Both Cox and Henwood seem to think that what we have today is somehow not worth criticizing, inasmuch as what we had before was dreadful. For all their Marxist noise, both of them have made precisely the same "argument" that one hears from the Media Institute, The Weekly Standard--and The Nation (e.g., John Leonard's dismissive editorial in the 6/8 special issue): that criticizing what we have today presumes a celebration of the crap of yesterday. Maybe Henwood didn't know about the newspapers in Colorado, but those of us who've studied media history, and who've read carefully through Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, I.F. Stone et al., know very well what journalism used to be throughout this country. How exactly does the nastiness of journalism past detract from the critique of journalism nowadays? Among the crucial differences between the company press of 1910 and the corporate press of 1998: Today's press fetishizes "objectivity," yet pushes its agenda every bit as ruthlessly as Ludlow's daily. >Carrol Cox wrote: > >>Miller's articles, and his posts to this list, exhibit him deep into >>that other important form of apologetics: nostalgia. Has anyone on this >>list ever read Upton Sinclair's *The Brass Check*? An elementary school >>teacher I happened to meet when I was in high school (this would have >>been the spring of 1947) loaned me her copy of the book. Could Miller >>empirically establish that the state of the media in 1904, as revealed >>in that work, was in any way better than the situation he describes. If >>anything, the public access to knowledge has rather increased than >>decreased in the last 90 years. > >I just happened to talk with Jeff St Clair about Miller's stuff, and he >told me something I'd never heard before. In the first decades of this >century, almost all the newspapers in the Rocky Mountain states were owned >by mining and timber companies. I bet they produced some staggeringly >pathbreaking, independent journalism! > >Doug
