Chris Hedges reviews Bob McChesney and John Nichols’s new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”.

Certainly, as the authors point out, the faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news. The structure of “objectivity” works far better when there are powerful social movements, such as the civil rights movement, that provide an actual alternative and demand a voice. But without these movements the press functions as courtiers in the corridors of power. It dutifully reports the Democratic and Republic positions, a condition that imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. The two parties are in fundamental agreement about the underlying economic, political and military structures which are largely responsible for our decline.

I’m not sure that I agree with Hedges’s overall analysis (“America’s profound cultural shift into collective self-delusion”), but this is still worth reading.

My particular concern with schemes like those proposed by McChesney and Nichols is that perhaps the state-corporate system has a vested interest in the death of good journalism, which Hedges mentions:

The plan proposed by the authors would work only if the public, and our corporate state, recognized and cared about journalism as a vital public good.

And, more directly:

Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism.