Creative Destruction

"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from."

         T. S. Eliot, 1942

The idea of "creative destruction" is that new ideas, new technologies, new institutions supplant what came before by destroying them. The automobile creatively destroyed the horse and buggy. It is an optimistic thought. Maybe, as the Beatles sang in my youth, things are getting better, better all the time.

Maybe even the news, where Craigslist destroyed the classified ad business and big tech took most of the revenue from news creators. There are green shoots amid the wasteland of journalism. My post Monday is an example. An independent journalist gets revenue covering the Fox News beat, where bad journalism gets revenue by becoming a reliable source of "comfort food" masking as news. My local newspaper died and took a TV news department down with it, but innovative mostly on-line new newspapers sprung up in its absence, and the remaining two local TV news stations expanded. 

And young people emerge, the subject of today's observation by Jack Mullen. He grew up in Medford, worked in newspapers in the Bay Area, and now lives in Washington, D.C. His interests include politics and sports.

Guest Post by Jack Mullen   

Mullen

                                        Democracy dies in darkness

I shudder to think that, in 2025, all three branches of our government could exist under a strong executive thumb. A compliant Congress and a weak Supreme Court may render our system of checks and balances useless. If that were to happen, the last recourse under our constitutional democracy would lie in the Fourth Estate. Is the Fourth Estate up to the task as it was in the early 1970’s?

Thanks to Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s reporting, Congress and the courts had the evidence to spring into action. Nixon’s “if the President does it, it is not illegal” philosophy ran into Senator Sam Ervin and Judge John Sirica. After Senators from his own party told Nixon he could either resign or be impeached, he chose to resign. Ultimately, the authority of the other two branches of government prevailed over the executive branch.

Should the 2025 legislative and judicial branches be called to action due to unlawful executive overreach, will they perform the same public service that they did in 1973-74? If not, what about the Fourth Estate?

The Fourth Estate is floundering. The demise of the Medford Mail Tribune is not unusual. Local papers across the country are shutting down. The award-winning Eugene Register Guard is a shell of its former self. Large metropolitan papers aren’t exempt from large staff layoffs.

Recent events tell us that hope might exist in college newspapers. Campus newspapers need not worry about decreasing profits, hedge fund takeovers, or being bullied by owners and overlords who want news shaped a certain way.

When a freshman reporter can bring down a school president, or when reporters at a Big Ten school can bring down a football coach, then some hope exists in the role of the Fourth Estate.

Stanford freshman Theo Baker wrote a series of articles that raised concerns about research data manipulation and scientific impropriety by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. An alarmed Board of Trustees appointed five high level scientists to look into the allegations. They found enough irregularities that Marc-Tessier-Lavigne decided to resign as Stanford president, effective August 31.

Halfway across the country, the Northwestern University student newspaper exposed a sordid hazing scandal in the Wildcat football program. Former University of Oregon President Michael Schill, now Northwestern’s president, took note, reviewed the players’ allegations, then fired the popular football coach, Pat Fitzgerald.

Schill’s firing of Fitzgerald set off a chain of events. Football, baseball, even women’s softball athletes are now coming forward filing charges against a bevy of school officials and coaches over the mistreatment of student athletes. Dr. Schill may wish he had stayed in Eugene.

The Stanford and Northwestern papers are part of a continuing history of student newspapers taking truth to power.

As a freshman at the University of Oregon in 1966, I recall Oregon Daily Emerald editor Annette Buchanan writing an article in which she interviewed seven students who admitted smoking marijuana. Lane County District Attorney William Frye brought charges against Buchanan for failing to name the seven students. Buchanan stood her ground; she would not finger the seven students. Ms. Buchanan was fined $300. She appealed to the State Supreme Court in Salem. She lost. By then, her case was gaining national attention.

The Washington Post, impressed by her unwavering stance, published an editorial during the time of the Broadway revival of the musical “No, No, Nanette,” with the headline “Yes, Yes, Annette.” The 1973 Oregon Media Shield Law is credited to Annette Buchanan.

Perhaps the state of our democracy won’t descend to the point where our last vestige of hope may lie within the Fourth Estate. If it does, the $64,000 question is if it will be enough to keep the world’s longest running democracy functioning? The current Israeli crisis forewarns us what may lie ahead for us.

 

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