Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [75]
“I was unconscious to the very powerful interests I was serving,” he said:
I had never bellied up to the challenges to whether I wanted to serve power in this way. There were points during my ten years at the Times when I was writing about government. Power can be construed directly in those articles, but primarily I was a culture reporter for a long time, a metro reporter and then a business reporter. I was basically always a pawn in the big game. I had never thought through whether I was using the skills I had amassed for the best possible moral outcome. I knew people at the Times who literally got sick every time they walked through those revolving doors. I got that way. And I didn’t know what was hitting me. I felt physically ill. It was my conscience. It was strong enough that I knew I needed to escape. When you work at the New York Times, it is like working at the White House. Nobody should have that power permanently. They should have it for a while and drop it. It is not the real world in there. I was getting too used to having mayors and governors and CEOs call me up, as if I were a friend, and pay for my dinners and give me their press releases and have me describe them in glowing terms. And this happened over and over. I wrote critical pieces. The former chairman of Christie’s [auction house] lost his job because of me. The former head of the New York City Historical Society lost his job because of me and my reporting of how he squandered the endowment and let priceless treasures at the museum get rained on and destroyed. I did my bit. I did the investigative part. But overall, the New York Times is an entrenched source of power and does not serve those who are the neediest in society well or at all. When you have that amount of power, you need to spend a lot more time thinking about people who really need help.
And yet McGill, for all his problems with the paper, was quick to add that “the world without the New York Times would be a poorer place.” He said that when the paper covered the U.S. government, New York City, or Washington, the moral problems he increasingly encountered as a reporter reached their apex: “That is when the conflicts of interest are the strongest.” He said that the need for access to the powerful rammed news through “a weird distorting force field, to the point where it is difficult for readers to know where the story is coming from.”
But despite these impediments, McGill fears, as do I, the loss of papers and liberal institutions as “a counterweight to government and corporate power.” Newspapers, he said, were powerful enough to stand up to lawsuits and harassments and threats:No amount of blogging and Web sites, even when added up together, will equal that kind of counterweight. That is being lost. Journalism was born and reared in newspapers. Not in TV. Not in radio. There is so much institutional memory and practice and good that came up in newspapers that it will be a tragedy if it is lost, and it is being lost.
“The further you get from these distorting power sources, like New York City or Washington, and can write national or foreign stories, you can get indispensable reporting done by the same reporters who, in other realms, work in these distorting force fields,” he said:There are two kinds of objectivities. There is one in quotes and one outside of quotes. The one in quotes is the corrupted objectivity of mainstream journalism. It is an ideology. It does not have an underlying rigor. It means a lot of things, with many of those things being contradictory. It can mean neutral, fair, balanced, and impartial.