The end of an era

When I was a kid growing up in Atkins, Arkansas, there were two state newspapers operating daily, both from Little Rock. The Arkansas Gazette ran in the morning and the Arkansas Democrat ran in the afternoon. We only subscribed to the morning paper and I remember reading it was the first thing I did after I got up in the morning. I would spread it out on the kitchen table, turning first to the sports section and literally read every word in that section as I drank my orange juice and ate my breakfast. There was nothing like reading the morning paper (at least the sports section) to get your day started off right. I later found out that the Gazette was the more liberal of our two newspapers which I thought was interesting since the more conservative newspaper was named the Democrat. On top of that, there were only three television networks that delivered national news in a news program and those were CBS, NBC and ABC. During my early years, the programs were only 15 minutes each but eventually expanded to 30 minutes as I got older and major cities publishing two different newspapers were slowly but steadily dropping one of them. There were things happening both politically and personally around the country that the news media didn’t think was the business of the public and so they kept them quiet, believing they knew better than the people did about what we should or should not know. We didn’t find out about Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy’s dilly-dallying around on their wives until years after the fact. We found out about Bill Clinton’s immediately.

That’s because today we’re inundated with so-called news except that most of it is NOT news but it so sounds like it that people believe it. We have 24-hour-a-day news reporting and when you have that much air time to fill up, a lot of things are going to see the light of day that wouldn’t have in a more limited news environment. Some people think that’s good, others think it’s bad. I’ve always believed that privacy is precious and people don’t deserve to know everything about a person’s life, both private and public, but many disagree with that perspective.

I still read the Arkansas Gazette on-line from McCook and was shocked to discover the other day that in less than a month, it will become a strictly on-line publication except for the Sunday paper. So, one of the most stable factors in our society isn’t going to be stable anymore because of this decision and the decision was purely economical. The reporting I read said that Sunday was the only profitable day for the newspaper because of all the advertising inserts that were featured in the Sunday edition. So, thanks to advertising, at least the people of Arkansas will be able to spread out their paper on the kitchen table one day a week. It’s my understanding that the Arkansas paper is the only major newspaper in a large city to opt for this option, although the smart money says this is the beginning of the end for print journalism, thanks almost exclusively to the Internet and the 24 hour-seven days a week television news which is successfully running print journalism out of business.

A casualty of the war between journalism and politics has been that no one knows where to turn to find the objective truth anymore. Republicans watch FOX news and listen to Rush

Limbaugh, Democrats watch MSNBC and listen to Rachel Maddow and the truth doesn’t lie exclusively with either source but can usually be found somewhere in the middle between those two opposite extremes which has always been the case.

I do know that no one is right all the time and this includes newspapers, television programs, educators, the clergy, police officers, soldiers and every other group that resides in America. What we desperately need is a reliable source to go to that explains group and individual behavior based on fact and not emotion and it seems to me there is no place left.