Sam Smith – As the Covid crisis has painfully demonstrated, our national systems aren’t working well these days. There are lots of reasons for this such as the growth of a gradocracy including lawyers and MBAs, who have helped process, overwhelm, collapse, misdirect or confuse actual policy. Then there’s television and the internet that has helped replace actual response to communities in politics with simple images, cliches and lies, as well as members of Congress so much more dependent on corporate contributions that their actual constituents no longer matter as much.
This is not all that new a phenomenon. For example in 2012 I wrote:
Having challenged the establishment my whole life, I’m feeling a little down right now. It is one thing to take on an elite revered by presidents, academics, media and the public for their illusion of wisdom and knowledge and quite another to find oneself in the ring with a mob of fools, prevaricators and pathological bullies whose only claim to fame is their claim to fame.
Allen Dulles has been replaced by Donald Trump, Katherine Graham by Sarah Palin, McGeorge Bundy by Lindsay Lohan.
To be sure, the old establishment was repeatedly cruel, hypocritical and wrong, witness the Harvard intellectuals who helped talk LBJ into entering and staying in Vietnam. But one could embarrass them, and with a strong enough anti-establishment convince the public that something was badly wrong. It was tough but – as the civil rights and peace movement discovered – you could win if you fought long enough.
The current dysestablishment, on the other hand, makes little sense and possesses less. It shuns rational thought, words or action. And it is encouraged by a media that is content to speak in the same meaningless abstractions created by lobbyists for political marketing purposes.
The real has been replaced by adjectives. Politics has become just another form of advertising. And presidential kitchen cabinets these days are not composed of establishment figures in law, politics and foreign affairs but of clever hustlers in the techniques of Madison Avenue – as well as those seeking to parlay public service into later private profits.
A major player in all this has been the Washington press corps that has undergone huge changes. For example, in 1918 a survey found that about 40% of Washington correspondents were born in towns of less than 2,500 population, and only 16% came from towns of 100,000 or more. In 1936, the Socialist candidate for president was supported by 5% of the Washington journalists polled and one even cast a ballot for the Communists. One third of Washington correspondents lacked a college degree in 1937.
And what also existed was much more competition in the news industry. By the 1980s, most of what Americans saw, read, or heard was controlled by fewer than two dozen corporations. By the 1990s just five corporations controlled all or part of 26 cable channels.
I once described how this change affected me:
When
I started out as a Washington reporter in the 1950s, only about half of
American journalists had more than a high school degree. They naturally
identified with their readership rather than with their publishers or elite
sources. I didn’t let anyone know I had gone to Harvard because that would not
have improved my standing either with staffers on the Hill or colleagues in the
media.
Ben Bagdikian, a bit older than myself, described the craft in his memoir, Double
Vision:
“Before
the war a common source of the reporter was an energetic kid who ran newsroom
errands for a few years before he was permitted to accompany the most glamorous
character on the staff, the rough-tough, seen-it-all, blood-and-guts police
reporter. Or else, as in my case, on a paper with low standards, reporters
started off as merely warm bodies that could type and would accept $18 a week
with no benefits.
“Some of us on that long-ago paper had college educations but we learned to
keep quiet about it; there was a suspicion that a degree turned men into
sissies. Only after the war did the US Labor Department’s annual summary of job
possibilities in journalism state that a college degree is ‘sometimes
preferred.’”
And there were changes at the top as well. One of my first major shocks about my chosen trade was listening to a top Washington editor talking about how he had been discussing with the White House the best way to handle the arrest of Walter Jenkins, LBJ’s top aide who had been caught giving a blow job to a man at a local YMCA. It had never occurred to me that an editor would actually consult with politicians on how their stories were to be covered. But in a few decades journalists would be thoroughly “embedded” both in war zones and at the White House and find nothing strange about it.
Now, a few decades later, it’s gotten worse. It is as if our whole culture has been nationalized from the news media to show business to politics. With the aid of the internet and cable television along with the decline of local newspapers and radio shows, we now all share a common mythology about what we are and who is doing what.
It may be too late to reverse this, but as someone who has long been involved in things at both the local and national level, I think it is worth recognizing as a problem and trying to do something about it.
My thought is that we should face the reality of how our minds have been turned so strongly towards the large and grand, and find ways instead of reinstituting the wisdom and knowledge that one gains from more local experience. This isn’t about our individual action, relations and choices but how we can bring the local back into our collective social and political experience and discussion.
Our failure to do so is overwhelmingly ignored despite what we could learn from it. For example The nation’s capital has been run by black officials leading a black majority for some five decades, yet, even in the face of national ethnic turmoil, hardly anyone bothers to look at what the instructive history of a bi-ethnic DC could tell us.
Here are just a few steps that might be taken to make the local more important:
- Have governors and the mayors of major cities hold a conference several times a year in Washington, the locale forcing the capital’s press corps to give some attention. The conferences, among other things, would outline the major state and urban issues that are not getting enough attention at the national level.
- Use the internet to create local media even as the more traditional versions continue to disappear.
- Create a national organization to deal with state and local issues that require federal attention.
- Create a national internet program that supplies information about state and local developments useful to other locations.
- Put pressure on media to interview and cite professors, scientists and other knowledgeable individuals more than at present. This has happened with the coronavirus and has been strikingly useful. The powerful in Washington and Hollywood don’t have all the answers.
As artificial intelligence adds to this attack on the importance of individual and small group knowledge, wisdom and decency, we need to take a stand for human answers to human problems and recognize that all the answers will not be found in the nation’s capital.
