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THE Q&A: LEWIS H. LAPHAM, MEDIA MAVEN, HISTORIAN

Few people in America today have as much experience in media as Lewis Lapham. From his start as a self-described “copy boy” at the San Francisco Chronicle on a summer break from Yale University, Lapham worked his way to the editor’s easy chair at Harper’s Magazine, a seat he held for nearly three decades. Since becoming editor emeritus in 2006 Lapham has, through his “The World in Time” radio show and  Lapham’s Quarterly magazine, revisited his passion for history, which had originally led him to undertake a doctorate in the subject at the University of Cambridge.

At a lecture on June 2nd at the National Arts Club in New York, Lapham fused his background in publishing and knowledge of history to deliver a compelling look “at the ever-changing role of the media”. Here he elaborates on the future of news, partisanship in the press and the art of blogging.

More Intelligent Life:  Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, you said “The media is hand in hand with the government.” That paper currently stands on the verge of bankruptcy.  Would you like to see the government formalise its embrace of the media and offer subsidies to newspapers?

Lewis H. Lapham:  No. We’ve never in this country had a really oppositional press.  We did have at the turn of the 19th century when you had a very strong political division. There the newspapers were operated by political factions—there was the Whig paper, there was the Federalist paper, there was the Republican paper and they were strong in their opinions and very raucous in the insults that they would heap on the opposition. There were still those kinds of papers to some extent after the Civil War, but by the time we get up to the 20th century the big papers tend to be on the side of the status quo—whatever the status quo is—because they’re dependent on advertising. The newspaper comes up in the morning and all the advertising space is already blocked out and you fit the news columns around the advertisements.

MIL:  Do you think the foundation model employed by Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones and a handful of other niche magazines can work on a larger scale? Can it be expanded into the ailing newspaper industry?

LHL:  I don’t think it can. The political implication is that it will be hard to maintain the notion of a classical democracy. I don’t know where we’ll get our common ground. There are people that only listen to  Rush Limbaugh, there are people that read the Nation. I had a history teacher once at Yale who told me that the important thing about history is not what happened but what people believe happened. I talked to Arthur Schlesinger about that once and said that if you try to write history based on what was being reported in the papers at the time, you would be seriously misled. As a newspaper reporter at the [New York] Herald Tribune, I would go to a press conference, the mayor would give a statement and we all knew that the mayor was lying. If he was good at his job he would manage to deflect any questions. You were forced to write what the mayor said yesterday. That was the story. Whether or not what the mayor said was true… wasn’t your problem.

MIL:  I think back to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” As someone who’s worked in a newsroom, do you see the implosion of the newspaper industry as a problem?

LHL:  Jefferson was talking about a world in which there weren’t wire services, there weren’t blogs—newspapers were the only game in town. And the audiences that he’s talking about for these newspapers were small. Now, the New York Times says it has a daily circulation of a million. How many of those million are the informed citizens that you and I like to have in mind? My guess is maybe 25%. The rest of the people are glancing at the paper for the ball score or the stock report or the fashion trend or the gossip item or whatever—you don’t know. And that’s one of the problems the newspaper has because it doesn’t know what content its selling to whom because the audience is so piebald.

MIL:  The transformation of the press in the first quarter of the 19th century that you alluded to seems to resemble the growing divisions within the media today. Could one infer from this recurring trend that the thriving existence of the broadsheet newspaper was an historical anomaly? Are we bound to return to, as you put it in your speech, “information for the rich and magic for the poor?”

LHL:  Yeah, I think that’s going to happen and that bothers me because that is damaging to my hope of representative self-government. I’m not sure how much of a democratic government we’ve got now. I mean, the first job of any politician in America is to raise money. I was reading again a book by Matthew Josephson called “The Politicos”, which is the way American politics worked in the 1860s through the 1880s and there it all is. When you’re talking about Cleveland, Harrison, Tilden or McKinley, you’re talking about the same kind of system. I have this maybe romantic and idealised notion of our democracy. I don’t find a lot of evidence of it in my reading around of American history.

MIL:  Let’s talk about your place in the partisan divide. Your profile says you’ve written for a few conservative publications. How have you gone from contributor to combatant?

LHL:  All those pieces I wrote in the ‘70s and they were only one in each case. I still believed when I became editor of Harper’s Magazine in 1976 that there was something called the “marketplace of ideas.” In my early days as editor, I was capable of publishing a piece by Michael Harrington—who was well to the left—and in the same issue I remember publishing a piece by Irving Kristol.  And I did enough of that so that Alex Cockburn in the Village Voice gave me the runner up for the Attila The Hun Award in 1979. By 1985, the divide was very sharp. I can remember trying to get a forum together. I had a couple of leftist people in the line-up and then I called up Bill Buckley and [Norman] Podhoretz and Kristol they refused to show up on the same stage with people whom they denounced as either liberal fools or communists or whatever the hell it was. Nobody was prepared to concede the other person’s point or change their mind because you became hard to sell as a commodity. So where’s the democratic give and take there?

MIL:  Some might say it’s moved to the blogosphere, although in your speech you seemed to disagree: “The technologies divide the American citizenry into constituencies of one and encourage the broad retreat into the pools of Narcissus where the summer nights are loud with the croaking of blogs.” And yet, the New York Observer reported that you plan to start your own blog.  What sort of croaking do you plan to do and why the apparent change of heart?
 
LHL:  I’m going to try and turn it into an art form. I think it can be done along the lines of a Japanese haiku. The internet lends itself to compression, to short form. There’s a wonderful new book by Eduardo Galeano called "Mirrors". I could teach myself how to write an entry along the lines of the kinds you see in the book—stories that have an aperçus. He can sometimes within the space of 600 words tell a small and illuminating story. I was maybe too hasty in my dismissal of the blog, in general. I do see it as a form that can be developed. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out in "Understanding Media", when moveable type came in at the end of the 15th century there are all kinds of dismissive remarks and outrage and scorn and ridicule from the literary class—suddenly you’ve got printing presses grinding out screeds in the vernacular. But it takes a hundred years before you get to Montaigne, Cervantes and Shakespeare.

~ CORBIN HIAR

Picture Credit: David Masters (via Flickr)