The people you do not see

THE DOCTOR: How come I've never seen you people before?

OKWE: Because we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks.

— from Dirty Pretty Things,written by Steven Knight

To begin to answer the important question "What is a newspaper for?" we must also address a related, and also largely ignored, question: Who is a newspaper for?

In comments to the previous post, Dave suggests that the answer to the first question has already been answered: A newspaper exists to sell advertising space. That's, of course, a terribly cynical answer. It's also probably a dismayingly accurate one. And given such an answer to the first question, the answer to the second — Who is a newspaper for? — can only be this: For the target audiences that advertisers want to reach.

Exhibit A in support of this cynical thesis is the Pippin Weekly and all the other depressing tabloids targeting younger readers. The purported aim of most of these is to nurture the next generation of newspaper readers. That claim is difficult to swallow once you actually read the wretched things, which seem designed, instead, to prolong the adolescence of their readers and ensure that "35 is the new 15."

But I like to think — or at least I want to think — that this cynical answer, while accurate, is not the only answer. I like to think that part of the answer has to do with those idealistic reasons America's founders had in mind when they enshrined the freedom of the press in the First Amendment. I want to believe this because I think the founders were right in believing that a free and vibrant press is necessary for a healthy democracy.

And I want to believe this because, well, I work for a newspaper, and it doesn't pay enough for this to be just a paycheck job.

The paper I work for is owned by the largest chain in the country — a chain that others have referred to as "the WalMart of newspapers." One of the current buzzwords in our chain is "real news for real people" (which always makes me think of Sarah Purcell and Fred Willard). This might be a not-so-bad idea if there were any indication that the folks steering this effort had any idea who "real people" were. There isn't. This enterprise has the whiff of a bunch of very fortunate people who don't realize they're very fortunate people sitting around a table and brainstorming about the hoi polloi.

More about that later. For now, here's this from Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, from this interview in Ode magazine:

Poor people are not the authors of their poverty. Poverty is a creation of a complex system of conceptions, rules and attitudes we have thought up ourselves. Therefore, if you want to eradicate poverty you have to go back to the drawing board, discover where we have planted the seeds of poverty and make changes there.

This is how I figured out that our financial institutions have incorporated an enormously high threshhold — collateral — which means that poor people, who so desperately need credit to escape their poverty, never set foot in a bank. They'd be laughed at. We believe that poor people will never repay their loans. We consider it normal that banks — like other companies — must turn a profit and that they exclude some 70, 80 percent of the world population. Those assumptions are not up for discussion; this is simply the way it is. In reality, no one has ever tested those ideas. …

To solve the problem of poverty you have to start thinking differently. You have to treat poor people the way you want to be treated. You have to offer them the same facilities you have access to. Indeed, like everyone else they should be able to go to the bank for a loan because with a loan you can create your own work, you can support yourself and generate income. Credit is one of the barriers we must eliminate so that the poor can clamber out of poverty. But it is not enough.

For example, they must also have access to information technology because knowledge is power — and they haven't had power. For centuries, the supply of news has been dominated by journalists: an elite, in fact, that decided which information was appropriate to pass on and which was not. You always had to rely on journalists to find out what had happened in the country and the world.  But thanks to the Internet, a whole range of news sources has emerged that I can look to for information — from independent organizations to private Weblogs around the world. I can weigh opinions against one another. I can form my own opinion based on various sources. That's a tremendous liberation because it ultimately means you can't cheat poor people any longer. … Or at least you have to make more of an effort to cheat them.