By Brent Cunningham
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, America and its press vowed to get serious. Remember the end of irony and all that? Well, the new seriousness turned out to be the chimera of editorials calling for a new seriousness. As Lawrence F. Kaplan writes in The New Republic, “According to a mountain of attitudinal and behavioral data collected in the past four years, the post-September 11 mood that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge dubbed ‘the new normalcy’ resembles nothing so much as the old normalcy.” In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina humbled the nation in ways that 9/11 could not, the press was again full of revolutionary talk about a new seriousness, especially concerning national awareness of race, poverty, and the environment. Joe Klein admonished readers about that in the September 12 issue of Time: “Having celebrated our individuality to a fault for half a century, we now should pay greater attention to the common weal.”
Klein’s point is a noble one, but it bears emphasizing that the unsettling facts about the common weal that Katrina exposed will not disappear once the blueprint for a twenty-first century New Orleans has been drafted. It will be largely up to the press to make sure the nation keeps paying attention. Journalists drew praise for speaking truth to officialdom in the wake of Katrina, but as PressThink’s Jay Rosen suggests, “The challenge for American journalism is not to recover its reason for being, but to find a stronger and better one.”
Extensive coverage of the rebuilding of New Orleans is certainly something readers and viewers deserve, but they also deserve a form of journalism that has always been difficult for the press in the United States to produce: stories grounded in solid reporting about what is possible, rather than simply what is probable; stories that shatter the official zeitgeist; stories that help set the agenda.
This forward-looking journalism shouldn’t be exclusively about New Orleans, however, since the nation also faces growing problems elsewhere at home and abroad. In short, we need new ideas for the new century. Brian Urquhart, writing in August in The New York Review of Books, argues that in respect to America’s international role, the traditional threat to peace — wars between great powers — has been “supplanted by a series of global threats to human society — nuclear proliferation, global warming, terrorism, poverty, global epidemics, and more. These challenges can only be addressed by collective action, led by determined and imaginative men and women.” After World War II, America’s leaders spearheaded the creation of crucial institutions (the UN) and ideas (“containment”) that proved decisive during the cold war. Despite the parallels that the Bush administration draws between the cold war and its “war on terror,” it has failed to undertake such work of imagination, a failing exacerbated by a political system that has grown too partisan, choreographed, and shortsighted to generate effective ideas.
The press has been a willing partner in this intellectual devolution. Cable news roils the nation over the latest missing white woman but remains silent about larger, more troubling matters, such as the fact that in fifteen years, two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in countries with a serious shortage of fresh water. That dire forecast was made by the UN during the third annual World Water Forum in March 2003 in Japan, an event that drew scant coverage in the U.S. Like the depletion of the global oil supply — or bird flu — water shortage is a genuine problem, not a matter of opinion. Smart people within and outside government grapple with such problems in wonky articles; some of their ideas appear on the better op-ed pages but rarely on the front pages of newspapers and almost never on television.
It’s time for the press to help broaden the scope of public discourse — not just by sounding an alarm, but by exploring possible solutions beyond those offered by government. By “the press” I mean the mass media — the newspapers and broadcast outlets that cater to a mass audience, and thus have the most influence over what people know about the world beyond their own experiences. While it’s now commonplace to say that the media have become diffuse, most primary journalism is still done by the mainstream media, segments of which strive for intellectual honesty and believe deeply in reporting.
To make aggressive journalism about the various threats to human society a priority will require a radical reassessment of America’s relation to the world as well as the American press’s definition of news. Last January in an op-ed in The New York Times, Jared Diamond, the author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, explained that among the lessons he gleaned from studying the survival of societies is the need for “a willingness to re-examine long-held core values, when conditions change and those values no longer make sense.” The press alone can’t force this re-examination on the nation, but it could start the conversation.
Remember the Patriot missile, the darling of the first gulf war that protected Israel and Saudi Arabia from Saddam’s evil Scuds? The initial declarations from the Pentagon and the White House, trumpeted enthusiastically by the press (which was, to be fair, severely limited in its ability to cover that war) were of the Patriot’s virtually flawless performance. Less than a year later, and thanks largely to an MIT whistleblower named Theodore Postol, it was clear that the Patriot’s record was actually rather mediocre.
There are many reasons why the press didn’t bring more skepticism to its coverage of the Patriot. Or to the success of Enron and other corporate miracle workers. Or, more recently, to the Pentagon’s initial explanation of how Pat Tillman, the former NFL star turned Special Forces soldier, was killed in Afghanistan. Or to the notion that all America needs to patch things up with the world is better p.r. Professional conventions such as objectivity discourage speculative coverage, argumentative coverage, and coverage that strays too far from the pack or the news peg. The regimented, relentless, and at times punitive message management executed by public- and private-sector institutions can also inhibit (and intimidate) the press.
But on a more fundamental level, these stories didn’t arouse skepticism in the press because they clicked into the well-worn grooves of our national mythology, the narratives that explain our country’s purposes and shape what it means to be an American. These myths are commonly subsumed under the heading “American exceptionalism,” which is useful shorthand for polemicists but, like “liberal” and “conservative,” has become such a loaded term that it can’t help us understand how myths limit our ability to imagine what is possible. In Myths America Lives By, Richard T. Hughes, a professor of religion at Pepperdine University, tries to explain those limits. Hughes traces the evolution of what he calls five “foundational myths” — the chosen nation, the Christian nation, nature’s nation, the millennial nation, and the innocent nation — from their common roots in religious faith to their modern-day manifestation in, for example, the lack of debate in the United States about what happened on 9/11, and why. “Americans have by and large refused to face the question of ‘why they hate us’ head-on,” Hughes told a gathering of Christian scholars in 2004. “Instead, following the lead of their president, they have taken refuge in the venerable myth of American innocence. To claim our enemies hate us because they hate liberty is simply a way of asserting American innocence without coming to grips with the awful truth that our enemies hate us for many clear and definable reasons.” (While a handful of genuine attempts to wrestle with this question have appeared in the mass media — notably a Newsweek cover story in March 2003 by Fareed Zakaria entitled “The Arrogant Empire” — they have been rare.)
These foundational myths have been manipulated to launch wars, support dictators, and lend the aura of unassailability to man-made systems. Consider, for example, the myths of nature’s nation and of the chosen nation. The former, Hughes explains, was a construct of the Enlightenment and, when it emerged in the late 1700s, contributed to the belief that America’s founders “simply exploited a design they found in nature itself, a design as old as creation, rooted in the mind of God.” It lent a timeless, “self-evident” quality to the American experiment, and together with the myth of the chosen nation, which implies a covenant with God, was used by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to define laissez-faire capitalism as the natural, or self-evident, system for organizing man’s economy. In the wake of the Civil War, the victorious North saw the economic prosperity it enjoyed (thanks to industrialization and a humming war-time economy) as a reward for its righteousness on the question of slavery. This “gospel of wealth,” as Hughes calls it, was soon applied to individuals by way of Social Darwinism, and America’s mythology thereby embraced the notion that the rich are divinely entitled to their wealth and the poor similarly to blame for their want.
Hollywood is the primary wholesaler of American myths, but the press does plenty to perpetuate them and very little to define their shades of gray. For example, although the worst abuses of laissez-faire capitalism have been alleviated, there are echoes of the gospel of wealth in the celebratory coverage routinely bestowed upon the rich, famous, and powerful, while the poor in America — when they make the news at all — are typically rendered as victims, perpetrators, or the face of failed social policies.
To be sure, commercial pressures are partly to blame for that, but another reason the press is reluctant to lead a persistent discussion of the large, rather abstract problems we face as a nation and as part of an interdependent world is that the substance of that discussion would necessarily involve questions of national identity as much as the peculiarities of our profession. If we are to rethink some of our “core values,” as Jared Diamond suggests, then as a country we must first be honest about what needs fixing.
No society, of course, can survive without myths. As the sociologist Robert N. Bellah pointed out to Hughes, “Humans are in some very deep way story-telling animals. So a world without myth would be an inhuman world.” But to the extent that an uncritical embrace of myths limits our ability to imagine alternative ways of organizing the world, they are problematic. The difficulty Americans have imagining failure, for example, especially failure brought about by incompetence, arrogance, or anything short of a noble and good-faith effort, is rooted in our national myths. As the writer Lawrence Wright says in his memoir, In the New World: Growing Up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties, “America had a mission — we thought it was a divine mission — to spread freedom, and freedom meant democracy, and democracy meant capitalism, and all that meant the American way of life.” Unwavering belief in this mission underlies the shock people felt about the systemic failure of government — from FEMA to the local governments along the Gulf Coast — to manage Katrina’s aftermath. There is no reason to believe that American journalists, assuming they grew up here, would be less immune to this national blind spot than anyone else. After all, it was reporters’ uncontainable shock and outrage at this failure that garnered them the most praise.
The imagination of the press is further constrained by the habit of exploring in any broad and consistent way only those ideas put forth by anointed newsmakers — most of whom have a powerful interest in framing the debate to suit their narrow agendas. These stories have a tendency to emphasize the political strategy underpinning an idea. Consider the neoconservative ideology that has guided America’s foreign policy these last five years. To the extent that consumers of mass media were exposed to this ideology, it was largely through comparisons to the more cautious, multilateral foreign policy represented by Colin Powell and the State Department. If a reader also knew that neoconservative ideology recognizes the usefulness of the “noble lie,” a notion conceived by Plato but articulated by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, the reader probably didn’t learn about it from the press. During the past five years, only a handful of major American newspapers and broadcast outlets have highlighted the role of Straussian ideas in neoconservative politics. In light of the collapse of the Bush administration’s casus belli in Iraq, a more robust exploration of the intellectual underpinnings of neoconservatism hardly seems irrelevant.
At the end of the cold war, heady talk in the United States about “the end of history” and the triumph of free-market liberalism was followed by a decade in which American society and its press became unhinged by the utopian promise of amazing technological advances and their attendant riches. September 11 reminded us, in horrific fashion, that the flow of history is largely impervious to the hubristic declarations of empires. But partly through a widespread inability to reflect on the country’s identity in ways that acknowledge the inadequacies of national myth, that lesson largely escaped us. In his book, Hughes explains how national myths tend to become “absolutized” in times of war, and this was clearly on display in the wake of 9/11. Listen, for example, to Mort Zuckerman, editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, defend American unilateralism post-9/11 to Lou Dobbs in 2003: “It would be nice to have a much broader array of support . . . but it always makes me remember Gary Cooper in High Noon when he had to defend the town, even when the rest of the town wasn’t willing to support him. We are the sheriff in the world, whether we like it or not.”
Now, once again we — the people and their press — have a moment of reckoning. The public is unsettled by the disaster unfolding in Iraq and the vulnerability of life on display along the Gulf Coast. The nation is, more or less, paying attention. How should we engage it?
The big ideas during the last twenty years about saving the news business have generally centered on delivering to the great swath of citizenry possessed of credit cards and investment income the experience of diversion. (A notable exception was civic journalism, which flared up and then dimmed in the 1990s.) The most recent big idea, unpacked in a New York Times Magazine profile of CBS chairman Leslie Moonves, is more of the same. At a time when the three major networks are thinking of ways to rehabilitate their news operations, Moonves wants to make the newsroom into an outlet of primetime vapidity. As Lynn Hirschberg, who profiled Moonves, explains, “News stories are often dark, and Moonves would like to find a way to make them light.” America was built on optimism, Moonves says, and Americans like “traditional heroes” and “conflicts that can be solved.” This is media reform with an eye on the bottom line, not the common weal. Like Hollywood, Moonves aims to bank on the salability of unquestioned myth.
Moonves’s proposal also reeks of the disdain for journalism demonstrated by the Bush administration, which has brazenly vilified and bypassed “the filter” (that is, us) whenever possible. Moreover, it’s a proposal that shrewdly avoids trying to compete in a media landscape that is fracturing along the dangerous partisan notion of “you have your facts, I have mine.” It’s time that the segment of the press that is still committed to intellectually honest journalism — a majority, I’m convinced — try something other than patronizing the citizens of this country. What have we to lose?
While it’s difficult to change the core mission of any large organization, traces of a vital alternative — of public-service and idea-based journalism that helps set the agenda for what the nation thinks about — still course through our mass media. It has been evident in Katrina’s wake in stories about the ways the country has failed those citizens who live in poverty, and the manner in which the nation’s singular devotion to commerce and development weakened New Orleans’s natural protections against flooding. It’s evident, too, more broadly in mainstream journalism — in the Ideas section created by The Boston Globe in 2002, in the devastating documentary Frontline aired earlier this year about the viral spread of radical Islam in Europe.
But such work is a rivulet in the torrent of journalism that pours forth daily in this country. The vibrant coverage of ideas available in many small-circulation magazines is generally absent from the mass media, a state of affairs that makes the career of Tom Quinn, a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, all the more instructive.
Quinn began covering environmental and energy topics for the Plain Dealer in the mid-1970s, and since has worked a number of other beats at the paper. He is currently the night police reporter. But through it all he has, as Joan Didion put it, “worked the fringes” — taking classes at Cleveland State University, talking to professors, going to the potlucks and hayrides of groups (Green Energy Ohio, the Northeast Ohio Foodshed Network, etc.) that Quinn, sixty-two, describes as part of “the dissent community.” For Quinn, working the fringes isn’t about advocacy but ideas.
In the late 1990s, Quinn learned about the phenomenon of “peak oil” — how world production of crude oil will eventually peak and then trend irreversibly downward. “Peak oil” is a source of considerable disagreement between the geologists who endorse it and the economists who argue that as the price of oil rises, market forces will spur more efficient ways to extract the remaining crude. Neither side, however, disputes that crude will eventually be scarce. Quinn read the books and technical articles. He studied geology, international finance, and Middle East politics. In January 2005, he began to talk to his editors about “peak oil” and the need to publish work in the paper that attempted to, as he put it, “connect the dots” on the future of energy. His editors listened, and in May the paper began a series that is still under way.
It helped that the Plain Dealer could ground the story of energy development in the region the paper covers. John D. Rockefeller launched the oil age when he started what became Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1863, and Charles Brush, a local inventor, harnessed the wind off Lake Erie with the world’s first electricity-producing turbine in 1887. From there the series broadens to include the global context of energy, drawing on sources from Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere, as well as explorations of “peak oil,” coal, nuclear, and hydrogen power, and stories that move from systemic solutions to practical ways to make readers’ lives more energy-efficient.
Even though the price of gas was in the news before Katrina, the Plain Dealer’s series wasn’t an obvious way for a budget-conscious paper to marshal its resources. Indeed, Doug Clifton, the paper’s editor, says, “It doesn’t sell many papers. In fact, it may not sell any.” But Clifton is quick to stress that “we felt we had an obligation to put these issues before the public.” Clifton has also considered ways to counter the “big-project effect” that can plague newspaper series — meaning that for a specified number of consecutive days the paper asks readers to digest long articles raising big questions, but then mostly drops the subject until the next big project. Series at the Plain Dealer, including one on regional development that has been under way for four years, are doled out intermittently in small portions rather than in one heaping helping, and are typically accompanied by something of an old-fashioned editorial crusade, reinforcing (and revisiting) lessons from the reporting.
Quinn says he is “perceived as kind of ‘out there’ in the city room.” And maybe he is. But the nation could use more “out there” journalism. The center has grown too complacent. The trick, of course, is to find creative ways of working the fringes and connecting the dots. That doesn’t require that we in the press seek to destroy the myths of America, but rather that we help cultivate an awareness of the ways such myths fuel arrogance and limit American ingenuity. The Plain Dealer series doesn’t do this overtly, but the idea underlies the entire project.
In September in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff remarked that Katrina’s biggest casualty was the destruction of the “contract of citizenship” between Americans and their government. “It is very much too late,” he writes, “for senior federal officials, from the president on down, to reknit these ties. It is just too late for the public-relations exercises that pass for leadership these days . . . . The real work of healing will be done by citizens much lower down the chain of command.” That is true, too, of the real work of grappling with the many problems America and the world will have to confront in this century. Indeed, an aspect of the mythology of America is the venerated common sense of its citizens. If presented with a challenge and given all the facts, it is said, the American people will make the right decision. They will roll up their sleeves and get to work. It’s time for the press to embrace this myth and help the country decide where to begin.
Brent Cunningham is CJR’s managing editor.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
