An extract from the new book Journalists and Their Shadows begins below. The book’s publication date from Clarity Press is Oct. 1, but it is apparently “out now.” Click HERE or HERE for another extract from it published in July by Consortium News, titled “The U.S. press, spooks & the Church Committee.” For brief recommendations of the book, click HERE. — MCM

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Bad faith & blank checks

By Patrick Lawrence | Consortium News

Some years ago, as the decline of American media became evident even among those not in the profession, friends and acquaintances began to ask two questions. Do journalists believe what they report and write? Or do they know what they tell us is misleading or false but mislead or lie so as to keep their jobs?

I had no ready reply to these queries, but I welcomed them as measures of a healthy loss of faith, another “dis-illusioning.” They suggested a reading and viewing public that was more aware, more alert to the crisis in our media, as the public was when Henry Luce financed the Hutchins Commission. [The commission published A Free and Responsible Press in 1947.]

To attempt a reply to these inquiries now, in journalism today we have a remarkably prevalent case of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mauvaise foi. Bad faith, in terms I hope are not too simplified, comes down to pretending to be someone or something other than oneself. It means surrendering authenticity, that essential value in Sartre’s thinking. In bad faith one enacts a role to meet the expectations of others as one imagines them to be. Sartre’s famous example is the café waiter whose every movement — “a little too precise, a little too rapid” — is an artificial display of what he thinks patrons expect a café waiter to be. In philosophic terms, it is a question of “being-for-others” as against “being-for-itself.”

A former journalist made the point very simply in the comment thread appended to one of my columns. “I was like most of the journalists I knew over the decades I spent off-and-on in the business. I was a faker.”

This is the American journalist as he or she has come to be, a journalist-for-others. The less he genuinely serves as a journalist — a journalist-for-itself — the more he must hold to the accepted image of the journalist. He is “the man without a shadow,” as Carl Jung put it in another context. Having become another of society’s “de-individualized persons” — Jung again — the journalist role-plays now, in psychotherapeutic terms. Newspapers, in the same way, are at bottom reënactments of newspapers.

To inquiring friends, I now say journalists are not liars, not precisely. “A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of,” Sartre wrote in Being and Nothingness, “he does not lie when he spreads an error of which he is a dupe.” It is our perfect term for the unmoored journalist of our time. We come again to the turning of Descartes upside down. “I think, therefore I am” becomes “I am, therefore I think.” This is what I mean: I am a Washington Post reporter, and these, therefore, are my thoughts and this my understanding of the world I report upon.

Self-deception of the kind I describe . . . READ MORE . . .