Vanquishing the Devil

Harry T. Cook

1/23/09

In the 1939 movie version of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Cedric Hardwicke, playing Claude Frollo, archdeacon of the cathedral, looks upon Johannes Gutenberg’s recently invented printing press as “the instrument of the devil.”

The problem? The printing press, while unbearably slow by modern standards, could in the late 15th Century put people in the know as never before. Already it was a time of change and ferment for which the archdeacon was unready. More information? Heaven forefend! Frollo understood that information, like knowledge, was power. He would gladly have put Gutenberg on the rack, but settled for having the only printing press in Paris demolished and its cases of moveable type along with it. Frollo was not the end of the printing industry by any means. Despite his pre-Luddite discontents, history went on to be made as whole empires were built up and brought down by the dissemination of the printed word. The Protestant Reformation, the French and American Revolutions were each and all borne along on a tide of newsprint. In later times, the printing press brought down Richard Nixon and exposed the shenanigans of every “-Gate” thereafter.

Were he living today, Frollo might think he could rest easy as his much-hated adversary is about to go out of style as well as out of business. Scarcely a week passes without word of yet another newspaper teetering on the verge of bankruptcy or outright shutdown. The two surviving dailies in Detroit, which well into the 20th Century had five, are about 60 days away from becoming largely online publications with home delivery of an actual physical product offered on only three of seven days of the week. We are told that the newsprint version will be mostly advertising and therefore a pretty insubstantial thing. Frollo would not need to send the gendarmes to do in the press today. It has been done in by the thing Al Gore once took credit for inventing: the Internet — the very means by which you are now reading this essay. “Freedom of the press” means something different today than it did on December 15, 1791, when the First Amendment along with the other nine in the Bill of Rights was ratified. It used to mean that the press lord with his great clanking machines, buckets of hot lead and viscous ink could print what he damned well pleased and then dip into his considerable fortune to defend himself against charges of libel. Vested government institutions and ambitious politicians alike quaked before him. No doubt profit from printing newspapers was always a goal, but it was easier to realize before reporters, typesetters, printers and pressmen could command a living wage, before radio and television and the Internet sucked up advertising dollars and before the economy went south, pedal to the metal. CNN and YouTube, helped along by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, are now the chief purveyors of whatever each decides is or ought to be the news. Those of us who publish via the Internet enjoy and in some cases abuse the freedom of cost-free blogging. We have no editors other than ourselves. Most newspaper pundits compose with watchful editorial eyes peering over their shoulders, as did I during the years I wrote a weekly column for the Detroit Free Press. No more. If Frollo wished to exercise his dictatorial powers effectively in this age, he would have to fry every hard drive in the world, hack into every computer and let loose a killer virus on every network to combat the devil. He would go insane in the attempt, because it can’t be done.

Technology is far ahead of the Frollos of the 21st Century, if any there be. It is also ahead of the corporations who own newspapers. The mighty Goss and Hoe presses are, many of them, mortgaged to the hilt even as their obsolescence becomes more and more obvious. The New York Times is about to borrow $250 million from a Mexican billionaire to prop up its hallowed enterprise of getting out “all the news that’s fit to print.” The late Adolph Ochs, the founder and shaper of the modern Times, would be wondering how the hell his paper got itself in hock south of the border. Also the once-invincible Chicago Tribune is poised to go under.

On newsprint or online, this country needs a press that the establishment thinks is an instrument of the devil. The press by whatever means it gets out the word is an agency of freedom. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” saith John 8:32.

The word “truth” there is the Greek — alaythaya — meaning the reality lying at the base of an appearance or the disclosed essence of a matter. Freedom is only possible with a flow of that kind of truth: substantial, accurate information whether presented on newsprint or on the computer screen. Frollo was wrong. If there is a devil, his instrument would be a press-less society.

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 © Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.