“You report the facts and let READERS DECIDE. “
I was having a conversation with my editor at the Tallahassee Democrat. (I wrote 50+ commercial articles, meaning to highlight the paper’s advertisers.) I asked why the paper continued to carry the cartoon Doonesbury when every survey they sent out said their readers didn’t like it. She said, something like, “Our readers are all idiots and we have to tell them how to think.” Really, it was something that startling. It also highlighted why the paper has been on a two decade decline in readership.
At the time I worked for an Israeli owned firm in town. One morning two of the American Jews were having a conversation outside my office. These were professional people deeply connected with universities and uber-liberal. There had been yet another article the previous Sunday on Rosewood, a “black” town in Florida that was attacked by the KKK in the ‘20’s and eliminated as a town. (These articles where a regular, appearing about twice a month at the time.) One of the Jews said he had cancelled his subscription to the Democrat because he was tired of reading about how he was such a racist. “Really,” he said, “we had nothing to do with this and every article implies we did just because we’re white. I’m tired of it.”
That kind of elitist anti-intellectualism starts at schools that teach journalism to know-nothings like her.
EXACTLY why Trump got elected. Number one reason-
People who are not racist are DONE with being called racist.
And Left aint doin nuthin but hollerin RACIST even louder.
Red Wave. #walkaway.
I think you ‘keyed’ into the subject very well.
I had some professor from Louisiana who chatted one evening class over this odd phonenmum that had occurred in Louisiana after WW II. Prior to the war, most of the three major newspapers in the state, were employing folks without a college education. The editor might have been a graduate, and maybe a couple of the prized people might have been that way....but most everyone else was without any college degree. So they tended to emphasize more on the story-telling art, rather than provoking you into some stance with fraudulent writing.
After the war, with the GI Bill...suddenly in the 1950s, you started to have guys show up and take the reporter jobs, who had degrees. Things were fine in the beginning, but by the 1970s...newspapers were set to only have degreed reporters, and you were starting to have a set view of the world from some college professor crowd. The layout, as this professor described this in early 1980s, was that you had people with no true view or understanding of the general public that they were serving.
A couple of years ago, I took to reading newspapers from the 1800s, and it surprised me on the refreshing way they told a story, and they’d do interviews with locals to make a story out of nothing. Of course, none of that happens today.
I’ve taken the surveys over the past forty years that you talk about, and said the same basic thing over Doonesbury. I’d also go and suggest a whole two-page section of editorials every Sunday...opening it up to folks, and letting real people write a 30-line piece on open topics.
My observation is that the newspaper ‘media’ is dying off, and by the end of the Trump era (Jan 2025), I think a quarter of daily papers (right now 1,286) will have dissolved. From those remaining, I think they will have more or less drifted into large scale ownership (one company, a dozen or more papers under them each). And I’ll predict some odd phenomenon will occur with a dozen kids banding together to create local news only newspapers, available only in digital format.
I'd like to thank Garry Trudeau for curing me of my Sunday comics habit.
I don't even look at them any more.