This Week:

Prisons and Police

Welfare Reform: The System Is Working!

Media in the Free Market

 

Greetings,

It’s good to be back in the saddle, so to speak. The main piece this week is a meditation on the media - how the Market impacts everything we do and, increasingly, everything we think. The piece focuses on The Toaster, but it applies to every media project I’ve ever been involved in, or heard about. It’s even got footnotes! In addition, a note on an important conference, and a little anecdote from the Newspaper of the Twin Cities.

‘Til next week, Nygaard

Welfare Reform: The System Is Working!:

Monday’s Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) gave us this headline on the cover of the Metro section: “Welfare workers surveyed: They say system working, but caseloads heavy.” Here is the lead paragraph: “Minnesota’s new welfare system has been ‘moderately successful’ in moving parents into the workplace and reducing welfare dependency, but it is not reducing poverty for most parents, says a survey of job counselors and welfare workers.”

According to a graph accompanying the story, 73% of welfare caseworkers said that the new welfare regime was “not successful” in reducing poverty. 76% said that it has been “moderately successful” at increasing work among recipients.

Here are a few alternative headlines, courtesy of Nygaard Notes:

• “State forcing people to work for poverty wages”
• “Welfare workers say reform fails to address poverty”
• “Workers exploited by system”
• “Welfare reform after one year: Corporations win”

In a not-unrelated development, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set a record this week, topping 10,000 for the first time.

Media in the Free Market:

When we were recently in Nicaragua, we were exposed to malaria on a number of occasions. We dutifully took our medication but, despite the fact that malaria has killed 10 times more children over the last ten years than all wars combined during that period, medical research has not come up with a vaccine. Why is this? It turns out that malaria occurs most often in tropical and subtropical regions of the world, and these regions are largely populated by poor people.

The pharmaceutical companies have thus neglected to invest much money in research on malaria vaccines, since they know that there is not much profit in vaccinating poor people.¹ This is not a conspiracy against poor people by those mean pharmaceutical companies. This is the Free Market at work.

We don’t have a healthy and thriving independent media in this country for the same reason that we don’t have a vaccine against malaria. There is no conspiracy against independent journalism by those mean ol’ corporations. It’s just the Free Market at work.

I was recently at a meeting (actually a party) for The Toaster. The Toaster, for those who don’t know, is the soon-to-be-launched independent weekly newspaper of the Twin Cities.² An exchange I heard at the party made me think of malaria.

Claude Peck, the final editor of the late Twin Cities Reader, was among those who gave little pep talks to the crowd. During the discussion that followed, a long-time progressive activist in the Twin Cities asked Mr. Peck a question along the following lines: “The Toaster will be financed by advertising. And the Toaster will be a political publication, with the responsibility of writing about the activities of corporations and their effects on life in the Twin Cities. Will this pose a problem, since the people who should be the subjects of critical investigating will be the same people who are paying the bills?”

This question reveals a common fear among progressive media activists. That fear is that, when we try to plant our tree in the soil of the Free Market, the Corporadoes will inevitably, and with malice aforethought, cut that tree down if it gets too big.

That’s a real fear, but it’s not the thing that we should be most concerned with. A far greater danger than the malice of the Market is the indifference of the Market. The Toaster will seek to, in the words of the old journalistic adage, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The Toaster will also seek to pay its bills by selling advertising. And therein lies the problem: these two things very quickly come into conflict. A good share of the “afflicted” in our community, as in any community, are the poorest and most marginalized. While these are the very people most in need of the voice that a truly independent paper can provide, these are also the very people who are of little or no interest to potential advertisers.

Corporations, large or small, advertise for one reason: to sell stuff. They thus try to put their “message” out in front of the people who they think are the most likely to buy their stuff. And who are these people? Are they poor people? Are they unemployed people? Are they environmentally conscious people who are trying to reduce their consumption? I don’t see too many full-page ads for the Goodwill or the DAV Store.

Which orientation will be more likely to survive in the marketplace? An orientation toward the poor, toward the disfranchised, toward the principled segment of the educated classes who are consciously limiting their consumption? Or an orientation toward the comfortable, toward the middle and upper classes, toward the “consuming class,” toward those more likely to buy more “stuff”?

Let’s be clear that I am not talking about conspiracy. In fact, it’s sort of the opposite of a conspiracy. Corporations don’t dislike poor people, and I doubt that anyone sits around trying to think of ways to hurt us. But, alcohol and tobaccos sales notwithstanding, the success of the Free Market depends for the most part on satisfying the needs and wants of the “haves,” not the “have-nots.” The Free Market doesn’t dislike poor people; it just has no use for them.

So how can The Toaster, or any media project of its type, exist simultaneously in the realm of public discourse and in the realm of the Market? Two things occur to me.

There is no shortage of skilled, talented writers and reporters here in the Twin Cities. And there is no shortage of principled people who would love to work for a newspaper with the right priorities. The Toaster has to find and recruit them, because these are the people who will stand guard against the Corporadoes who are always there with axes and saws, ready to cut down our metaphorical tree.

Secondly, The Toaster and its allies must remember to constantly nourish the soil in which we want our tree to grow. More insidious, and thus more threatening, than the danger of our journalistic tree being chopped down is the danger that the soil in which it is planted is simply lacking the nutrients to allow that tree to grow. So The Toaster must be planted in the soil of the community, rather than in the soil of the Market. That soil is a lot richer, but there is a lot less of it.

In the long term, there are two ways for an independent weekly newspaper to go. One is easy, and one is difficult. The difficult way is to evolve into a true voice for the voiceless, every week earning anew a reputation for integrity and independence in the service of human rights. Poor people will read a paper like this it because it will speak for us. Powerful people will read it because they will suffer, in various ways, if they don’t. Going this way, the difficult way, will require good journalism, a well-functioning moral compass, and broadly-diversified funding sources.

The easy way is to evolve into an advertising-driven child of demographics, catering to and profiting from a readership of young, urban professionals. This is the easy way because it’s what the Free Market wants. And in most cases that I can think of in recent decades, what the Free Market wants, the Free Market gets. Let’s hope The Toaster proves to be the exception to the rule.

Footnotes:

1. See the New York Times, January 8, 1997, “Malaria Makes a Comeback, Deadlier Than Ever.” Specifically, the following quote: “ Money for malaria research is meager in part because the disease primarily afflicts poor people, and Western drug companies doubt that Third World villagers would be able to pay much for a new malaria vaccine even if it was developed.”

2. For more info on The Toaster visit the home page at http://www.thetoaster.org/.