Why Forbes, Capitalism, and Journalism Still Matter

At times, Stewart Pinkerton’s The Fall of the House of Forbes reads like a modern parable. As the third generation inherits a mighty dynasty, founding principles become dilute, and some sons love the family principles while others love the family money. At other times, Pinkerton’s tell-all resembles the “kiss of death” journalism that draws the very lurid audiences the author decries. It’s up to the committed reader to separate one from the other.

Scottish expat Bertie Charles “BC” Forbes founded his eponymous magazine in 1917 as a mix of stock tip sheet and fawning profile rag. BC’s son Malcolm made it a showcase for America’s glittering postwar aspirations, and Forbes set the tone of economic debate for a decade after Malcolm’s death. But in the new century, Forbes has foundered, becoming an in-joke and pale shadow of itself. It exists now as yet another tawdry blog platform and “content farm.”

Pinkerton, who clawed his way to managing editor, produced his book mere months after Forbes unceremoniously “retired” him in 2009. This explains the bitter edge to Pinkerton’s voice. But that edge gives his narrative a punch that rises above mass-manufactured crisis memoirs to make this book really work, when it does. Though he applies journalistic acumen, he also tells the story he lived.

BC Forbes left his media empire to his sons, but only Malcolm had balls enough to leverage his influence and seize control. The Forbes name rose alongside its flamboyant owner-editor. But none of Malcolm’s four sons captains the ship, though Steve inherited a controlling share. Pinkerton compares the resulting split vision among relatives to “having to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner every day.”

Pinkerton identifies only two specific missteps: Steve Forbes’ two tragicomic Presidential bids, and the failure to integrate Forbes.com with the print Forbes. Rather than one Sophoclean downfall, Pinkerton describes a pattern of mismanagement. Good writers and editors got squeezed, the heyday vigor fell prey to timidity, and the Forbes brothers’ compromises proved worse than the problems they solved.

Malcolm Forbes

My problem arises not with Pinkerton’s facts, which are robust, but with his storytelling. Pinkerton narrates the decline from 1990 to 2010 with no sense of the rise. BC and Malcolm Forbes are mere ciphers. BC alienated his wife through high-handed dicta that exiled most of his sons. Malcolm was personally, politically, and sexually ambiguous.

Both drove their company with their larger-than life personalities. And that’s all she wrote. Pinkerton spins transgressive anecdotes about Malcolm, whom he admits he never met, but never explains how that personality translated into media success. Rather than savvy, Malcolm appears merely squicky. Forbes, for Pinkerton, simply exists to decline.

Pinkerton introduces a cast of thousands with little regard for clarity. Keep notes on the endpaper. He has trouble keeping all the names in play. Lewis D’Vorkin, the villain of Pinkerton’s final chapters, disappears from the narrative for 140 pages, then again for another thirty. With such long gaps, Pinkerton has to introduce characters multiple times. Eventually, he should ask if every personality really advances the story.

Considering that Pinkerton blames Forbes’ decline partly on diminished editing and fact checking, he could use some of both. For instance, if the magazine hit its revenue peak in 2001, after Steve’s costly campaigns, after the worst of the print/digital feud, and over a decade after Malcolm’s 1990 death, I need an explanation of the gap into decline. An editor like Jim Michaels, whom Pinkerton lionizes, would catch that.

Likewise, his grammar, usually solid, occasionally turns haphazard. A few hours with a copy checker could save Pinkerton from some embarrassing moments. For instance, Pinkerton admits cribbing one-liners from David Letterman, billed in the bibliography as “David Le Herman.” Such a crude mistake suggests Pinkerton’s iPad can’t read his handwriting.

Reading what I’ve written, it sounds like I dislike this book. Not so. Pinkerton spins an interesting, if rocky, yarn about the pitfalls of capitalistic journalism. He shows why media enterprises need a solid defining vision unifying diverse parts. In an era of digital decentralization, he persuades me that journalism remains important: “Most people need an expert to filter, prioritize, and context [sic] information. A firehose of information without that is useless.”

But Pinkerton doesn’t connect the dots. He does what he accuses Forbes of descending into, if on a more professional scale. He cries out for someone to ask the question behind the question. Because if nobody does, Forbes will not be the last journalistic titan to crumble under its own weight.

Working Class Values, Part Three

PART ONE: SHARING, BELLYACHING, AND SLOGANEERING
PART TWO: READING

5. RELIGIOSITY. Working class people wear religious affiliation on their sleeves—even though they never, ever talk religion publicly. Having worked at two factories, I have never heard one worker discuss God aloud, and the only book in my hands I’ve ever seen my colleagues look squeamish at was by Billy Graham. They “do” religion, but never discuss it.

Instead, closely related to sloganeering, the working class literally wear their religious affiliations. T-shirt slogans make the most common forms of public witness. One folksy colleague favors an image of a cowboy and horse drinking from a stream, captioned “Rivers of living water will flow from within them. John 7:38.” Another wears an image of Jesus as a video game character, captioned “John 3:16—Hii Saved Me.”

Mixing and matching pop culture images lets workers convey both faith and personality. Those wanting to look hip mash-up rock band logos or brand trademarks. Others go for more nostalgic references, like the cowboy or a Thomas Kinkade painting. Though the faith expressed is uniformly Christian, religiosity, like sloganeering, separates in-group members from outsiders.

Note that religiosity does not translate into church attendance. Many in the working class feel uncomfortable in ordinary church services. This is amplified for second and third shift workers. Scanning a recent newsletter from my own church, besides services, a midday stay-at-home moms’ book group, and a sunrise bible study, all church activities occur in evenings and weekends—what church leadership, overwhelmingly middle class, mistakenly consider “after work.”

Church is just one more area where the working class are constantly reminded they don’t belong.

6. EGALITARIANISM. The working class is a collage of people who have limited means, limited opportunity, hard luck, or diminished expectations. What they all have in common is that they’re in this mess together. Unlike the middle classes, who divide themselves up (remember what I said about cubicles), the working class stay in close proximity for a prolonged time.

Breaktime exemplifies this. Everyone flocks to one of two places: either the indoor breakroom or the outdoor smoking shelter. No matter where one goes, conversation is the norm. Everyone, even new hires, is addressed as a friend and equal. And anyone who, like me, chooses neither location (I don’t smoke and dislike the breakroom’s continuous Fox News) endures the isolation of not being spoken to.

Some of this attitude is enforced by management. We’re assigned name badges, highlighting our first names in large letters, but our last names in vanishingly tiny type. This results in an unearned level of informality and enforced cheerfulness, but it also means everyone, from bosses to line managers to the lowliest new hires, speaks to one another on the same level.

This equality can be abused. Because everyone helps everyone else, some newbies rush in to lend a hand where it’s unneeded, even unwanted, and wind up underfoot. Those who last learn when to ease up on the open-handedness. Just because everyone is equal doesn’t mean everyone wants a piece of everyone else. We have sharing for that (q.v.).

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Obery Hendricks defines hegemony as “the process by which the lines between the interests of an oppressed group and those of the class that dominates it become blurred by the systematic efforts of the oppressor to obscure or hide them.” By that standards, the well-heeled have gone to great lengths to force hegemony on the working class.

This doesn’t mean just the wealthy, who yoke top-tier tax breaks and international free trade to conventional morality. The middle class often deride the poor for their untidy homes, unkempt lawns, and disinterest in suburban convention. Carl Paladino, 2010 New York gubernatorial candidate, openly claimed that the poor remained poor, not because of systemic disadvantage or diminished opportunity, but because they lacked basic hygiene.

But consider it from the other angle. If some privileged class barged into your community, insisting that you could aspire to their level of prestige if you simply adapted your habits to mimic them, how would you react? We know it’s absurd. We would not all become Manhattan financial managers if we built more steel skyscrapers. We would resist such a colonial imposition by doubling down on our current mode of life.

Which is exactly what working class values permit. The group identity provided by these values, and others I still have yet to discover and explore, let America’s poor and struggling define their own identities, rather than having someone else’s identity imposed upon them. And I, for one, can’t blame them.

Working Class Values, Part Two

PART ONE: SHARING, BELLYACHING, AND SLOGANEERING

4. READING. In graduate school, one of my writing professors discused the large subset of the publishing industry dedicated to books for “people who don’t read very much.” She characterized romances, thrillers, and the kind of novels sold at drugstores as “books people can fall asleep under.” Though my professor surely meant no malice in describing unchallenging books, her description is not just wrong, it’s potentially harmful.

Of the many myths and caricatures that stick to the working class, none does more harm than the idea that they don’t read. Nothing could be further from the truth; many read committedly. Some read far more than the economic elites who would put them down. But they don’t read what literary scholars say they should read. And they don’t define their lives around which books they consider most worth their time.

English professors claim that “good” books challenge, unsettle, and expand their readers. “Mere” pop literature earns their disdain because it holds no such promise for its audience. Such professors openly mock the authors who sell the most books to the largest audiences, like Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Danielle Steele, and James Patterson. These assembly line authors crank out books to quickly and often to count as “real” literature.

If speed and repetition disqualify authors from the heights of Parnassus, then the converse should also be true, and Johnathan Franzen, who requires ten years to polish and publish just one book, would be the greatest living American author. Some literary critics seem eager to crown him as such. Yet many of my factory peers have no idea who Franzen is, and when told, look unimpressed at the paces he puts himself through.

Working class readers want to be entertained, uplifted, made to laugh, cry, scream. They do not want to feel confused by language, situations, and manners alien to their experience. Thus many books which scholars tell us we should read, whether acknowledged classics or cutting edge new releases, simply zoom by working class readers. Many blue collar workers can finesse a novel in one night, but get told it doesn’t really count.

This essentially colonial attitude toward working class reading habits results in marked anti-intellectualism. If brainy types devalue blue collar reading, then blue collar readers can’t be bothered with intellectualism. During my factory orientation, the HR representative indicated one suite of offices to which we had no admittance. A woman behind me sneered: “That’s where the people with college degrees work.”

I chose not to reply that I, too, have a college degree. It’s just as well I didn’t, since I now know about a quarter of my factory colleagues have at least one degree, and some, like me, have graduate degrees. Yet this disdain for intellectuals is not about me, or any individual, as people. Rather, many workers see intellectuals, rightly or wrongly, as the ones holding back their economic potential.

This results in reading as a compartmentalized activity for many in the working class. They read at home, and they work at work. Looking around the breakroom, you would not see so much as a magazine or newspaper. Breaktime is for talking, which is where real information transactions occur. I’ve seen peers completing crossword puzzles in their cars, but they leave the paper behind when they enter the factory.

Blue collar orality is famous among those who study such things. When trying new tasks, somebody like me might naturally reach for a book; but workers prefer to teach skills through oral explanation and mimicry. This apprenticeship arrangement, which may last minutes for simple tasks, or years for a body of knowledge, fills the role scholars and white collar professionals associate with school and book learning.

That said, nobody bothers me about bringing books to read on my own breaktime. Recently, two peers saw me reading the prerelease edition of a mystery due out later this month. Both became very excited, asking me questions and talking about books they’ve enjoyed recently. In other words, though they wouldn’t read on the job themselves, they were able to have a group bonding moment around my reading.

One last note on working class reading. I have never seen my factory peers with a Kindle or other reading device. Though I’ve seen at least two workers with tablet computers, they use these to store and play music or movies. My peers cannot be bothered to pay good money for a gee-whiz gadget to do what the public library lets them do for free.

PART THREE: RELIGIOSITY AND EGALITARIANISM

Working Class Values, Part One

Anyone who deals with economics, ethics, or related fields hears the term “middle class values” spoken so often that it drops into our conversation almost casually. But, like the proverb about explaining water to a fish, many of us from middle class backgrounds, or with aspirations to better ourselves, don’t really know what this means. Even working class people who climb the social ladder quickly forget the difference between their station and their origin.

But, as Obery Hendricks observes, “individual and collective responses to actions, events, and pronouncements can be conditioned by and can also vary by class, culture, and certainly by social location.” As circumstances have forced me to temporarily move down the ladder, I’ve learned much about the working class roots I’d previously forgotten. And I’d like to share a few “working class values” I’ve had to rediscover working at the factory.

1. SHARING. Members of the working class present themselves as stalwart bastions of self-reliance. The expression “rugged individualism” dogs Western novels, John Birch broadsides, conservative economic principles, and even the rhetoric of trade unionists. Yet while working class people take self-reliance as a matter of pride, their speech often reveals how much they must share, just to stave off routine loneliness.

Any discussion with peers at the factory inevitably turns up intimate details. Saying “hello” to another worker can unleash a tide of personal revelations. And “How are you?,” a common greeting that requires no response but “fine” in the middle class, is taken literally. I’ve learned about fellow workers’ professional aspirations, marital discord, every cute thing their children have done, and even the details of one guy’s probation arrangement.

Middle class people wall themselves off, allowing only teasing glimpses into their private lives. This manifests physically in that emblem of middle class labor, the cubicle. Though water cooler conclaves and Facebook status updates permit brief insights, they come through a tit-for-tat economic exchange. Because laborers know their work is generally interchangeable, they can only make their mark on others through remarkable candor.

Closely related to this is:

2. BELLYACHING. Bosses, spouses, politicians, celebrities, and even co-workers out of earshot are all fair game. I’m under no illusions: I know my peers carp about me when I’m not there, though I don’t know what they say. Cultural critic Tex Sample says that workers regularly “argue, fuss, gripe, complain, moan, and gossip” as ways of asserting their autonomy.

Often, bellyaching is the only tool workers have to assert autonomy. We spend most of our working hours going where we’re told, doing what we’re told, when we’re told. Autonomy comes where we can get it. If that means mocking peers behind their backs, so be it. And, just as in the blues and country music that come from this same background, much working class discourse consists of running down the boss.

“Middle class values” call these spiteful and malicious actions, which we should stop at once. And these actions could have harmful consequences if misused. But without authority to grouse around, working class people have literally no power over their own lives. When a desk jockey who has time to noodle with a Rubik’s Cube tells us to stop the one area of working life we can control, surely resistance only makes sense.

3. SLOGANEERING. Women’s rights groups were rightly incensed recently when a department store chain briefly sold girls’ t-shirts emblazoned with “I’m Too Pretty To Do Homework.” But t-shirt and bumper sticker slogans permit workers to broadcast value statements that could get them in trouble if spoken aloud. Imagine if an assembly line worker shouted these on the factory floor:

• A bad day fishing is better than a good day working
• I put the “pro” in “procrastination”
• You don’t have to be crazy to work here—we’ll train you
• What has two thumbs and needs a beer? This guy
• Take this job and shove it

Simple slogans permit workers to bond around their shared sense of alienation in the face of mind-numbing work. Note that favored slogans work as shibboleths to identify who’s in and who’s out. Work is no place for political slogans, which gin up sides; even my “Obama '08” bumper sticker earns some weird looks. Working class slogans are in-group references, not polarizing opinions.

4. READING. I can charitably describe workers’ relationships with books as complex and loaded. Because this dovetails so precisely with my own personal and educational background, I’d like to dedicate an entire entry to this topic. Please stay tuned.

PART TWO: READING
PART THREE: RELIGIOSITY AND EGALITARIANISM 

The Day I Dropped a Racial Term in Public

When we make a unit with extra components, the assembly line can get hairy. So Monday night, when Ray and I had to work about twelve inches apart, we knew minor setbacks would turn major in a hurry. Neither of us were surprised when a simple error sent us scrambling backward to make up for lost time, and, joking though my frustration, I growled: “What the hell are you trying to do to me, boy?”

Only several minutes later did I realize I’d said this to the only black worker on the line.

I’d certainly meant nothing racial. I was thinking more of a middle school gym teacher who’d called all of us “boy,” black or white. And my intent was entirely in fun. But considering the casual cruelty many African Americans continue to suffer—from diminished economic opportunity and disproportionate incarceration to bigots who use racial terms in daily conversation—my words’ intent matters less than their effect.

The “joke” inherent in my words meant race less than authority: my words conveyed that the recipient of my words stood lower on the hierarchy than me. This is of course not true, since Ray and I are both worker bees. But that’s the joke: I’m pretending to authority I don’t really have. I’m putting myself above Ray by pretending to steal his limited power and adding it to mine.

Real thigh-slapper, huh?

I can’t help but remember my dad in these moments. Though he disavowed racism, and taught me not to divide people by something as insignificant as skin color, he also, when not guarding his words, acted about as enlightened as Archie Bunker. He would defend himself by saying he didn’t really mean it, and besides, he’d never say it outside the family. But whether he meant it or not, those concepts certainly percolated in his mind.

Which means they percolate in my mind, too. They were part of the milieu I grew up in. And they were part of the milieu you grew up in, too, because our slaveholding and segregated past is, like it or not, part of America’s cultural heritage. This is why, despite some white liberals’ professed desires, America can never be a truly colorblind society. The past, even a shameful past, never truly goes away.

Building a respectful, productive present does not mean shutting off the past like a switch. It means coming to grips with the past, facing our own demons, and remaining conscious of the effects our words and actions have on others. We must recognize that we owe it to coming generations to redefine how black and white, women and men, poor and rich, rural and urban—in short, powerless and powerful—relate to one another.

Therefore I must make amends for my thoughtless words. Even in jest, my words’ effects do not reflect my Christian values. I believe good solid ethics mean bridging the gaps between people, trying to heal wounds, and looking out for one another. We really are in this together. And even pretending to superiority over another person widens gulfs. That’s completely unacceptable.

Ray is a good guy and a diligent worker. I’m proud to work next to him on the line because, quite apart from anything racial, he’s a dedicated colleague. And while I don’t make friends easily, he and I josh friendly, and I can imagine he and I getting to be pals. Come to that, even if we despised each other, I owed it to him to make peace when I’ve said something hurtful.

But I found myself in that awkward situation where I don’t know if he heard the wrong thing I said. Even if he did, not everybody is equally sensitive to implications. Apologizing may draw attention to what he considered a minor issue, but not apologizing could mean letting a serious problem fester. After vacillating for a few minutes, I finally spoke up.

“Hey, Ray.”

“Yeah?”

“When we were horsing around back there a few minutes ago, I didn’t think before I spoke, and I let slip with a racial term. I just wanted to say I’m sorry for that.”

“Oh? I didn’t even hear it.”

“Well, maybe not, but I still need to say it. Because I can’t let something like that stand.”

Ray turned from his work station long enough to take me in, then smiled slightly and nodded. I don’t know if that means I’m forgiven, but I hope it means at least that this won’t fester forever.