I have a link – at least for a while longer – to the website of Editor & Publisher. The owners of E&P announced that they would be shutting down both print and online versions of the publication.
I will miss Editor & Publisher, despite its occasional errors, because it reported on an industry that should have – to its peril unsuccessfully – reported on politicians with courage and zeal.
I am neither a writer nor a reporter, but in blogging about small-town politics in Whitewater, Wisconsin, I have come to see how much difference a true and vigorous press might have made for our rural community.
We don’t have as much. We have a lapdog press, reporters who become part of the stories they cover, reporters who aren’t supposed to question certain politicians, or news of a peculiar kind from a long-standing incumbent politician, covering the very bodies on which he sits.
This shabby or ersatz press leaves us with a failed politics, flacked constantly as proof of local exceptionalism and triumph.
No one is surprised that politicians are self-interested except people foolish enough to believe that a man becomes a saint public servant as soon as he takes office.
Editor & Publisher had the sad task of chronicling the decline of many newspapers before its own decline. There’s no pleasure in that, for bloggers or anyone else.
When a few in town bemoan a blogger here or there, they inadvertently highlight the decline of a local newspaper, with true news standards. The absence of real journalism in town causes politicians, town squires, self-important bureaucrats, and assorted back-patters to assume that acceptance of whatever they say is a community obligation.
They have grown fat and selfish on the absence of a true local press that should be part of any American community.
Bloggers came to focus on local politics because they saw that local papers stopped being representatives of the American tradition of press scrutiny of politicians. Common citizens acted to fill a breach.
When they stepped in, they predictably found that every politician and bureaucrat claimed that the absence of independent inquiry was the norm. They ignored the history of America, this free and beautiful place, and made their self-interest a community principle, however thinly disguised. Fawning deference to authority – something wholly Un-American – became a community value.
That’s as common now in rural places as anywhere, and it will be a long road back to a better, more American tradition.