Seventy-three percent of American consumers have faith in their local newspaper, according to a company that brokers jobs in journalism.
Good reasons to own a newspaper are corkscrewing. A newspaper is not a good place to find or keep work. Rent, fuel, food and interest rates are going up, and the price of newsprint is inflating right along with them.
Digital-only newsroom staff has trampolined 116 percent because providing information via bandwidth is far cheaper than buying and delivering paper.
Several weeks ago, on 60 Minutes, some old news guys were interviewed. They talked about how everything has changed, and traditional newsrooms were being shipped to museums. At least that was implied.
The men saw doom in their industry and begged the public to keep newspapers alive so that corrupt politicians would be held accountable, the government would be unable to keep so many secrets from us, and the elites would stop believing they could herd us, using fear and financial muscle to make us behave and believe.
Truth, science, art – those are the things we are curious about – the things that surround us. It doesn’t take a newspaper to reveal those.
But it helps.
Information was once spread by word-of-mouth, and the truthier it was, the better. But people being people, there were pranksters and blanket stretchers and swindlers who embellished the truth. They made life more fun or more difficult and they became legends. People remembered them, not their knowledge.
Other people relied on lore to know what plants to use as medicine, what animal parts not to eat, and other significant information that was passed down through generations. Lore is traditional knowledge vital to the welfare of a child and that child’s children. Lore is like what grandma told you, just that one sentence you carry around forever, “Wash your hands.” Lore is information. Legend is grandma.
Then along came the press, about 800 years ago, and somehow, 340 years after that, in the United States the press got itself an amendment. Maybe by insisting they would be fair and truthful, maybe by giving people something to read, maybe by promising politicians they would get a mention.
Because there is freedom of the press, newspapers can professionally criticize, advocate for, or ignore what it chooses.
Yes, printing what is in the public interest is a judgment call. We were taught that the First Estate is the executive branch of the government. The Second Estate is the legislative branch of the same government, and the judicial branch is the Third Estate.
Which is terribly self-serving. Before we had these united states that we call America, way back when we lived in France or someplace close by, the first estate was clergy, the second was nobility and the third was a majority of the people. Those estates go back to when people were forced to choose between allegiance to the pope or the king.
Naturally, that didn’t work out because some people wanted it both ways and others couldn’t make up their minds.
Once the printing press was invented, humans didn’t have to rely on having face-to-face conversations. They could read the same information others read, but on their own time.
Then some Victorian fellow named the press the Fourth Estate. The watchdog. Two hundred years after the Fourth Estate became the estate that kept an eye on the first three estates, the press realized that there was no sense in covering the first three estates while ignoring huge corporations that were secretly throwing trash into rivers, creating Agent Orange, chemtrailing the weather, choking the honeybees and sucking oil out of the earth.
What to do?
Today we have the Fifth Estate, blogs. That one might be the most curious because anyone with a computer can share an opinion without putting a name to it. No retribution, just freedom. We have an amendment to prove it.
I was sorry for the men on 60 Minutes because they were not having fun. They were worried and sad.
Newspapers might be out of date, unwieldy and expensive. But if you do what you prefer to do with your time, wouldn’t reading a newspaper be as beneficial as washing your hands?
“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.” Hannah Arendt