The American press, including Utah journalism, is trapped in a race to the bottom. 

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I love what I do for a living. Not everyone can say that—so I routinely remind myself how rare it is to find a job that nourishes rather than merely sustains.

Those who work in journalism often have a difficult time finding outlets through which they may consistently pursue their craft, especially with the leeway that City Weekly affords. It's humbling and exciting to offer my meager abilities.

Not having started out as a journalist—but nevertheless being an enthusiastic latecomer—I had long absorbed the maxims regarding the importance of the fourth estate for an informed public, the bedrock for a functioning democracy. I still believe that. Having grown up loving films like All the President's Men and TV series like Lou Grant, I had a rough notion of what "healthy" journalism looked like and the environment in which it best flourished.

Edifying as those depictions might have been, and as important as the principles of a free press remain, I have come to the realization that I have never actually seen or experienced a completely healthy and "free" press in all the years of my life—struggling, as the press does, to survive with unstable revenue sources. Nor, for that matter, has any other American since perhaps the 19th century.

As with all ills, commercialism can be found at the root. But when anyone suggests improvement to the American system—an outlier upon the world's stage—there are inevitable shrieks of resistance against governmental (but ideally, public) solutions, followed by incantations that our media industries can regulate themselves. The conversation has changed little for decades.

In his book America's Battle for Media Democracy, Victor Pickard studied popular efforts to reform the American radio and newspaper industries in the 1940s that were prematurely abandoned, the consequences of which continue to be felt in the policies of today.

Back in that post-war period, Pickard wrote, efforts around social democracy sought a less commercialized media landscape, preferring one that "prioritized the collective rights of the public's 'freedom to read, see, and hear' over the individual rights of media producers and owners"—that is, fostering "positive" freedoms for a common good rather than the "negative" freedom from such things as regulation.

The negative version is the media landscape we have known, Pickard writes, one in which "particular kinds of state intervention—copyright, relaxation of media ownership restrictions and generally any measure that privatizes what had been previously in the public domain (such as the public airwaves)—are embraced, whereas any measure that aims to curb profit-seeking behavior is scorned as regulatory and therefore anti-free market."

You don't need to look too closely in order to see how this libertarian sophistry was applied to television and the internet in the years that followed, and what damage it has wrought to our self-conception as citizens, our freedoms and our standards.

Today, we've confused multiplicity for diversity, with so many media "options" that nevertheless have little to say. Substantive reporting is rare amidst an ocean of sincere, if ill-informed commentary (at best) and a tidal wave of pernicious propaganda (at worst), all clamoring to fill the void.

Wonder not why so many have been radicalized to violence or polarized with partisan nostrums. Years of hermetically sealed indoctrination will do that.

"Fewer companies and fewer journalists are covering fewer stories with fewer resources," lamented the late media scholar Robert McChesney. "Reporters are stretched thin and increasingly rely on the shortest path to an 'objective' story, regurgitating official press releases from both sides of any given issue—thus 'balance' but not always truth or even analysis."

With a media system that engenders little public understanding or action on issues—not to mention owners whose interests lie invariably with capital—we are dealing with a landscape that has been in need of structural reform for well over a century. It has been enormously impactful upon how we perceive the world about us as Americans and does indeed bear responsibility for our current national woes.

Were it not for the fawning support or vapid credulousness of our commercial media, would tenth-rate showmen like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump (or their circles) ever have been able to obtain the normalization and influence they have upon the national consciousness?

The poet Archibald MacLeish considered the American press of the 1940s as little better than that of Germany's under Adolf Hitler, whose project was "to produce the intellectual perplexity, the emotional disorder, the doubt of truth, the distrust of all declarations of principle, all measures of value, all standards of decency, in the midst of which, like thieves in the confusion of a manufactured panic, the gangsters of the age may have their way."

It is against such a crisis of communication and social plunder that I implore all to seek for non-commercial approaches to media, for journalists to venture beyond stenography, and for policymakers to reconsider for whom the freedom of the press was intended. (Hint: the postal service originally offered subsidized rates for newspapers so that citizens would have secure access.)

In the meantime, we can and should support the local journalism we have; while journalists can spend more time at public meetings and less time on political theater.

Or as City Weekly editor Ben Wood often says: "Stay local and get creative."

Private Eye is off this week. Send comments to wlong@cityweekly.net.