December 13, 2008 12:01 AM
Crumbling
This cartoon may seem a bit self-serving, given the recent news about this newspaper. I'm most likely to be unemployed fairly soon, no longer doing the job I love. In the week following the announcement that the Rocky is for sale, the Miami Herald was put up for sale, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times announced it was borrowing millions against its new building. As worried as I am about my own fate, I'm more worried about an America with a severely weakened newspaper industry. There's a reason the First Amendment gives special treatment to the press. We're the watchdogs of a free society.
Yes, we make plenty of mistakes, yes our judgment can be impaired by personal bias, yes we can be intrusive and annoying. But there's no ready replacement for what we do. We're where the news comes from. Newspaper reporters generate most of the stories you read, hear on the radio and see on television. Sure, bloggers fill some of the vacuum, but the blogosphere does not operate under the rules of journalism. It propagates many more false stories, lies, libels, flights of fancy, rumors, and deliberate distortions than it does credible news stories. For all our errors, we ink-stained wretches of the legitimate press try to adhere to strict standards of fact-gathering and of vetting the information we gather before we print it. When we make mistakes, we correct ourselves.
Those of you who dismiss the press as simply biased, of blindly pressing an agenda, have not worked in a newspaper newsroom and seen firsthand the care taken every day with every story by disciplined reporters and editors. This is especially true when we are breaking a story about political or financial malfeasance, which may be the most important job we do. When we are acting in the role of watchdog, and we've caught a burglar, we absolutely want to get it right. You need to look no further than today's paper to see what I mean. Laura Frank's dogged investigative work on the continuing failure of the federal government to compensate ailing Rocky Flats workers for illnesses they contracted making nuclear bomb parts with radioactive material is the newspaper at its best. Who else is going to do that job when we're gone? Who's going to stand up for the sick and the dying and force our government to honor its commitments? I shudder to think what this society might become without strong, vital newspapers performing the eternal vigilance that makes a democratic society viable.
