Dear Editor
Dear Editor Press Problems I don't think Robert Lekachman really located the root of the problem in his review of John Ho-henberg*s A Crisis for the American Press ("Missing the News," NL, January...
...Whether or not newspapers resume "serious analysis, independent editorial judgment and readiness to annoy the advertisers" will not affect their chances of survival one way or the other...
...A good, hard look at where we are is worth infinitely more than Coles' pretentiously heroic paean to the quotidian...
...And yet...
...Dear Editor Press Problems I don't think Robert Lekachman really located the root of the problem in his review of John Ho-henberg*s A Crisis for the American Press ("Missing the News," NL, January 29...
...And yet, even those who make the inquiries, who come up with the predictions, have to make do, at the very least—and, maybe, find for themselves, in spite of their own words, a sense of purpose and conviction, a smile that is not always wan, a response that is not insistently begrudging or contemptuous...
...It is, rather, as historian Robert Boyers has written, "a time of shallow optimism, when the radical critique of social institutions has largely yielded once again to discussions of management, technique and short-term diplomacy...
...Detroit Dick Scanlon Shallow Optimists In her discussion of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Robert Coles' Walker Percy ("Writers and Writing," NL, February 26), Daphne Merkin approvingly quotes a remark by Coles: "We are rather accustomed these days to dire if not apocalyptic critiques—prophecies that leave little room for anyone to find much leeway, never mind hope...
...Houston Andrew McGill Correction Due to a mechanical scramble caused by our computer typesetter, a sentence in Yuval Elizur's article, "How Critical is the Oil Crisis...
...To me, it sums up precisely what makes Coles so unappealing...
...The machine apologizes...
...If the men who wrote our Constitution had been able to foresee such a development, certainly they would have limited "freedom of the press...
...NL, February 26), that should have gone at the end of paragraph four on page 4 alighted instead on the tail of paragraph three...
...But the pessimists claimed that the relief was temporary, that consumption would once more outstrip supply and opec would reassert its stranglehold...
...Coles is the very embodiment of this smug optimism, talking about communion when what he should be doing is criticizing?like Lasch—a society that is making communion impossible...
...The correct version should read as follows: "There was every reason to believe the glut team's prediction—that the supply would continue to overtake demand as economic growth slowed—was accurate...
...But of course, they couldn't: What they understood by "newspapers" were little halfpenny political tracts...
...This apparently sums up both what Merkin likes about Coles ("Compassion and Understanding") and what she reviles in Lasch ("he denounces with an almost unseemly vigor, relishing his doomsday role a bit too much...
...For the media are being attacked today not because they are greedy or empty-headed, but because they have become an increasingly centralized, corporate power—one that can often make or break policy by how they choose to present facts, not to mention what facts they choose to present...
...This is not, as both he and Merkin seem to believe, a time of apocalyptic critiques...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
