All Points Between

Image Gallery 2009 © Chris Lyons / lindgrensmith.com

The image of Americans that is reflected back to us by our political and media process is false. . . . We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate—and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done, but the truth is we do.  

We work together to get things done every damn day. . . . We know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Promised Land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together. 

    —The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, October 30, 2010 

When I started Utne Reader in 1984, I trumpeted the alternative press as a hotbed of “passionate, quirky, and opinionated” journalism. The magazines and newsletters we covered and excerpted were produced by writers and editors who didn’t pretend to be objective, but were instead willing to honestly voice their biases up front and out loud.

The best of America’s independent media during that era resembled the day’s British newspapers, which were notoriously subjective not just on the opinion pages but also on the front page, where news broke and developed. Readers of the London Times or the Guardian or the Evening Standard knew which of their papers was liberal and which was conservative, which favored the Labour Party or the Tories. Those interested in all sides of the story (or a more objective take) developed strategies to mix, match, and filter the papers’ prejudices.

I loved this approach, and, as an editor and publisher, I championed a brand of advocacy journalism that encourages people to think for themselves. I also hoped the mainstream media would eventually emulate the model.

Be careful what you wish for.

Today, passionate, quirky, and opinionated are staples in our daily news diet: the “fair and balanced” reporting of Fox News, the morning news anchors on CNN, the nighttime crusaders of MSNBC, the blogs, and the original instigators up and down our radio dials. It’s everywhere. And I’m guessing that even the boldest of my peers in the alternative media would never have imagined that the primary source for news for most educated 18- to 34-year-old Americans would be a late-night, sit-down cable comedian. And that he would also be as wise as his more “serious” peers were misguided.

So how do we go forward—as Jon Stewart hopes we will—together? And what role can the press play in that effort? Surveying the landscape, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for the press to move beyond advocacy to what we might call “holistic” journalism.