Radical Media Renewal

these and related issues, Robert McChesney and John Nichols can rightly claim to have the track record that counts. The two of them, respectively a distinguished media scholar (and radio show host) and one of the sharpest political journalists in the United States, have been at the beating heart of Free Press (www.freepress.net) from its inception. This social movement, epitomized by the radio show Democracy Now, was created to fight corporate media domination and the Bushies’ effort to quash human rights discussions, and it seems to have peaked in the midst of that administration ’s blundering bloodthirstiness. The nomination and election of Obama threw a spanner into the works for some months because the worst of the problems , it was hoped, might now be passed. Sad reality: we need this kind of movement as much as ever. The Death and Life of American Journalism is, at its most innovative, a historical analysis with a programmatic conclusion.SomanybooksonU.S.history have appeared in recent decades that the actual story of journalism has remained a remarkable mystery. McChesney and Nichols reveal the surprising fact that without government subsidies, there wouldhavebeennopennypress(aninnovation way back in the 1820s); no blood and thunder fiction weekly papers (the television or Web of the day) in the 1840s; no vigorous arguing over slavery; and for that matter, no utopian, free love, and women’s rights papers. Forget for the moment that the huge mass of newspapers and, later, magazines , have historically been profitdriven , morally corrupt, racist, and tied to a corrupt two-party system. All the way back to Thomas Jefferson, elements of the elite found a dissenting press useful to themselves and expressive of the democratic promise of the new nation. The Post Office Act of 1792, opening up “Post Roads” across the country (and soon making the Post Office the nation’s largest employer), was accompanied by a heavy subsidy of rates for sending printed matter. Printing subsidies of various kinds followed as well. Go forward to the twentieth century, and newspapers are peaking in circulation with a staggering variety in many languages, local, regional, and national— not to mention the comic pages (always favorites, along with sports sections). The press of the 1910s featured muckraking revelations of corruption and called for political reform. Again, never mind that by the end of the decade, papers and magazines favoring the U.S. entry to war had been favored, those opposing the war suppressed (mostly by the loss of postal rates, though sometimes by mobs of American Legionnaires wrecking offices and Red Squads dragging staff members off to jail). Subsequent bursts of lively journalism, the scandal sheets of the 1920s, the leftleaning minority of papers (including much of the secular foreign-language press and of the African-American press), foreshadowed the Pentagon Papers’ revelations and belated criticism of the CIA by the liberal press. By the 1980s and ‘90s, of course, the heavily centralized newspaper industry was raking in profits by cutting staffs and news pages while loading up on ads, much to the delight of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton regimes. The opposition press, such as had existed, virtually ceased to exist outside of some weeklies and a handful of left-leaning magazines. The PBS commentaries by Bill Moyers were to the point but after the fact, and 70 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 0 CULTURE learned. Unfortunately it lacks footnotes (except for the epigraphs, which are profuse and wonderful, ranging from talmudic and zoharic sayings to quotes from famous Hasids and their rebbetzin wives), and although there is an extended bibliography, I’m not sure how a reader wanting to track her sources for more precise information would do so. But that is really beside the point. The point is that “Shekhinah energy” is available to us today, by a multiplicity of paths, if we seek it. I Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, and author of For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Her poetry collection The Book of Seventy received...