"The Screening of America"

Here is a delightfully snobby editorial from The New Republic about the widely reported decline in American's reading habits, and the parallel decline of serious book reviews in some quarters of journalism. Excerpts:

In some quarters, the enemies of the printed book pretend that they are merely trying to save the book from the print--"the last bastion of analog," as Jeff Bezos ominously told a reporter from Newsweek (prepare the gallows!); to save reading by digitalizing it.

I think it's quite possible that digitizing books for reading on hand-held gadgets may do for the book what the downloadable MP3 has done for the LP. (That is, render it increasingly obsolete as as an artistic medium and as a viable commodity).

In other quarters--in our quarter, in American journalism--a new anxiety about profits has combined with an old philistinism to produce a kind of informal national purge of book reviewers and book reviewing.

[...]

No, the e-book is not the end of civilization. If readers kindle to the Kindle, splendid: Any reading is better than no reading. Nothing valuable was ever preserved solely on Luddite grounds. The screening of America will inevitably come to include our encounters with serious prose, or what is rather comically described in our culture of speed as "long form." (Meanwhile the Internet is re-educating the planet for a largely audio-visual life in short form, but that is another vexation.) And yet it is neither sentimentality nor snobbery to insist that what we mean by the experience of reading may be singularly indebted to the printed book, to its physicality and its temporality.

[...]

In recent years, in-house book reviewing has been eliminated, abridged, or downgraded by the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, The San Diego Union-Tribune--the list goes on. The same cannot be said about management's enthusiasm for, say, sports, or food. "Committing resources" is not least a philosophical exercise: A newspaper discloses its view of the world clearly by what it chooses to cover and not to cover, and with what degree of rigor and pride. When you deprive the coverage of books of adequate space and talent, you are declaring that books are not important, even if you and your wife belong to a book club and your Amazon account is a mile long.

[...]

[B]ook reviewing is not blogging, even if a lot of blogging is book reviewing. Not everybody who can boil an egg is a food critic and not everybody who can hit a softball is a sportswriter. There are, or there should be, intellectual qualifications for the task, because there are urgent things at stake--at least as long as the citizens of this country continue to agree that beliefs, and the methods by which they are formed, matter.

[...]

A newspaper--and a magazine: we ourselves have not been immune from these pressures--is a business, not a charity; and capitalists cannot be impugned for seeking profit. Yet there are properties that are not just properties, but also pillars of a culture and institutions of a society. To regard them simply as businesses is to misunderstand them. In the ownership of a newspaper, the hunger for gain must surely be diversified by a sensation of stewardship. There are many companies in America that are not implicated in the public values of American life, but media companies are not among them. That is the extra-economic burden that they bear, though in many cases they are plentifully compensated for these inconveniently lofty obligations. The responsible and lively and ambitious coverage of books may not be much of a revenue stream, but it is a formidable thought stream, and knowledge stream; and it should be an honor to preside over it. When a book review is done well, it transcends leisure. It inducts its reader into the enchanted circle of those who really live by their minds. It is a small but significant aid to genuine citizenship, to meaningful living.