Often, one doesn’t need a medical license to tell that a person’s sick. Even without the ability to diagnose an ailment, one can see that another’s tattered clothes, lapsed hygiene, and lethargy are signs of an underlying illness. These signs point to symptoms, but those symptoms – those pains within the sick person – may come from one of hundreds of disorders. By outward signs alone, there may be no way tell what afflicts someone. Still, one knows there’s something wrong with the struggling person.
In a newspaper, one may see several signs of a sickness: limited and low-quality advertisements, cheap newsprint, smudged ink, etc. Yet, of all possible signs, the most telling is when the very heart of the paper – its reporting – becomes weak. If the newspaper lets reporting lapse, it has let its most important attribute rot.
When reporting goes, when it stops being inquisitive of, and a break on, political power, the paper’s future is bleak. The easiest way to tell the reporting’s gone is when it’s not even the paper‘s reporting anymore. If the front page doesn’t belong to the paper, shared with a reputable news service, one spots a sign much worse than an sickly person’s commonplace badges of distress.
A front page that offers space for sows’ ears, although labeled as silk purses, is so ill that it has lost even the memory of what it feels like to be well.
That’s more than illness; it’s the conviction that chronic sickness is a kind of health. One seldom finds a person who holds that conviction and yet returns to genuine wellness.