The Editors at Broad + Liberty, where my weekly Crime Beat column appears, offers an editorial on why we need a functioning news media.
Readers of a
certain age will no doubt recall the opening monologue to Woody
Allen’s film, Annie Hall:
“There’s an
old joke: Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of ’em
says: ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says,
‘Yeah, I know, and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel
about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and
it’s all over much too quickly.”
Today the joke
would still carry if describing the relationship most Americans have with
the media if you took out the word “food” and replaced it with “news.”
That’s
essentially how today’s public feels about news — they think it’s terrible,
lacks context, is under-researched and biased, and yet they can’t get enough of it.
The announcement this week that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will
cease publication in four months is the latest example of this trend — and a
seriously damaging one for our state. Formed in 1927 after a series of mergers
of Pittsburgh newspapers, the Post-Gazette’s antecedents dated back
even farther — to 1786, when the Pittsburgh Gazette was the first
newspaper published west of the Alleghenies. Since the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review went all-digital in 2016, the Post-Gazette has
been the only print newspaper in the city. The news scene has changed over the
years, but Pittsburgh has always had at least one reliable source of print
journalism — until now.
Print,
as a technological medium, may be dying. You’ll notice that this editorial is
not coming to you on a sheet of newsprint. But some sort of daily publication
is needed to reach the masses, whether on their phones, their computers, or
their front stoops. The written word — whether in ink or in pixels — delivers a
thoroughness and a seriousness that video cannot replace.
…
We all have a part to play — publishers, writers, photographers, editors, and —
yes — readers. In a republic, the people rule themselves. They cannot do so
without reliable news to tell them about the world. Republican governance in
Pittsburgh — and all of western Pennsylvania — will now be worse off.
You
can read the rest of the editorial via the link below:
From the Editors: A functioning republic needs a functioning news media
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