Chris Hedges on 'the loss of civic responsibility'

Truthdig's columnist writes:

The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal an inevitable and salutary change. It is not a form of progress. The decline of newspapers is about the rise of the corporate state, the loss of civic and public responsibility on the part of much of our entrepreneurial class and the intellectual poverty of our post-literate world, a world where information is conveyed primarily through rapidly moving images rather than print....

All these forces have combined to strangle newspapers. And the blood on the floor, this year alone, is disheartening.

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...Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are being ruthlessly cannibalized by corporate trolls like Sam Zell, turned into empty husks that focus increasingly on boutique journalism. Corporations are not in the business of news. They hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions.

Hedges was the longtime Middle East reporter for the New York Times. He's now a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.

Via Romenesko