Denial of the impact of climate change might cause the collapse of civilization. But with social media pushing aside daily newspapers, people are losing their connection with reality.
The Four Horsemen are approaching at a canter (the Fifth Horseman may be a fat man with an orange face who traded his pale horse for a golf cart). Apocalypse advances on its own schedule, and it’s probably an illusion that we can do anything to fend it off or speed it up. But the summer of 2023 feels like a turning point, when those dread Horsemen may break into a gallop. July was the hottest month in recorded human history, July 6 may have been the hottest day since human beings evolved, and scientists who study sediments and ice cores calculate that those were the highest global readings in at least 125,000 years. The year 2023 is well on its way to achieving the same distinction as “hottest ever.” “This would mean that nothing even remotely resembling a human civilization has ever known a world this hot,” concludes Bill McKibben in The New Yorker.
Canada, Hawaii and Greece are on fire, the ocean water off South Florida is now warmer than a normal human body. Vermont, half underwater, is the new Bangladesh, and heat dome-doomed Texans have been waiting for weeks to breathe any outdoor air cooler than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Parts of the American Southwest are becoming uninhabitable. “The era of global warming has ended,” declared the Secretary-General of the United Nations. “The era of global boiling has begun.” Climate disasters triggered by the heat — severe storms and floods — have cost struggling economies nearly $40 billion.
Global warming and drastic climate change are the central facts that will shape the future of our species and all species on this planet. Climate scientists have done their work and published their consensus. The earth is warming too rapidly, the polar ice caps are melting and the 9 billion humans who burn fossil fuels and create greenhouse gases are the villains. If this climate consensus even required one final proof, it’s the infernal heat we’re suffering this summer, heat that’s causing thousands of deaths, destroying ecosystems as well as economies and showing us much more than a glimpse of apocalyptic miseries that lie ahead.
We have essentially done this to ourselves. The case is closed. This is no longer a matter of opinion, of opposing ideologies or philosophies. There are no respectable scientists who dissent, no argument against the consensus that commands any respect, no politician who can question the science without exposing himself as a prostitute who depends on the philanthropy of the fossil-fuel industry. Anyone still clinging to climate-change denial is either a liar who profits from lying or a sorry primate with the cognitive range of a zucchini. Denial has been so thoroughly discredited — and at such a terrible price — that deniers should worry about sweating, suffocating mobs that come to burn their homes.
How many summers like this one before vigilantes go after these lethal cynics and fools? Where do they live? Pick up your torch and follow me. We can start with the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing “think”(?) tank that has prepared Project 2025, a post-election Republican strategy that would roll back or eliminate every effort to reduce emissions and face up to climate change. For the Heritage crew, for the Heartland Institute, for all these whores with their hands deep in the pockets of Big Oil and Big Coal, climate change is still a “hoax” perpetrated by Joe Biden and those job-killing liberals. Is Project 2025, a $24-million war on reality, for real? Well, I read about it in the New York Times, which used the verb “gut” to describe the Project’s plans for every program that attempts to slow global warming. If you can’t even imagine this level of genocidal cynicism — or genocidal ignorance — you haven’t paid enough attention to the Republican Party’s descent into criminal incoherence.
Heat has become the worst enemy of all living beings, the very face of the Apocalypse to come. But Apocalypse can wear different disguises. Most Americans who identify as journalists have made a living working for newspapers and magazines. For our shrinking tribe, the news of our profession is like a morning edition filled with nothing but obituaries. At least two newspapers die every week, and more than 2,500 have been shut down since 2005. That’s a quarter of all the nation’s newspapers; more than a third will be gone by 2025. Nearly 60% of all newsroom jobs have been lost over those last two decades, along with 70% of the newspaper industry’s revenues. Seventy million Americans now live in “news deserts” where no local news source is available. Even cities as large as Pittsburgh and New Orleans no longer support print dailies.
This is a dirge with many verses, for many voices. The Gannett chain, which owns more than 200 dailies in 43 states, is now owned by a Japanese hedge fund called Softbank, which was predictably unmoved when hundreds of Gannett journalists staged a walkout to protest shrinking newsrooms and declining standards. Another hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, specializes in buying failing dailies, slashing payrolls and selling off assets. Legendary papers like the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune are among Alden’s victims. Half of America’s surviving dailies are now owned by hedge funds and private equity firms.
I have friends with Pulitzer Prizes who are essentially unemployed. Each sad story, each statistic cuts closer to the bone. The industry’s great remaining powers aren’t immune to the slow death of Print. The Washington Post, rescued from insolvency in 2013 by the Amazon mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, projects its 2023 losses at $100 million and plans layoffs. The New York Times recently shut down its fabled sports desk, a personal injury to lifelong readers like me who remember Red Smith, Arthur Daley, and Dave Anderson — and my grad school professor Joe Durso — with the same reverence we offered Ted Williams or Bill Russell.
The blight that’s devastating printed news hasn’t spared the frugal alternative end of our business, either. Here in Maine, where I hide from the summer heat, the July demise of the Portland Phoenix brought down the final curtain on the family of alternative weeklies that began in 1966 with the Boston Phoenix, a paper I admired so much that I joined in an attempt to emulate it in North Carolina. In the same news cycle, Maine’s dominant news baron, who owned the Portland Press Herald and a score of other dailies and weeklies, announced that he was selling the Press Herald and most of his other properties to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News.
The Press Herald sale shouldn’t be mourned as more of the same, journalists will argue, because nonprofit owners like the National Trust are idealists whose mission is to rescue these local papers from hedge-fund predators and irrigate the news deserts of America. I don’t dismiss that argument. But the message we can’t ignore is that newsprint operations are no longer financially viable. In order to fulfill its critical role in a functioning democracy, a free press requires professionals who are not only idealistic, but experienced and adequately funded. When you can’t sell ads or compete for eyeballs, your future is uncertain at best. When journalism schools have been limited to trust-fund babies and masochists taking vows of poverty, the end is near.
For print media it’s late in the game, fourth down and 40. The swan song of the local newspaper isn’t everyone’s tearjerker. But this isn’t about newsroom nostalgia, or the aging minority of news consumers who still like to hold a printed paper in our hands. It’s about a population, an information culture that’s rapidly losing its connection to reality, in part because it has turned its back on its most reliable guides. Public confidence in the press establishment was permanently damaged by a raging idiot of a president who called the news media “the enemy of the American people” and dismissed every story that didn’t flatter him as “fake news.”
In the wake of Trump’s coinage, actual fake news blossomed everywhere, from the meretricious blend of news coverage and Republican propaganda on Fox News to such outrageous fountains of falsehood as Alex Jones’s InfoWars. This deadly toxin has even spread to local newspapers. Media-watchers identify at least 1,200 local news outlets funded by rightwing activists, false neighbors who spread algorithm-generated fake news. Journalist Ryan Zickgraf compared them to “pink slime,” a stomach-churning slaughterhouse byproduct used to adulterate ground beef. “As traditional newspapers continue to die off,” he wrote, “pink slime outlets are rapidly filling the gaps.”
But it’s no secret that it’s new technology, the swift and chaotic digitalization of information, that has undermined traditional journalism and left it groping for its identity. History will rule on the decidedly mixed blessings of the internet. The impact of social media, on what contemporary Americans know and believe, has been predominantly dreadful. “The erosion of trust in basic facts is largely the result of too many people getting their news from social media platforms,” Steven Brill of NewsGuard has stated bluntly. Brill, the founder of Court TV, is about to publish a book apocalyptically titled “The Death of Truth.” Will I have the courage to read it?
“We are living through an information revolution,” Julia Angwin writes in the Times. “The traditional gatekeepers of knowledge---librarians, journalists and government officials---have largely been replaced by technological gatekeepers: search engines, artificial intelligence chatbots and social media feeds.”
I don’t know what to make of artificial intelligence, at a time when the natural intelligence of my compatriots seems to be running so thin. I know that my wizard of a son-in-law, manipulating some kind of chatbot, took only a few seconds to produce an apocryphal news story that would satisfy most editors. I’ve hired reporters who couldn’t match it.
I’m saving the worst news for last. “Journalism is the first rough draft of history” is a quote attributed to Washington Post publisher Phil Graham. But the final draft requires historians. In an essay titled “This Is Actually the End of History,” the scholar Daniel Bessner documents the de-emphasis of history — and all the liberal arts — in American universities. Barely a quarter of 2017’s history Ph.D.s had tenure-track jobs four years later, Bessner claims, reflecting a dramatic reduction in tenured positions that has left 70% of America’s college teachers unprotected.
Undergraduates who hope to make a living avoid history, and the number of degrees earned by history majors fell by a third between 2012 and 2019. “It’s the end of history,” according to Bessner. “Entire areas of our shared history will never be known because no one will receive a living wage to uncover and study them.”
No Herodotus, no Gibbon, no Bill Leuchtenburg (teacher, friend, centenarian) to chronicle the 21st century? We all know who will step up to fill the vacuum. “Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.”
“When there are no historians to reflect meaningfully and accurately on the past, then ignorance and hatred are sure to triumph,” Bessner writes. And darkness falls. A different kind of darkness , a darkness those of us who have lived in brighter times can scarcely imagine. The darkness of abysmal ignorance. And along with it this relentless heat.
The distinguished literary scholar Louis Rubin Jr. once wrote an introduction to a book of my essays, over-generous but with one caveat, that some readers might find my pessimism depressing. No doubt he was right. But that was years ago, and I’m afraid the world has caught up to me. When there are no knights of the newsroom to slay the big dragons like Donald Trump and Alex Jones, when there are no historians to test their work and place it in context, night falls swiftly. And we can hear the hoofbeats of those ghastly Horsemen.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun's H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of "An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken" (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2023
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