Dead man talking

I found the following article online this morning and thought some of it quite profound. The fourth estate, as I grew up thinking of our newspapers, is pretty much gone and is only a puppet of government or corporations or both. It definitely is a slave to capitalism and not the muckracking, truth-telling, news-gathering expose it ought to be. The larger papers in particular often leave me wondering where the real news is and whose toes are being protected.

Because it certainly isn't yours or mine.

From the Illinois Times
POSTED ON AUGUST 2, 2007:
Dead man talking
I have seen the past, and it works
By Roland Klose

As a young reporter, Lincoln Steffens learned that successful police officers had a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the law. Here’s how it worked in some New York City precincts in the late 19th century: Criminal syndicates did a thriving business in age-old vices (gambling, prostitution, thievery) and the police protected them, as long as they stayed within certain limits. If rich man lost his wallet to pickpocket, a detective would call in a favor from his criminal associates, the victim’s goods were returned, and the cop looked like a crime-solving genius. ...

... For Steffens, a college-educated naïf, learning how some cops worked their beats helped launch him on a lifelong quest to understand the difference between the righteous and the sinners.

Eventually he’d write “The Shame of the Cities,” a magazine series about municipal corruption that made him famous. . . .

... I’m fascinated by Steffens and the other muckrakers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who showed what an aggressive, independent press could do. ...

... Steffens started his career, like many journalists, just plain curious about how things work. And he believed, as have many idealists, that simply exposing evil would be enough to kill it, like sunlight on mold. So he went about the business of exposing corruption and its consequences, and he named names....

... The idea that corruption was an urban phenomenon faded as he probed state governments. The belief that business was somehow more ethical or efficient than politics evaporated when reform-minded good-government businessmen took charge of cities and things became worse. ...

... On Wall Street, company presidents did not control — they were puppets of such tycoons as J.P. Morgan. In cities, it wasn’t the mayor who governed; he was a creature of the local political boss. And so it went with governors and congressmen and presidents and, yes, even newspaper editors and publishers.

Steffens recounted what he told one boss about political corruption: “It is not a temporary evil, not an accidental wickedness, not a passing symptom of the youth of a people. It is a natural process by which a democracy is made gradually into a plutocracy” — government of the people becomes government for the wealthy. ...

Steffens represents modern American journalism at its start, a time of hellraising and optimism and discovery.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m witnessing the end.

Newspapers where I spent most of my adult life are circling the drain — the consequence of years of betrayal by owners who sucked ungodly profits from their operations. Most news organizations today are gripped by fear; if they’re not cutting back, they’re selling out.....