Editor’s Note: As more and more daily newspapers fall by the wayside – victims of a terrible economy and the Internet – many critics of the mainstream media say the MSM is getting what it deserves, for having failed in so many of its responsibilities to a democratic society.
But there is a danger as fewer reporters are left to chronicle events, even imperfectly, as author and historian Gray Brechin notes in this guest essay.
We seldom think of oxygen unless it’s absent. You’d think about it a lot if it suddenly exited this room; you’d start gasping and writhing, your eardrums would burst, you and your neighbors would do a lot of bleeding on each other, then you’d die.
But if we gradually replaced oxygen with nitrous oxide mixed with just a soupcon of cyanide gas, you might not notice that anything was missing at all; you might feel very content as your brain and body gradually turned off and you lapsed into a sleep without end.
I’ve frequently criticized the San Francisco Chronicle for just that — for its lack of the kind of mental oxygen that makes for a healthy democratic polity. In my book Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, I showed how it and two other leading San Francisco newspapers a century ago served the interests of their owning families — the deYoung, Hearst, and Spreckels clans.
All three detested each other to the point of murder, although they could all agree — as do all major newspaper-owning families and corporations to this day — that capitalism is the only acceptable means of arranging human affairs and that the value of land and the structures built upon it must continue to rise.
They also agreed that an expanding U.S. empire in the Pacific Basin suited their own interests just fine. As the young William Randolph Hearst advised his father in an 1885 letter, “Every atom of humanity added to the struggling mass means another figure to the landlord’s bank account.”
All three media dynasties had very large real estate holdings and bank accounts that were replenished and enlarged by every atom added to the struggling mass far below those families.