Book Review | ‘Free The Press: The Death of American Journalism and How to Revive It’ by Brian J. Karem

In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman sounded a warning about media ownership and the danger to the public when it’s fed a steady diet of salacious, trivial, and factually dubious information. Postman wasn’t the first to warn that mass media was a double-edged blade. In the late 1950’s, Edward R. Murrow, one of the most famous journalists of his time, urged Americans to recognize that television was being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us from disturbing or unpleasant information. If Murrow were alive today to see the condition of the American press what would he make of it? We are well into a “post-truth” era where objective facts and information have little impact on public opinion. News and information that doesn’t conform to a person’s personal and political beliefs is regarded as suspect, fake news; government officials at the highest level peddle “alternative” facts; and an American president garners applause from his supporters when he refers to the press as “enemies of the people.” 

Brian J. Karem has spent his professional life in print and television journalism. He’s reported on everything from local policing to the War on Drugs; immigration and border policy; the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the Gulf War; and the White House, including the Trump years; as well as stints with Playboy and America’s Most Wanted. A reporter’s reporter, Karem learned his craft in the era of Helen Thomas, Dan Rather, and Sam Donaldson, when the mission of a free press was more commonly understood. Good reporters challenged the government, asked officials and politicians difficult questions, and avoided sacrificing journalistic rigor on the altar of access. Karem has witnessed the transformation of the news business from the inside, and his recent book, Free The Press, is both a history lesson and a prescription for healing what ails the press. 

In a free society, tension between politicians, business leaders, government officials, and the press is not only inherent, it’s necessary. Those in positions of power and the press should have a respectful but adversarial relationship, and when the powerful obscure, hide, or distort the truth we need journalists to hold them accountable. And because every politician and political party attempts to use the press to spread their positions on vital public issues, we need journalists to help us sort fact from opinion, spin, and outright falsehoods from truth. Alternately courting and castigating the press has been a staple of politicians of every ideological persuasion, but until relatively recently, some equilibrium seemed to exist between those in power and the press. Perhaps this has something to do with the decline of print journalism. Throughout the book Karem laments the loss of local print reporting, beat reporting, day-to-day nitty-gritty: city hall, police, courts, and schools.