What's Behind the Recent Attacks on Public Libraries?

Back in June, the Chicago bureau of FoxNEWS aired a story asking "Are Libraries Necessary, or a Waste of Tax Money?" They framed their story as such:

[K]eeping libraries running costs big money. In Chicago, the city pumps $120 million a year into them. In fact, a full 2.5 percent of our yearly property taxes go to fund them.

That's money that could go elsewhere – like for schools, the CTA, police or pensions

They even went so far as to send in undercover cameras to see if, in this era of online information, libraries were indeed a waste of tax dollars:

So we decided to check it out. We used an undercover camera to see how many people used the library and what were they doing.

In an hour, we counted about 300 visitors. Most of them were using the free internet. The bookshelves? Not so much.

If you've paid attention to their methods, you probably won't be surprised to learn that the FoxNEWS story was highly misleading. According to Mary A. Dempsey, Commissioner of the Chicago Public Library, whose brilliant response to Fox is well worth reading in full:

Last year, Chicagoans checked out nearly 10 million items from the Chicago Public Library’s 74 locations and the majority of those items were books. (Your ‘undercover cameras” shots were taken in a series of stacks devoted to bound periodicals used for reference. Next time, try looking at the circulating collections throughout the building.)

But Chicago isn't the only place where the usefulness of public libraries in the digital age is being challenged. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones recently blasted an op-ed by Frank Skinner that the London Times published on why Britain should do away with their information lending institutions. It should be noted that although Jones dismisses Skinner as a "comedian," here he's dismissed as "a third rate comedian who sometimes has a chat show on British television and is probably best known for once helping to write a football song". From Jone's response

Do you believe in a well-funded, free library service? The comedian Frank Skinner doesn't. Writing in the Times last week, he sneered at old black and white images of cloth-capped workers educating themselves for free. He's a working-class lad himself, he reminded readers, and libraries never did anything for him. These dreary hangouts are just a big joke.

I came across his column just after my daughter completed a superb summer reading programme run by Camden Libraries, which was singled out yesterday by the Reading Agency. There is a huge gulf between the reality of libraries using imaginative ideas to get kids reading and the stereotype Skinner's Times column sought to create. Apparently, he is happy to see a world of diminished literacy, full of people whose idea of mental stimulation is to watch him banter on the telly.

The Times of London (which, like FoxNEWS, is owned by Rupert Murdoch) charges readers for access to their opinion pieces by third-rate comedians, so I'll have to take Jones' word for what it actually contains.

Of course, a local news piece in Chicago and an op-ed in London hardly constitute a widespread organized attack on public libraries, but to question their usefulness at all seems amazingly insensitive to the needs of the people they serve and nearly evil, in my opinion. However, I became a bit more alarmed about where such attacks might be coming from and where they might lead when my memory connected Jones' astute comment on "a world of diminished literacy" with these two passages from Orwell's explanation of Newspeak:

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. [...]

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible.

Of course it takes the special brand of suspicion that thrives where I come from (where no conspiracy theory is untrue until proven so) to imagine Murdoch sitting in his office, petting a hairless cat, and plotting to further brainwash the viewers of his mass media empire by discouraging them from stumbling upon information that might contradict his pre-approved narratives at free libraries, but an extensive search for any other organization other than FoxNews that doesn't understand the importance of public libraries, especially during economic hardship, turned up nothing. (Anyone else find others?) There are budget cuts being proposed, but nothing so brash as these assertions of obsolescence from the same source.

The linchpin of their anti-library argument (i.e., that you can get all this information online) is easily dismissed when you remember the why we have public libraries in a democracy. Dempsey put it succinctly:

The mission of the Chicago Public Library is and always has been to make available to all people from birth through senior citizenship, the resources they need to enjoy a good quality of life, to participate in lifelong learning, and to become and remain civically engaged. If information is power, then the public library is the source of that power....

Until use of a computer and Internet access is universally free, what's available online to all people from birth through senior citizenship isn't free. What you can read in a public library is, including what's online.

As Diane Rehm noted at the beginning of the economic crisis in a piece titled "The Role of Libraries in Economic Hard Times," when the economy sours, people often turn to local libraries for help. In the piece, Diane's guests note that historically, people have always (re)turned to their libraries with each downturn in the economy, and now more than every not only for internet access and free entertainment options, but also workshops on polishing one's resume or other employment help and community development initiatives. This haven of information and community organization would be the saddest of losses for those hurting the most during the economic crisis. As such, Murdoch's lack of support, even if you don't see a conspiracy of concerted attacks on libraries, strikes me as an opportunistic and nearly criminally cynical disservice.