The (Lack of) Democratic Sensibility in Today's Media

As Frank Cowperwood's enemies in The Titan carried on their campaign against him in the newspapers one editorial in them declared Frank Cowperwoord to be a man with "an innate, chronic, unconquerable contempt for the rank and file" who regards others as but "slaves and thralls to draw for him the chariot of his greatness," with this reflected in his buying legislators rather than trying to win the public to his object--in the end, monopoly control of a public utility for his personal gain of the kind that the critically-minded economist would call "rent-seeking."

All of this is, of course, no more than what is true given what we know of Frank--and that truth allowed to appear in the paper only for the most cynical political reasons, Frank's enemies ready to do just about anything to crush his drive after a long-term street-car monopoly, even "playing with fire" by riling up "the common man" with such language. (Indeed this aspect of the novel very effectively dramatizes something Dreiser described well in A Book About Myself as part of his personal journalistic experience--the way the newspapers would carry on a campaign against some particular piece of corruption appearing to be on the side of the public but really just serving the purposes of settling scores between factions of the local elite.) Still, we are very unlikely to see any denunciation of a figure like Cowperwood in such terms today, the democratic outrage against behavior like his simply absent--a reminder that if as Dreiser (and Sinclair, and many others) make clear to all who can understand the simple point that the mainstream of journalism in this era was utterly corrupt, today the deployment of such rhetoric in even such a cynical game is unthinkable for those courtiers of power and privilege.