Just as the public begins to recognize the utter corruption of journalism, when mainstream media lie to us daily, the Peacock streaming service debuted The Paper, a series that attempts to distract us from the horrid truth by mocking the absurdity that journalism has become, the information service we have lost.
The Paper, not to be confused with Ron Howard’s pompous, sentimentalizing The Paper, from 1994, was co-created by Greg Daniels (of the laudable, lifelike animation series King of the Hill) and Michael Koman (a writer from the ingenious MADtv series). Unfortunately, working in streaming-TV fashion, Daniels and Koman spin off the mockumentary style of the unaccountably popular NBC sitcom The Office, a landmark of television falsehood adapted from the original Ricky Gervais BBC Two show. They take a declining small-town newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller (supposedly in Ohio), and show that Midwestern Americans are low-information consumers — unsophisticated yet cynical proles.
The Toledo Truth Teller has been purchased by Enervate, a toilet paper manufacturer connected to Dunder Mifflin (The Office’s fictional paper company, made famous on T-shirts worn by fans of the show). Enervate hires a Brit, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), as a new editor in chief to resurrect the declining paper, using its untrained staff of bored employees.
Intentionally insulting the presumed America-First Golden Age, Daniels and Koman completely ignore the deprivation that most Americans have gotten used to by accommodating the decision of media corporations to aggregate and then shut down local newspapers. (I first noted this in the 1990s when small-town papers in Pennsylvania and Michigan began to run movie reviews from Chicago Sun-Times celebrity Roger Ebert, homogenizing news and criticism in terms of the second-rate media elite.)
Gleeson resembles the young Martin Short, and his Sampson (a bicoastal’s idea of the hapless Homer Simpson) is eager to fulfill dreams of journalistic glory. (“My kryptonite is my love of journalism.”) But first he must inspire a team of feckless dimwits inherited from The Office stereotypes — clueless bosses and uncommitted staffers. The skeptical blonde Mare (Chelsea Frei), a military vet from Stars and Stripes, derides the TTT: “I don’t know if it’s a real newspaper. Four AP stories and high school sports on the front page.” Demoted managing editor Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciatore) resents the usurpation of her role. “Don’t be so self-defecating,” she tells Ned, her word choice supposedly satirizing low-standard immigration. The entire ethnically diverse staff represent Millennial America’s shortcomings.
The Paper trades on popular naïveté about the media. Episode 2 ridicules journalistic practices and is titled “The Five Ws.” A staffer, ignorant of the “Who, What, Where, When, Why” rule, wonders “Is that a gang?” Another asks, “Would you say the lower crime rate has been due to increased police brutality?” Such humor might be funny if it didn’t perpetuate real ignorance.
The wrong-way comedy of The Paper mocks the bozos who make journalism and cheats the gullible readers who accept it — the way many New York Times subscribers accept front-page “analysis” as news instead of opinion. The Office–derived bureaucratic premise places blame for the media’s constant slanting, deception (gaslighting), and omitted facts on budgets and fecklessness, rather than on the apparent, real causes: nonprofessional activism and dishonesty.
Our suspicion of methods such as narrative-crafting and censorship (recently regarding January 6 and anti-ICE rioting) is already way past The Paper’s trivia.
The show’s ultimate insult comes from its misrepresentation of the nature of work — whether the camaraderie fantasized in the old Mary Tyler Moore Show and the ennui captured in Ermanno Olmi’s late-neorealist classic Il Posto (The Job). The Paper’s format is not just postmodern, it’s post-meta.
The first episode’s epilogue cuts to a black-and-white documentary from 1971 on newspapers and then jump-cuts to a contemporary wide shot of an Ohio office building burning in the background. This fakery ridicules journalism’s ruin.
The demise of local newspapers goes deeper. It’s not simply a result of mainstream hegemony or the “hyperlocal” trend that favors parochial politics. Local papers now merely republish news-agency pieces or parrot government and public relations press releases rather than do actual shoe-leather investigation and phone-call-intense reporting (as romanticized in the movie All the President’s Men). The Paper’s myth disguises the dread circumstances in which mainstream media now operate as a counter government, using front-page analyses and dubious polls as a way to control public opinion and to support or disable political power. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and the TV networks remain safe in their feelings of superiority.
It is unbelievable that a TV streaming series tries fooling us to laugh at incompetence and temerity instead. Surely this insanity has something to do with the aberrant fact that so many people do still trust and believe whatever the mainstream tells them.
The Paper’s “wit” seems designed to satisfy “the educated class” that is flattered by the current media power structure.