>I was delighted in opening the latest issue of MR today to see that it
>featured a lead article on Upton Sinclair's greatest work, _The Brass
>Check_. For many years, in answer to people who complained about the
>"consolidation" of the press in the last decades I have urged them to
>read this work. The Press is not a whit worse today than it was a
>hundred years ago. Then as now it serves its owners -- the capitalist
>class. Complaints about the current media which look back to the
>supposedly brigher days of a more independent press 25 or 50 or 100
>years ago are, implicitly, apologies for capitalism: their implication
>is that the press would be just fine if independent capitalists instead
>of corporations ran it.
Yeah, but... People often posit Golden Ages that were a generation or two back - Williams has a whole chapter in The Country & The City on that theme in English poetry. I think he traces it back to Piers Plowman. But aside from that, the reality-based material on which this fantasy is based is the Watergate time, when Woodward & Bernstein were allegedly stalking a president. But the elite wanted Nixon out, so it wasn't very counterhegemonic to go against him (Kevin Phillips argued in Post-Conservative America that the U.S. was in a pre-revolutionary situation in the early 1970s, and Nixon had to go for the stability of the regime.) And soon after it was all over, Katharine Graham said essentially "Never again."
Doug