Stop the Press

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Just had a chance to see the AMS-PBS documentary by Mark Birnbaum Stop the Presses, about the demise of the printed newspaper in America. Besides being an extremely well produced video, the piece also sets up the premise of the danger to democracy that the disappearance of the daily newspaper may bring.

In my new novel, The Myth Makers, I deal with the decline and death of a major city newspaper. It is top of mind to me. So, this week I asked people what they thought of the death of a newspaper, say if The Dallas Morning News were to go away, how would it affect them? And the answers disturbed me.

By in large, all the people I talked to said that if Dallas were to lose its daily newspaper, they would miss the Cowboy’s coverage.  Number one thing – the cowboys. Most of these were men.  The women said they would miss the features –non-specific, but features.

Then yesterday morning I got up and walked the neighborhood and looked at front lawns early. I wanted to see how many people on a Sunday actually took the paper. It was discouraging. There were far fewer homes with a plastic sheathed paper than there were with none. And even fewer had two papers, usually the tale-tale blue plastic wrapping of the New York Times.

On a day when America used to slow down and read a daily newspaper, there are far fewer people reading the news. True, many are getting it on the Internet. Others rely on TV or radio, but the watershed of information that comes to us in the printed form of a daily newspaper is remarkably low and it is shrinking.

This is worrisome.  Because if all your news and opinion forming information come from Fox News or from MSNBC, then you are getting a highly slanted and biased veneer. It is bad enough to rely just on a veneer, but to have it cut in a prejudiced direction is even more disturbing.

As one young man said to me, “I watch Fox News because they agree with me.”

Really?

And what if you are wrong?

He didn’t have a comeback. What do you vet your ideas and facts against?  What do you use as a standard of truth? How do you know you are right?

And that is what worries me.  To be sure, The Dallas Morning News is no great independent sentinel in the country – its voice is far from independent– but it is all we have here standing between us and the total darkness in many major categories of news, which the electronic media doesn’t even bother with. Yes, there are voices such as the Dallas Observer and others that raise truth to a new height, but as for the coverage of daily news, we need a strong newspaper. We need it until the newspapers figure how to use the web in their dissemination of their information. So far, their attempts have been very feeble.

I will miss a daily newspaper, if it were to go away.  I will have to find another way to examine what is going on in my world. I hope you feel the same. And I hope you take a subscription to the daily newspaper, to keep it alive as long as we can, to give them the chance to figure out how they will deliver quality journalism to us in the future.

Stopping the presses now, is not a viable alternative. It is far too dangerous for our democracy. 

I am glad a director such as Birnbaum took on such an important topic in his film. And I hope this message will be carried to you. Read a newspaper. It will make you smarter. Subscribe to a newspaper. It will make America stronger.