PressEthic

Somewhere between the story about the duck and the fake "color" lead about the old Texan woman and JFK's body, Alex Beam's new Atlantic Monthly article ("The Greatest Stories Never Told") starts to read like a swan song to a passing literary genre: the smart satire. While there are indeed questions raised in the article regarding self-censorship in the media (should the Wall Street Journal worry that much about running two articles that deal with the sex-industry?), the parting thoughts of the article strike a chord with those among us that yearn for the days of old-media.

Beam, after discussing the news parodies and killed stories that circulated through newsrooms, writes: " Forget writing for "the desk drawer." Forget mailing copies of your unpublishable work around to your friends. To paraphrase Yogi Berra ("Nobody goes there; it's too crowded"), so many people are doing it, it's hardly worth doing at all."

It very well may be true. Blogs, those flapping doggy-doors into publishing, may have killed smart satire. And with the demise of satire, the ability to "speak truth to power," (but without being all preachy about it) slinks away. The power of journalism like Swift's "Modest Proposal" is that is reasoned, edited and crafted – and not a seat of his pants retort to the slant of the nightly news.

In place of smart, we now have snark. In place of reason, we now have reaction.

It is hard to make an argument for smart satire based on articles that were never published, I concede. But perhaps something is lost when publishing comes too easily. After all, the Onion, today's best-known satire publication, still adheres to old-fashioned notions such as publishing on a specific day of the week.

While blogs do allow for quick publishing, maybe quick publishing isn't something that we need. It's good to look behind the curtain, but sometimes all that's staring back is emptiness.