What the "News" Media Gave Us Then, What the News Media Give Us Now

Remarking his time working in Pittsburgh not long after the bloodbath that was the crushing of the Homestead steel strike (1892), where Big Business control of the newspapers seems to have been even more repressive than elsewhere, Theodore Dreiser considered the kind of "service . . . my employers craved," which was harder to discern than what they did not. The elephants in the room were numerous and colossal, and for obvious reason. ("We don't touch on labor conditions except through our labor man . . . and he knows what to say," while there was "nothing to be said about the rich or religious in a derogatory sense," the city editor explained, acknowledging that "[t]he big steel men here just about own the place, so we can't.") Gossip ("a wedding . . . in high society," "the visit of a celebrity"), and violence or tragedy of a purely personal-seeming, irrelevant-to-the-"big picture" nature ("[s]uicides, occasional drownings, a brawl in a saloon"), were "the pabulum on which the local readers were fed." If there was some acknowledgement of weightier matters it had to be consistent with the line of the masters ("labor or the unions" spoken of in terms of makers of "unholy anarchistic demands," for example). But above all they wanted "idle feature stuff which they could use in place of news and still interest their readers."

"Idle feature stuff in place of news."

Not news, but a substitute for news intended to be acceptable to the powerful.

"So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!" Dreiser quipped while describing the constraints under which he and his colleagues had to work.

So much for a free press in America, A.D. 2024, one may say today, as the mainstream of that media barrages us with what is less news than a substitute for news, even where it may seem most like it is presenting us with news--helped by the inability or unwillingness of so many of those who would regard themselves as intelligent and educated to tell the difference between the campaign horse-race crapola" the media love so much, and coverage of what really matters in public life, or recognize the muddling of the insight that the personal is political and vice-versa that enables the media to pass off the shabbiest of personal scandal as material worthy of dominating the headlines. Meanwhile the editorial line would not seem to have changed one iota, the news editors groveling before the robber barons of our times just as they did in Dreiser's day.