Not Worth the Paper They’re Printed On.

“The most preventable tragedy was the deterioration of quality. Downsized local publications were all but forced to rely on more national content, but that content didn’t have to become so vapid…But that’s what happened. Rather than investing in the valuable steel and concrete of hard reporting, national news outlets began printing the most worthless kind of commercial paper — rumors, personality profiles and other such speculative derivatives that consumers could find elsewhere.“

Don’t cry for the end of the newspaper, says Salon‘s David Sirota (who also seems to be feeling a bit Howard Beale-ish right about now.) They brought it on themselves. “‘In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation,’ says journalist-turned-director David Simon, whose HBO series ‘The Wire’ examined this trend.” (Simon has more to say on the subject here.)

As Jack Shafer reminds us, newspapers were scurrilous, scandal-ridden, partisan rags long before they were bastions of citizenship and good journalism. Still, now that the broadsheets have mostly followed their television brethren down the road of endless horse-race-type political coverage and surface-skimming trivialities, what’s their purpose, really? We can get bad, rushed, smart-alecky journalism from TV and the web.

The War on Drugs is Lost.

“All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs – with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes – a twelvefold increase since 1980 – with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana – and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage the drug war have been accused of human-rights abuses in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now repeating many of the same mistakes we have made in the Andes.“

To their credit, those left-wing hippie radicals at National Review said as much way back in 1996, and HBO’s The Wire has dramatized the dismal consequences of the conflict for several years now. Now, coming to the same dour conclusion in 2007, Rolling Stone‘s Ben Wallace-Wells explains how America lost the War on Drugs, and argues that continuing to perpetuate it in its current fashion — with its “law and order” emphases of crushing supply, international interdiction, and mandatory minimum sentencing — is tantamount to flushing money and lives down the toilet. “Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point – all with little discernible impact on the drug trade…The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats — the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government.” (Found via Jack Shafer’s endorsement at Slate.)

What Rough Beast?

“I am going to say something that few people in public life will say, but most know is absolutely true: a vast aspect of our jobs today – outside of the really major decisions, as big as anything else – is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. At points, it literally overwhelms.” In his final weeks as prime minister, Tony Blair addresses the problem of the media, calling it “like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.” (Full text of remarks.) “The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by ‘impact’. Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamour, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact. It is this necessary devotion to impact that is unravelling standards, driving them down, making the diversity of the media not the strength it should be but an impulsion towards sensation above all else.“

I wouldn’t say the feral beast metaphor gets right at it — until last year, most of the major news media, in this country at least, was rather well domesticated: It let Dubya lie his way through just about anything, including building a case for war in Iraq on false pretenses, with impunity. But, clearly something is broken with “this relationship between public life and media,” as Blair put it. In the midst of a conflict that’s been dragging on longer than World War II, you’re still likely to hear more about Paris Hilton’s jail travails (Prison sucks? Our criminal justice system tends to favor the wealthy? Who knew?), Don Imus’s racist bromides (A bile-spewing racist on talk radio? Wherever did they find him?), or the winner of American Idol, to take only three recent examples, than anything of use about the status of the conflict, or our actions, there. And even coverage of the horrifying tragedy at Virginia Tech, obviously a legitimate news story, descended into exploitation almost immediately (and provoked very little understanding that this level of tragedy has become virtually a daily occurrence in Iraq.) They’re just giving us what they want, I suspect the comeback is, and that’s almost assuredly true. But, still, it’d be nice to see a little more daily recognition from our major journalistic outlets that the mass media in our society performs a crucial — if not the crucial — function in informing the electorate on current events and providing the information indispensable to maintaining an active, responsive citizenry, and that other factors should come into play in their coverage than just the corporate bottom line. Update: From the press box, Slate‘s Jack Shafer cries foul.