Attacks on press ‘designed to upend truth’
The golden age of print media is the topic of journalist Declan Lynch’s new memoir, Roll Away the Stone: When Journalism Was the Best Job in the World.
Published by Red Stripe Press and on sale now, the book’s launch at Hodges Figgis in Dublin (24 September) heard that the diminution of the power and reach of newspapers coincided with existential threats facing modern civilisation.
“The end of the heyday for newspapers was the start of the downfall for democracy as we know it,” publisher Michael Brennan commented last evening.
The book was launched by acclaimed author and comedy writer Paul Howard (small picture) who praised Lynch’s work as a “love letter to something that has been part of a lot of our lives.”
Reading a newspaper was the most important thing many people did in their day, Howard said.
Recalling an era of an era of smoke-filled newsrooms and buccaneering, fly-by-seat-of-the-pants news production, Paul Howard mused that such times actually produced opinion-forming, iconoclastic newspapers.
Serious warning
However, both writers emphasised the serious warning at the core of the book.
“We live in an age where journalism is under unrelenting pressure from the ‘bro-ligarchs’ in Silicon Valley and a US president who brands journalists as enemies of the state,” he said.
“Declan makes the point better than anyone I've read that when Donald Trump first came to power, he made it the first order of business to destroy journalism.
“If you're going to undermine the world's view of objective reality, that's what you have to do,” he said.
“He didn’t go after the satirical novelists, and he didn’t go after the stand-up comedians,” he pointed out.
“Journalism was, is, and will continue to be, if not the best job in the world, then certainly the most important,” Howard said.
Declan Lynch, whose career stretches from the early days of Hot Press to his current long-standing Sunday Independent column, reflected on an industry arc that went from pasting print corrections with cow gum and scalpels to fighting coordinated political attacks.
“Anything that is any good in this world is in constant danger, and our own industry has been a really huge example of that,” Lynch said, pointing to tech billionaires who “are determined to take everything from us that is of any value.”
Objective reality
Attacks on the press are designed to upend truth itself, and the concept of objective reality, he concluded.
Originally conceived as a light-hearted collection of the newsroom misadventures of colourful and eccentric characters, Declan Lynch said that the book ultimately evolved to match the gravity of the current moment.
- Roll Away the Stone: When Journalism Was the Best Job in the World by Declan Lynch, is on sale now.