ago – something lost and worthy of restoration. In a single word, journalists must become and remain “unincorporated” if they are to amount to more than the clerks of the governing class, and this I mean in all senses of the term. Disenfranchised will also do.
Staying true to oneself and one’s ethics
I have already quoted I. F. Stone to the effect that journalists are properly outsiders. The unique place they should occupy, in society but not altogether of it, must be observed – honored, even. This requires a distance from power that allows them to remain faithful to themselves and their ethics. Money does not serve this purpose; modest living does – comfortable-enough, rent-paying, family-raising, modest living.
I wonder: Have we become so grand that this is a strange idea? It is the precondition of authentic disinterest and immunity from intimidation. The adversarial position in the face of power and a reconnection with readers and viewers require this – a kind of disinvestment. Let all aspiration and imagination soar, but the work is the reward, not places at high table.
To conclude I will ask, “Can this transformation of the journalist’s identity and place be accomplished within the confines of our most powerful media institutions?”
Great potential of independent media
My profound doubts should by now be plain. The current ownership structure of American media appears to make this impossible, but let us count it an outstanding question, even if it is theoretically so as things now stand. I see vastly more promise in independent publications such as those that have brought me here this week. The resources are not what one would want. In a lot of cases, we find people who have not been properly trained.
At this point many of these publications are vulnerable to the censorship digital platforms impose. All this will evolve. It is early days yet in a new era. We have to think long-term. Resources will come, one way or another, as more readers migrate away from mainstream publications in search of writing that derives from a commitment to integrity. Skill levels will improve. The censorship wave, dreadful as it is, may subside or can otherwise be overcome.
So I am hopeful about the future – not foolishly, I would say, but with a native optimism that, try as I have over the years, I cannot overcome. •
1 “mauvaise foi” is a philosophical term used by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to describe the phenomenon of human beings adopting false values through conformity pressure and giving up their absolute freedom so that they no longer need to ask themselves the question of who they are. The French expression “mauvaise foi” (literally “bad faith”) can be translated as infidelity, disloyalty, dishonesty, even guile or insidiousness. One can assume that Sartre meant by his term exactly what is usually called self-deception today. [editor’s note according to Wikipedia]
* Patrick Lawrence is a writer, a commentator, a critic, a longtime newspaper and magazine correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer and writes often on Europe and Asia. Patrick Lawrence has published five books; his most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book The Journalists and Their Shadows will be published shortly by Clarity Press. His Twitter account @thefloutist has been permanently censored without explanation. His web site is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via patreon.com/thefloutist.
The text reproduces a lecture given by Patrick Lawrence to the readership of Zeit-Fragen / Horizons et débats / Current Concerns in Switzerland on 14 April 2023.
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