The Printer’s Devil

Jump to Comments

No.1

When I was a young and callow reporter, I sat through a “visioning” session in the small city I worked in, dutifully writing all the suggestions about the city’s future and what could be done to make it a better place to live in.

In the group I was in, I noticed one prominent business executive who loathed the newspaper, and by extension, me, because I worked for it.

When the discussion got around to finding ways to “foster communication” among the community, the guy, glaring at me, raised his hand to speak.

I inwardly cringed, expecting another loud harangue about what a crappy job the newspaper was doing.

What I heard astonished me.

My newspaper’s worst critic gave one of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard about the importance of newspapers, especially, small-town newspapers:

• More than any other institution, the newspaper is the glue that holds the community together.

At a time when many small-town churches are seeing their numbers decline, when populations, especially in rural areas are fleeing, when schools often aren’t connected to their communities, it’s the newspaper that everyone knows and that provides a common source of information and experience.

• A newspaper is often the oldest continuous business in town and the county, and as such provides an important source of continuity for the community.

• The newspaper is often the engine that makes the local economy go, highlighting new businesses and events, cajoling existing businesses into advertising their products and services.

• Outside of school and government, the newspaper is often the largest — and most profitable — small business in town and is a major source of employment (although for most of its employees, at sweat-shop pay scales).

• The newspaper is the major, and many times, the sole, historical document for the community.

• The newspaper is often the only institution that serves as a check and balance on local political power and provided a firewall against its abuse. while squelching outlandish gossip, innuendo and rumor. It’s the collective conscious for the community.

Indeed, the job of a newspaper report is the most important in the community — and in the world.

More than that of a saint. More than a healer. Even more than a teacher.

If you’ll forgive a bit of pontificating, I say the pen is mightier than the sword, and a newspaper reporter is the ultimate soldier and defender of democracy.

Without a free and independent press, there is no democracy. There is instead, hunger, famine and pestilence.

Saints, healers, teachers and soldiers serve democracy but they also can serve the cause of hunger, famine and pestilence through “right is might” religion, “might is right” militarism and “the ends justifies the means” political and social theory.

As history show, they have — often enthusiastically.

But a free and independent press cannot.

That’s not just my own opinion. That is the finding of a United Nations study on the press done a few years ago.

The U.N. study found that in every case, countries without a free press were often in dire shape, wracked by widespread starvation, overwhelmed by epidemics or public health disasters, and facing economic peril and impoverished national treasuries.

Countries with free and independent newspapers aren’t perfect and things could sometimes be grim, but as the U.N. study pointed out, you don’t see the Horsemen of the Apocalypse stabling their mounts in those countries.

Perhaps you are old enough, as I am, to remember your mother or grandmother saying, “Eat your (fill in the green, disgusting-looking vegetable not of your choice), there are children starving in India.”

However, that doesn’t apply as much because although there are children in poverty and who are hungry, there isn’t the mass die-off of children that used to occur in India or that is occurring elsewhere in the world.

That’s because Indian newspapers are free and independent, raucous and rambunctious.

If children are starving in one far-flung Indian state or if cholera breaks out in another, the newspapers are there casting a harsh light on the situation, and those who allowed it.

Good newspapers are agents of chaos (with apologies to science fiction writer Norman Spinrad). They comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I can write from here till the cows come in about what a genius my town’s mayor is. He, in turn, will consider me the most accurate and objective journalist — and happily continue conducting the public’s business as he continues to see fit.

And there are many newspapers and other publications over the years who willingly served Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini (who won his first national attention as a newspaper reporter) or Mao Dze Dhung and described them as geniuses.

But should I continually point out the potholes the mayor hasn’t bothered to fill or the city’s money he spent on that Christmas party with his hot secretary — with the unspoken but implied thought that he’s corrupt or a moron — and things will likely get fixed (of course, after he’s castigated me as a troublemaker and fool).

Even the Soviet, Chinese and other tyrants have felt the sting of news guerrillas circulating handwritten samzidats or hurriedly plastering posters on the wall of Tienamin Square.

Freedom of the press is freedom to point fingers. Nasty publicity gets things done. It’s that fear of nasty publicity that makes democracy work.

However, freedom of the press isn’t free. You can exercise your First Amendment rights but you don’t escape the consequences.

It’s that fear of nasty publicity that tends to get reporters shot, be it in Putin’s Russian, Bush’s Iraq or in the Congo.

A community doesn’t thank a good newspaper. Despite their protestations, most people abhor change and despise the different. Conformity and stability are powerful forces.

It’s not unlike the Dark Ages, where grandfathers, fathers and sons lived in the same place, planted the same crops, followed the same routines, thought the same thoughts, where change often involved Viking raiders making off with their daughters or a result of the work of witches wizards.

Throwing rocks and upsetting the community’s stability gets things done. And the community expects that from a good newspaper reporter.

But they don’t like it.

In any community, reporters are seen as seedy and slightly dangerous. Their social standing is somewhat below a street walker and a cut above a labor-union organizer or an ambulance-chasing attorney.

Reporters are soldiers of democracy. Unfortunately, they’re also democracy’s castor oil.

30