By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
It’s always a bad idea for government to decide what journalists should cover, but that has little to do with the Federal Writers Project. In its original incarnation, the FWP was mostly about documentation. From state travel guides to slave narratives, the FWP was at its best recording local knowledge for posterity. The government has continued to make such grants – through the NEH, for example – without seriously endangering our democracy.
The real flaw in Pinsky’s proposal is that it has nothing to do with the present crisis.
When the FWP was created in 1935, unemployment stood above 20%. Writers and editors who had lost their jobs had little chance of gaining alternative employment; using them as manual laborers in other federal programs would have egregiously wasted their skills and training. The FWP was intended to tide them over until the economy recovered, and, as Pinsky himself points out, many participants went on to achieve notable success in the postwar years.
The present economic crisis, however, shows every sign of simply deepening a secular trend. There’s no reason to believe that jobs being lost in journalism are ever coming back. Moreover, in an information-centric economy, former journalists possess skills that can be deployed in other sectors. I don’t want to downplay the pain of that dislocation, or its destructive consequences to the health of our democracy. But putting displaced journalists on to the federal payroll simply postpones the necessary readjustment.
The Dish 