In the U.S., the new law is: Everything just gets worse.
Here's a recent instance of the law, as applied to what used to be genuinely alternative news sources in the U.S.:
The Village Voice has now been politically eviscerated, along with the other city-based alternative weeklies bought up by Michael Lacey (nice picture! maybe he doesn't want to be recognized?) and the New Times corporation (check out those ads! Lots of alternatives there), which now operate “without the burden of a political agenda”. To get a taste of we've lost here, check out these excerpts from this April 13 Democracy Now segment:
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to former Village Voice reporter Jim Ridgeway in our Washington studio. And here in New York we’re joined by Sydney Schanberg, the former press critic at the Village Voice, Pulitzer Prize winner. He resigned in February, following the sale of the paper. He won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in Cambodia during the 1970s. His story inspired the film The Killing Fields. We’re also joined by Mark Jacobson. He’s a reporter with New York Magazine. In November, he wrote a major piece on the Voice-New Times merger, entitled "The Voice from Beyond the Grave." He’s a former writer at the Village Voice.
And I also want to say, we did try to reach Michael Lacey, who is the new Executive Editor of the Village Voice and co-founder of New Times Media, as well as Christine Brennan, the Executive Managing Editor of the Village Voice, but they did not return our calls. And New Times Media is now called Village Voice Media.
Sydney Schanberg, you attended a meeting in early February with Michael Lacey and the whole Village Voice staff. What happened?
SYDNEY SCHANBERG: What happened was very sad. Mr. Lacey came in and very quickly told the staff that he was disappointed and appalled by the fact that the front of the book was all commentary and that he wanted hard news. He said if he wanted to read a daily or regular critiques of the Bush administration, he would read the New York Times, and that's not what he wanted in the Village Voice. He was insulting to the staff. He figuratively or in effect called them stenographers. He said they had to stop being stenographers. When I objected to that, because that was so insulting, and I said that you can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.
Lacey's
charge is such a bunch of contradictory bullshit---stenographers to
what public figures !!?-- that I can't read this
without becoming enraged, but maybe that's just because I can still
remember the fast-disappearing good old days:
AMY GOODMAN: We are also joined on the telephone by Tim Redmond. He is the executive editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Tim, why is this a story that you feel is a national story? We’re talking to you from New York.
TIM REDMOND: I’ll tell you why it’s a national story. It's a national story, because the alternative press has always been kind of feisty, independent, challenging the status quo, and the alternative press has always been about independent media, has been about independent voices. And, you know, it sounds kind of hokey, but I got into this business 25 years ago, because, you know, I thought I could help change the world. And I’m not saying the alternative press has changed the world, but I think the Village Voice has made a huge difference in New York, and the Bay Guardian, where I work, has made a huge difference in San Francisco, and that's something.
And what the folks from New Times, now known as Village Voice Media, want to do, they want to buy up alternative papers all around the country and make them all the same. You know, I don't think anyone should own 17 alternative papers. And I particularly don't think a company run by people who despise activism, who are not activists and don't think of themselves journalistically as activists, who don't endorse candidates, who don't take stands on issues, who haven't even come out against the war, should be taking over the Village Voice. It's really sad. I mean, the Voice was always part of the activist tradition of the alternative press. And, you know, in the same way that a few big chains like Gannett have bought up and control most of the daily newspapers in the United States and a few big corporations like Clear Channel control an awful lot of the radio, a few big corporations control most of the TV, if we go that way in the alternative press, it's going to be very sad, particularly, as I say, when it is an operation that doesn't believe in activist politics. That's not what the alternative press has been about.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Tim, a question. New Times has a reputation, supposedly, for hard-hitting local investigative stories in many of their other chains. How do you reconcile that "reputation" with their current moves, in terms of the Village Voice?
TIM REDMOND: New Times has some good journalists, and they have done some good stories. I’ve never doubted that. But they don't believe in providing progressive community leadership on issues. They'll do some investigative reporting, and there's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes to the role the alternative press has always taken, which is to provide activist leadership, they don't believe in it.
Besides, you know, I don't care if Mike Lacey wants to run a kind of neo-libertarian paper down in Phoenix and say whatever he wants to say and do whatever he wants to do. But once he tries to take papers all over the country and make them all the same, you know, it's kind of like the Borg. They sweep into town, they take over a paper, and they remold it in their own image so it's exactly like all of the other New Times papers. If you go from city to city to city, you know, Denver, Phoenix, you go around, Houston and Miami, they all look the same. They all have the same voice. They all have the same tone. And that's not good for the alternative press, and I would say that's not good for the United States. It's not good for progressive politics. This is not what the alternative press is about.
It's bad enough that we are losing what we once had.
Even worse is that lots of kids coming up these days---those not lucky enough to have progressive parents or get plugged into progressive blogs, in particular---are not even going to know what things used to be like 20 years ago.
They're going to think it's just the way things are that every single thing you hear from the media is aimed at selling you something (or keeping things cool for the sellers) rather than telling you what is actually going on. That the corporate message---and indeed, the entire cultural landscape--- is always the same, no matter whether you're in New York, or LA, or Denver, or wherever.
They're not going to know that there once was a genuine alternative. Correction: genuine alternatives.
Say goodbye to one more thing that used to make the U.S. a place worth living in; say hello to the new law of ever decreasing returns.
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