Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Growing Necessity for Reporters)

“People can’t get outraged [at the political arena] without rapid access to solid, useful information—what we used to call journalism. There’s so much garbage being disguised as fact and so many gasbags posing as sages; somebody has to cut through the crap. That’s the job of reporters, and their job will be more important than at any time in history. There’s been this great lamentation about the end of newspapers as we know them, the end of the era of the paper hitting your doorstep in the morning, but I don’t think the language or the craft of writing is dying. In the next 40 years, there’s going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes.”—American crime novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, “Slipping Backward” (part of a “40 Things To Know” article cluster), interviewed by T. A. Frail, Smithsonian, July-August 2010

Fifteen years ago today, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending to corporations and other outside groups by ruling that any restrictions constituted a violation of freedom of speech.

In his Smithsonian Q&A, Hiaasen denounced the decision as “toxic to the whole democratic process,” and correctly predicted that “From now on, it’s basically going to be all the free speech that money can buy.”

Besides the communication skill that Hiaasen identified, more will be needed for the journalism of the present and future to affect the political process, however: the fearlessness of its practitioners and the open-mindedness of its readers. The portents for both these factors are deeply troubling right now.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twisted freedom of speech beyond recognition, it has permitted a lack of legal accountability for a President’s misdeeds and signaled, through Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan freedom of the press ruling might be up for reconsideration.

Even with an unfettered press, there’s no guarantee that, in the present digital environment dominated by what Hiaasen calls “gasbags posing as sages,” their revelations will be acted upon. 

“Confirmation bias”—the tendency to seek out and accept anything supporting our beliefs and ignoring anything contradicting them—has only solidified in the current polarized environment.

I’m not sure that I am any more hopeful than Hiaasen was 15 years ago. I only know that not to push back against these troubling trends constitutes preemptive, unconditional surrender that will haunt the democratic process now and into the foreseeable future. 

(For more information on the baleful effects of Citizen United—including the influx of secret “dark money” into elections—and what can be done to bring about campaign finance reform, I urge you to read Tim Lau’s December 2019 report for the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.)