Now, stop and think a minute . . .

A recent discussion with my son-the-reporter of course got around to the crisis that newspapers are going through these days, and how opinion writers and TV pundits just about everywhere are weighing in on what the outcome might or should be.

The noise seems to center on newspapers’ falling advertising revenues, on the one hand, and on the other the speculation that more and more folks are getting their news from the Internet, or from entertainment like the Jon Stewart show, Rush Limbaugh, or the talking heads at MSNBC and Fox News – none of which, by the way, are “hard news” reporters, but rather commentators on what may have begun as hard news — not exactly Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite or the PBS Newshour.

I admit to being addicted to some of the cable news shows, but that’s not where I get hard news. Before I tune in to MSNBC, I've listened to NPR, read the New York Times and other of the much-maligned “mainstream media” as well as assorted magazines for national and international news, and of course the Waxahachie Daily Light for local goings-on.

So what about the newspapers? How shall we be informed if they disappear? Can we agree that hard news is a good place to start, or will we be satisfied with the pre-selected information we get from favorite TV shows or Internet web sites?

Of course, no one really knows what will happen, any more than the effect of the Internet could have been predicted back when Gutenberg’s printing press got our attention in 1440, or when William Randolph Hearst (aka Citizen Kane) took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and turned it into a mighty publishing empire.

And over the years just about anyone who gave it a try could publish and distribute news in printed form. Back in the mid 20th century a simple image transfer medium consisting of a sheet of gelatin in a box, called a hectograph, was ideal for young aspiring reporters to print neighborhood newsletters. So we did.

If we’d had some advertisers we might even have made money, but …

Thanks to the Internet, of course, YouTube has become a player in the dissemination of information, and so it was that Frank Rich, writing about the situation for the New York Times, was able to share this bit of history:

To time-travel back to the dawn of the technological strand of the disaster, search YouTube for "1981 primitive Internet report on KRON." What you’ll find is a 28-year-old local television news piece from San Francisco about a "far-fetched," pre-Web experiment by the city’s two papers, The Chronicle and The Examiner, to distribute their wares to readers with home computers via primitive phone modems. Though there were at most 3,000 people in the Bay Area with PCs then, some 500 mailed in coupons for the service to The Chronicle alone. But, as the anchorwoman assures us at the end, with a two-hour download time (at $5 an hour), "the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20-cent street edition."

There’s a crowd that believes, sincerely, that there’s no problem, we’ll just get our news from the Internet. But there’s a catch: Most of the serious reporting that makes it onto the Internet sites is done by print reporters, published in newspapers, and picked up by web sites. What happens to those stories when a newspaper folds?

Oh, say some, there are smart people everywhere who will find, investigate and report the news we need. You don’t have to be trained in journalism to do that.

Maybe so; I won’t argue that point here. But do you have any idea what it costs to send a reporter to, say, Iraq? Try $10,000 a month – and that’s not salary, folks. It covers travel, food and lodging, of course, but also local transportation, security, translators, “fixers” (the people who get you into places you need to be and out of places you need to leave and generally keep you out of trouble), satellite phones, and of course armored vests and a camera or two. Just for starters.

But what if you don’t care about war zones, or for that matter any foreign news? Then ask yourself who, exactly, will be interested enough to cover your local city council meetings? Who will go to Austin to discover legislation that might be making its way through to becoming law that will affect your life? Who will bug the Center for Disease Control to get the news we need about swine flu? Who will spend hours and hours covering often tedious Congressional hearings, to make sure we know what our legislators are up to?

“Citizen journalists”? Do you think? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson:

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.

Originally published in the Waxahachie Daily Light, May 11, 2009.

Whither the Republicans?

In the heat of last year’s primary elections I ventured my opinion that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was doomed to fail because it was operating on a false premise: They believed that winning what they called “the core constituency” of the Democratic party was enough to win the nomination.

The premise was false because they didn’t understand their definition of “core constituency” was obsolete.

I referred to Danny DeVito’s famous lines in the play “Other People’s Money” to describe the problem:

“It's too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered and a miracle occurred, … we would still be dead. You know why? …

Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.

Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

I offered this opinion after the Pennsylvania primary, where the total vote for Clinton turned out to be less than half what they had counted on; either the “white, working class, non-college-educated” voter was not a certain voter for Hillary or the proportion of such voters had shrunk — perhaps both.

I called it “the toilet bowl effect”: When a toilet is flushed, a huge volume of water descends into the bowl and then whirls in an ever-shrinking vortex until it’s gone.
So why drag all this up again? Because those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them?

Recent events in and around the Republican party reached a crescendo with the decision by Senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania (there’s an interesting coincidence!) to give up on the party and join the Democrats.

It had become clear, after a huge number of Pennsylvania Republicans moved to the Democratic party in 2008, that the folks who were left were not a constituency likely to re-elect him in the 2010 Republican primary; a moderate Republican by history, it appeared his chances were better running as a Democrat in the general election.

The reaction in the Republican leadership was mixed, ranging from "sorry to see him go" to “good riddance,” with a heavy tilt toward the latter. Michael Steele, the Republican party chairman, referenced Specter’s “left-wing voting record,” an interesting new definition for “moderate.”

There’s a patchwork of hue and cry from assorted people who profess to care about the future of the Republican party who yearn for the party to rise again, to offer leadership and become a force again. Sad to say, the major players, at least so far, seem determined to pursue an increasing share of a shrinking market.

A good first step would be to dump the word “conservative,” because no one seems to know exactly what it means anymore. Awhile back, it was “low taxes, efficient government, strong national security.” But what does it mean now?

As it is, the lack of any other coherent message on the part of the Republican leadership leaves them defaulting to simply opposing anything the Democratic administration wants to do. With nothing to offer but anger, the party is doomed to keep on shrinking.

There are folks for whom positions on abortion, or gay rights, or school prayer may be a critical part of being “conservative”; but what do they do – refuse to join with anyone who disagrees with them? What if, like Pat Buchanan, they disagree with the war in Iraq but agree on those “social” issues?

What if, like Ron Paul, they disagree on the social issues and on the war in Iraq but believe in low taxes, efficient government and a strong national security”?

What if, like Arlen Specter, they agree on some issues and disagree on others but want to identify with the basic tenets of the Republican party? Drum them out of the roll call?

“Conservative” just doesn’t seem to tell us anything anymore.

Maybe going back to just plain “Republican” will do nicely, but it needs a new sense of purpose. A fractured party is almost no party at all.

Whatever your political leaning, you should want a healthy Republican party. No matter how well our president is doing, no matter how noble the intentions of his administration, a robust and coherent Republican party will always keep them on their toes.