A recent opinion piece by Bill Schubart bugged me when I first heard it, but I wasn’t going to write about it until it kept reappearing in the Vermont media. First as a commentary on VPR, then on Vermont Digger, and finally in the Times Argus and Rutland Herald. The omnipresence of this thing — and why do we have to keep hearing and reading the same handful of commentators over and over and over again? — finally induced me to address its shortcomings.

There’s a certain stock type of opinion piece which we could call The Bemoan. It’s kind of like The Get Off My Lawn, a harkening back to an earlier, idealized day, except with less anger and more sadness.

The latest Bemoan to appear in Vermont media — repeatedly, ad nauseam — is a piece by Bill Schubart called “News and Opinion,” deploring the sorry state of American journalism.  

(Or, as it is entitled on the Rutland Herald’s website: “Media Literach: News or Opinion?”

Yes, “literach.” Sounds like they could use a bit of remedial literacy in the Herald newsroom.)

There are significant problems with American journalism and serious questions about its future, but Schubart manages to miss the target quite badly.

Before I get to the fact that there was never, ever a Golden Age of Journalism, I must mention the single worst sentence in the piece.  

But now, the likes of Walter Cronkite and A.J. Liebling have been replaced by Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher, all bringing us opinion and entertainment that we hear as news.

Okay, hold it right there. “Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher”? A professional opinionator, a left-leaning news anchor, and a topical comedian? All three are equally to blame for the debasement of our national discourse? It’s like taking three very comparable figures from the mythical past — Father Coughlin, I.F. Stone, and Lenny Bruce — and finding them guilty of the exact same sins. Ridiculous. And insulting to the professional ethics of Ms. Maddow.

After the jump: A.J. Liebling, the Maddow of his day.

Second, he’s completely off-base to hold up A.J. Liebling as an exemplar of unbiased journalism. I love Liebling’s writing, and I strongly recommend a book called “The Press,” which gathers his commentary on newspapers in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Liebling was a brilliant observer of the press (and many other things) — but he was not at all objective. He was an advocacy journalist with a strong left-wing viewpoint. Exactly like Rachel Maddow, as a matter of fact.

Third, to cite Liebling as a shining beacon of a lost great era is to absolutely ignore what the man himself wrote about the press of his day. He saw the press as deeply, profoundly dysfunctional in a way that imperiled the functioning of democracy.

Gee, exactly what Bill Schubart is deploring today. Here’s a quote from “The Press”:

As an observer from outside I take a grave view of the plight of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy. It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum, while armament, a secondary instrument of liberty, is a Government concern. A man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.

And there’s the truth about the sad state of American journalism: it has always, from the very beginning, been a deeply flawed and often dysfunctional thing. It has frequently been as much a hindrance as a help to the health of our democracy. And its shining moments have often resulted from principled journalists battling against the system, finding ways to break through the commercially-driven noise of our media.

We have always had our Edward R. Murrows, seizing opportunities — temporarily, before commercialism drove him into exile — to speak truth to power. We have had our Walter Cronkites, doing their best within the constraints of a system or using their own popularity to present uncomfortable truths. We have had I.F. Stones, blazing their own trail and managing to make a difference outside the system.

We have also, sadly, always had our Rush Limbaughs, our Father Coughlins, our red-baiting Westbrook Peglers, our Walter Winchells serving up celebrity gossip marinated in rabid anti-Communist fervor. We had WIlliam Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer — yes, the one the Prize is named for — whipping up war fever and bullying the United States into the Spanish-American War by publishing blatantly fabricated propaganda. (Funny, there’s no Pulitzer for effective propaganda. There really ought to be, don’t you think?)

Fundamentally, we have always had a system of journalism that, as Liebling pointed out, is beholden first and foremost to commercial interests. It is not a matter of opportunistic individuals exploiting the system; it is a matter of the system seeking out and promoting such individuals for the sake of profit.  

Most of Schubart’s commentary is about a high-school encounter with the fury of William Loeb, longtime publisher of the Union Leader in Manchester, NH. Loeb was a rabid right-winger, always hunting down Commies and railing against taxation. When Schubart was a high school senior, Loeb conducted a vicious smear campaign against Schubart’s school and one of its teachers.

That was in 1962, during the presumed Golden Age of Cronkite and Liebling, and before the dastardly Rachel Maddow and her fellow-travelers Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher began their systematic debasement of American journalism.

Yes, there were heroes and scoundrels alike back then, just as there are now and have always been.Journalism today faces serious existential issues — but it always has. True journalism will always be an endangered species in a society driven by the profit motive, because real journalism has nothing to do with profit.

One more Schubart shibboleth.

Information needs to be vetted by skilled editors and fact-checkers to ensure that it is accurate, unbiased and verifiable.

…responsible reporting on any topic must be derivative of fact, not opinion. Conservatives claim the NY Times is liberal and liberals claim that the Wall Street Journal is conservative, yet both still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.

“Skilled editors” do much to ensure a kind of quality control. They also tend to homogenize the news. They rarely question basic assumptions. The herd mentality usually prevails. (Just look at the sad, predictable performance of the Beltway punditry for a good example. Or, if you like, the repeated reliance of the Vermont media on the same old handful of commentators and analysts.) And pardon me, but I am not at all encouraged by the dreary phrase “still invest to some degree in ensuring that news is more or less news.”

To some degree? More or less? There’s a clarion call to inspire the soul and warm the blood.

You know, I think I’d rather watch Rachel Maddow.