Tomgram: Todd Gitlin, The Tinsel Age of Journalism!

After all these decades, here is the strange thing: What I remember are his hands, not his face. But perhaps that is fitting for a writer. His name is Robert Shaplen, and he was a correspondent for the New Yorker. My parents knew him and, as a boy, I idolized him. From World War II on, he covered Asia. He seemed to me the most adventurous man on the planet. With him in mind, I was sure that there could be nothing better or more romantic than being a foreign correspondent. That, of course, was before I grew up and discovered that I did not even like to travel. It was a dream of the newspaper itself, and the habit learned in boyhood, now disappearing from much of our world, of reading the paper daily, sports section first, then front to back. Even now, it's an addiction I can't shake. When it comes to the print paper, however, I'm increasingly part of a lonely crowd. I first realized the change was coming in the early 2000s. Back then, I used to parachute into the Berkeley journalism school every spring to be an editor to a crew of future reporters. Every morning, you could get free copies of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and a couple of other papers. As a lifelong news junkie, it seemed like heaven to me. But to my surprise, my students often did not take the papers at all, free or not. One day, one of them explained that by the time she hits school, she had already checked out the New York Times, and the LA Times online twice, the night before and that morning. The actual paper was already older than Methuselah in her eyes. Today, Todd Gitlin, who wrote a classic account of how the news misreported the New Left and antiwar movements of the 1960s The Whole World Is Watching, and how TV worked back in the 1980s Inside Prime Time, offers a reminder that my journalistic dreams were just that. The news, with the usual notable exceptions, was generally a tawdry affair in the service of power. Still, can there be any question that, as the newspaper fades, we are entering a new age of conglomerated mainstream chaos? You only needed to check out the "coverage" of the Boston bombing aftermath, which you would have had to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss, to know that. What possible dreams, other than coverage nightmares could emerge from that? If we got what must have been the largest, most militarized manhunt in our history, for two young men briefly on the run in one city, I suspect we also got the largest, most intensive, least impressive media coverage for a single event of probably little long term import. It was the sort of thing that gives the word overkill a bad name. Have we learned nothing from the over the top reaction to the 9/11 attacks? The case itself may fade, but the example of shutting down a city, and flooding it with thousands of heavily up armored police and SWAT teams won't, nor will the flooding of it with just about every media resource that exists on the planet!