Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

A critical moment: The control of ideas by authority grows

A week ago, a widely respected classical-music critic was forced by his newspaper to stop covering the city orchestra that he had been writing about for decades.  

You may or may not have heard of him – his name is Donald Rosenberg. But you have very likely heard of the ensemble he covered for so long. It’s the Cleveland Orchestra.

Though his employers at The Plain Dealer simply announced his reassignment in the Sunday paper of Sept. 21 without explanation and though orchestra executives deny interfering, it’s an open secret in the Cleveland area and in the classical-music world that Rosenberg was demoted to reporter because the orchestra management was unhappy with his critical assessments of music director Franz Welser-Most’s conducting - and that the newspaper was unhappy because the orchestra was unhappy. 

Plain Dealer Publisher Terry Egger is a member of the orchestra’s board. The rest of that board includes leaders of major businesses and organizations in the paper’s circulation area. Whether these facts had any direct bearing on Rosenberg’s demotion or not, the scent of conflicting interests has added suspicion to outrage among the critic’s supporters.

The situation has been getting a great deal of attention, with other critics weighing in on their blogs, and other newspapers – including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – writing stories. Much of the coverage has focused on the beside-the-point questions of whether Rosenberg’s frequent dissatisfaction with Welser-Most’s work was justified or not and whether his opinions were shared by other critics or not. 

Other commentators have hit a little closer to the bullseye by remarking that it’s the fundamental, professional duty of a critic to report honestly what he has seen, heard and experienced during an artistic event, so long as his evaluation addresses the artist’s work and methods rather than the artist personally, and so long as he offers informed reasons for his conclusions. They’ve noted, in other words, that a good critic’s job is not just to shut up if he can’t say something nice.

The proper nature of criticism is something that critics, artists, editors and audiences have debated for centuries. And it’s an important issue. But it’s only a small part of the much broader and more troubling question that Rosenberg’s ousting raises: How many uncomfortable facts and ideas are we willing to let authority stifle in exchange for a controlled and safe-seeming society?

Music criticism may not seem like much of a fight to pick in the struggle for freedom of expression. But it’s representative of a vital right that we’re in danger of losing through our own acquiescence. 

Look what’s been happening: Americans’ fear of violence, poverty and persecution has steadily grown over the last decade. We’ve allowed our government ever-greater control over our individual privacy in hopes of protecting ourselves from terrorists. We’ve become so fearful of losing our health-care benefits, pensions, jobs, businesses and homes - our way of life – that we’ve let whole industries and their government cronies rape our nation financially in the deluded hope that it would somehow benefit us, too. We’ve allowed a culture of religious vigilantism to sway our secular leaders, bend our laws and suppress our speech. And even when we see the evil all this has produced, we’re afraid to protest. Conformity rules.

Instead of helping us resist our fear, the press has allowed itself to be squelched, too. All over the U.S., news outlets have been practically genuflecting before the political power of religion ever since George W. Bush won his second term as president on a wave of rural, conservative, Christian votes. As the economy has worsened and the newspaper industry has begun its own particular Titanic slide into oblivion because it didn’t notice the iceberg of the Internet looming, dailies everywhere have frantically tried to woo back advertisers and readers with content so focus-grouped, so imitative, bland and seductively reassuring that, in time, readers have come to expect to have their tastes and biases stroked - and papers have started to forget that their real mission is to inform the public and not to curry favor with powerful businesses, institutions and consumer blocs.  

When someone like Rosenberg has his voice silenced, it means that the press – like the rest of the nation – has caved in to a power it should have defied, colluding with it to crush and control ideas out of fear of financial or social punishment.   

But without the free exchange of ideas, creativity of any kind – including the work of major newspapers and famous, influential orchestras -cannot thrive. And without creativity, we’ll be stuck as we are, with no hope of improvement, breathing the same stale, depleted air through failing lungs, like the occupants of a tiny room surrounded by thick stone, who can’t tell whether they’re protected from outside harm by an impregnable fortress or trapped and dying in a viewless, doorless prison.

Donald Rosenberg has been a colleague and close friend of mine for many years. As a longtime critic of theater and other art forms, I share many of the same convictions and principles with which he informs his work. I was his editor for four years at The Plain Dealer. And I also sang for a decade with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus.

I note this, not just in the interest of full disclosure, but to illustrate the point that no matter what organizations we belong to or believe in, we must not allow them to hurt us and themselves by quelling ideas, facts and informed opinion. All human enterprises are creative; none can prosper if they are fueled by fear.