Let me explain. If I meet someone about my age who grew up in Michigan, I know automatically that we both remember Tiger Stadium, Al Kaline, Gordie Howe, and an appallingly long list of old advertising slogans. (Which way did he go? He went for Faygo!)
We remember Soapy Williams, the governor with the goofy grin and the green polka-dot bow tie, and how exciting it was when the Big Mac bridge finally united the two peninsulas.
Now, how can I be sure that someone born here in the 1950s knows all of these things? Simple. We were exposed to a common set of news media, all of which tried to provide us with a manageable digest of what was happening.
If you grew up in the Detroit area, I know that you got your statewide news from one of two newspapers, the News or Free Press, and from one of three local TV stations. If you lived In Kalamazoo or Flint or Grand Rapids or Muskegon, you got your news mainly from a good, solid local newspaper.
These papers largely resembled each other in structure and style, because they were part of the same group of eight papers in medium-sized Michigan cities. The others, by the way, were Jackson, Ann Arbor, Bay City and Saginaw.
And, whether you liked it or not, you heard news on the radio --even if you only listened to acid rock. That’s because the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission, required that every station provide some public service programming, including news.
That’s because the airwaves are public property. Broadcasting is legally a privilege, not a right, and if a station wanted to keep its license, it needed to serve the public.
News was one way to do that. The requirement that radio stations require news was dropped in the 1980s. The excuse was that it wasn‘t necessary, because there were now so many choices.
But too many people ended up not being exposed to news at all. The same thing happened with television. Now, newspapers, which always have been the main source of news of our communities, seem to be dying too.
Ann Arbor soon won‘t have a paper. Flint, Bay City and Saginaw have one only three days a week. The Detroit papers are increasingly dumbed down. Yesterday, with our state and its key industry in major crisis, the Sunday Free Press, the only paper available statewide, looked like a bad British tabloid. The main headline said: “Did cops grope 11 men in Detroit?“
Yes, there may be blogs somewhere with the information we used to get, but only a tiny fraction of the public knows how to find them. And I don’t think we can solve any of our state’s problems without a large number of reasonably informed citizens.
And that, even more than the economy, scares me.
Jack, I'm afraid it's going to come down to more and more "citizen journalists", at least until some other business model supporting professional journalism can develop. And, truth be told, lately I have more faith in some of these reporters than I do the traditional press outlets, that seem to be more and self-censoring themselves (particularly the local TV broadcasters). I have recently become a volunteer for ProPublica and will monitor some of Michigan's stimulus spending for them. I would encourage any others interested in keeping free and "independent" journalism alive in our country, to also volunteer as citizen journalists for any number of credible organizations. At the very least, we can help insure that truth and justice don't become just a quaint concept. Perhaps the Detroit papers should also enlist the aid of volunteer citizen journalists, like ProPublica is doing (though I don't think ANYTHING can help these "trash liners", now).
Posted by: George | June 23, 2009 at 11:37 AM
Part of the evolution of a civilization is the nature destruction of things..I view the newspapers in that context....
It is by no means the end of the world ..Truth is only a few people are decison makers and they not the masses..
This could be a great development..The end of disinformation, propaganda, tabloid driven fiction and news created by editors with a formuala
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