Insider’s book bemoans changes in newspapers

Bill Knight column for 6-4, 5 or 6, 2020     

As the world watches media attacked by the President, police and supposed protestors during unrest about the killing of another African-American by another white cop, John Stiles’ new book “(30) – from Woodward and Bernstein to Donald Trump: A Career” offers a broadside backstory to today’s newspaper business.

Change, like justice, is difficult – shown in newspapers, which too often embrace change as “creative destruction.”

An insider’s indictment of an industry suffering from mismanagement and greed, Stiles’ 237-page paperback is the heartbreaking lament of a reporter spurned by the vocation he loved, an industry that in some ways betrays the country. Its angry insights are universal, commercial and personal.

Writing about himself, Stiles says, “He had gone from a career he once saw as not only promising but successful, to an old man trapped in both his accomplishments and sins, trying desperately to find something worth saving.”

The title comes from the keystrokes reporters typed to indicate stories’ ends, a tradition with explanations ranging from an obscure reference to the Peloponnesian War and telegraph shorthand to Linotypes and Associated Press quotas, and Stiles’ byline here is “P.J. Cratty,” a nod to a grandmother. (Besides the nom de plume, the book, available online, substitutes fictitious names for communities where he worked in Illinois, Iowa and elsewhere.)

His reflection on four decades as a newspaperman comes from an irascible, likeable curmudgeon: driven, impatient and at home with yesteryears’ yelling, clacking typewriters, and smoking that made newsrooms as noisy as factories and exciting as anything.

The grizzled Stiles (reminiscent of renowned actor/writer Leo Gordon) was an activist when we met in the 1960s, a time of debating war. The combat veteran of the Viet Nam War eventually reversed himself about war, and we found common ground, including journalism.

Journalism requires reporters “to gather, compile and write in a readable form the truth, or as close to that laudable goal as they could,” he writes. Although finding truth is painful, uncomfortable and hard, he adds, “it’s the only things that matters.”

Others have described the mission: “Give voice to the voiceless, and hold the powerful accountable,” “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,” and Wilbur Storey of the 1861 Chicago Times saying, “It’s a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.”

But along the way, speaking truth to power became a sham, a shameful descent to irrelevance, he says.

“Society’s watchdogs have been chained to the wall … in favor of an entirely new business model,” Stiles writes. Knowledgeable beat reporters were eliminated, and eviscerated staffs became dependent on press handouts. Newspapers have been “committing an excruciating act of Hari Kari.”

Stiles sees himself as “now or about to be the last of a dying breed. Newspapers weren’t run by newspaper people any longer; they were run by a bunch of … bean-counters. They didn’t [care] about people reading their paper, only pleasing those who paid the advertising bills or were connected.”

The industry degenerated into insignificance, pushing pablum, cheering the Chamber of Commerce, and treating conservative propaganda as news, he says, adding that if the Founders thought the press was merely another moneymaking venture, why’s it in the First Amendment?

Unfortunately, he continues, newspapers went from serving the public to filling space between ads. And after readership declined because papers stopped telling them what they needed, the Internet filled the vacuum with unchallenging content that mostly reinforces existing beliefs and “petty prejudices.”

“(30)” has special criticism for those complicit in its demise, publishers he dubs “idiots in suits,” slash-and-burn types eager for ever-more newspaper properties. In the past, Stiles says, publishers had working knowledge of newspapers. Now all they know is debt load and how to cut expenses, he says; some “wouldn’t know Royko from Ronco.”

Besides the enlightening, enjoyable diatribe from a professional point of view, Stiles weaves parts of his personal history into the narrative, touching and shocking memories from Viet Nam and marriages/divorces, to running, loving his family, and dealing with health issues.

Throughout, he offers a more impassioned viewpoint than Charles Madigan’s 2007 book “-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper,” adding experiences since 2016, with the election of Donald Trump, “a narcissistic, sanity-challenged and barely literate human being who, despite a history marked by vile word and deed, rode his hatred for the truth and those who seek it to the presidency of a people he neither respected nor understood.”

Again writing about himself, Stiles says, “He was watching the democracy that he had loved for so long and so fervently die.”

In Stile’s poem about what passes for patriotism today, readers can see parallels to changes in newspapers and its “ink-stained wretches.” He writes, “America the beautiful, home of all that’s brave, all we’ll ever ask back from you is everything we gave.”