I’m still mourning the recent loss of The Rocky Mountain News - one of Denver, Colorado’s two, longtime competing newspapers. Published for 150 years, the venerable newspaper died an unceremonious death on February 27. Its death was just the latest in a number of newspapers closings. We are nearing the end of the news as we once knew it.
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.
Why should you care? Well, maybe you don’t. Maybe you think the print media is too left-leaning. Or maybe, you think just the opposite - the editorial pages are all too red, white and Right. But that’s the point, or the very fine print, about great newspapers. A great newspaper should never telegraph bias; it must never promote any single point of view. Great newspapers are published to tell it like it is; not like how someone wants it to be. So if too opposing sides are arguing about the slant of a newspaper, assume the newspaper has no slant at all.
Over the past decade or so, more and more, this hasn’t always been the case. Some newspapers abandoned objectivity in favor of reporting on celebrity-driven, superficial news. Real news wasn’t even covered. Maybe this was a case of giving the public what it wanted; or maybe just another example of the anything goes mentality responsible for so much damage to our current economy. Could a responsible press have alerted us to the dangers ahead? Probably. Many reporters simply failed to cover the stories that deserved coverage. They looked the other way. And when they did report (like Barrons‘ on Bernard Madoff, long before he was arrested), responsible officials chose not to take action. In many cases, reporters dropped the story and the ball. Or never picked it up in the first place. This happened time and time again when scandals bubbled to the surface; investigative reporters didn’t dig deeper for the story. That’s not what I was taught in journalism school. Remember when journalism was still a desirable college major? Without a viable print (newspaper) industry, we are nearing the end of Journalism School as we once knew it.
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.
Again, why should you care? Because news reporters are our local and national road warriors and street fighters. They have the means and the opportunity to expose wrongdoing and corruption in our backyard and down the street. Newspapers also are the voices of our neighborhoods; they are the last best means of communicating local news -from the honors and awards to hometown heroes to the tragedies and passings of those we knew or wished to. If there are is a living, breathing newspaper in your city or town, congratulations. Treat is like the endangered species it is. It may not last.
Once upon a time, the printed press was considered The Fourth Estate - the unofficial 4th arm of the Government, designed to observe, protect and defend the people against wrongdoing in the two Houses of Congress and the Presidential Office. The Washington Post reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, showed the power of the press by uncovering the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. The My Lai massacre was first reported in the printed press. Those are just two examples of the kind of in-depth newspaper reporting that changed the course of government and politics. I don’t believe these examples, or others like them, could ever be duplicated on television, the radio or the internet. Why should you care?
A free society functions best when the press is free. When there is no more press, it becomes an open question about how we are to freely obtain dependable and legitimate news about the world and our Country. Are we to depend on talk radio (openly biased in many cases), television sound bites, or internet digests? How are we to learn about road closures in our cities? FBI drug busts in our state? Congressional ear-marks in our nation? The collapse of banks around the world? Will a half-hour local newscast suffice? I am not satisfied one-minute TV sound bites on the national TV news or talking heads debating the merits of an issue for a book they wish to promote, can ever bring me all the national and world news a newspaper is fit to print.
I was deeply saddened when the highly-regarded Christian Science Monitor in Boston closed. I feel a stab every time I hear about another newspaper going under. Each newspaper that folds is one less outlet we have for the whole truth to be told. Word is The San Francisco Chronicle, another highly-regarded newspaper, also is on its last legs (pages) and The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times also are in trouble. Newspapers have already folded in major cities like Minneapolis. More newspapers are teetering on the edge. Surely this economy will not save them.
And why should you care?
Because one less newspaper means one less voice raised to keep the news fair and free. Because the American way of life, as we knew it, (“Extra, Extra, Read All About It”) is changing drastically, whether we want it to or not. The decline and death of newspapers is but one of the latest major changes to come down the pike. There will be more changes, of a different kind, as we slowly work our way out of this Mess. Not all bad, of course. Some changes will be so astounding, they will knock our socks off. But some, like the extinction of newspapers, will be harder to absorb. At least for those of us born with ink in our veins.
Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie.
