A Halloween Zombie

I grew up reading a daily newspaper. Most people did in the 1960s. Chicago had four daily newspapers in those days. We had the Sun-Times delivered in the morning, and my parents often bought the Daily News, the Chicago evening paper, as well. On top of that, we received the South-town Economist, containing news from our local neighborhood, once a week. Admittedly, my reading was confined primarily to the sports pages in those days, but I did occasionally drift into the front section of the paper as well.

Both of my parents read the paper each day, and my dad often saved headlines or entire papers covering events that he thought were historically significant. He kept a box in the attic with papers covering everything from World War II, to landmarks in the space race, to the JFK assassination. Sometime in the ‘70s, my mom went on a cleaning frenzy and tossed the entire box without telling him. He hit the roof when he found out about it. From that day until he died, whenever I was home visiting, I would subtly remind him of those headlines just to watch his head explode. I would casually say, “Hey dad, I’m teaching about WWII in class. Have you still got those old papers in the attic?” He would immediately turn red, grind his teeth violently, and go into a tirade that began with the words, “I had every goddamned headline from the war, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, but your mother . . .”

It was great entertainment.

Chicago was in the center of the news in 1968, when I was 14.  Local protests over the Tet Offensive in Vietnam registered on my radar in February. The city was ripped by rioting after Dr. King’s assassination in April. The Irish-Catholic neighborhood in which I grew up went into mourning when Bobby Kennedy was killed in June. In August, the “police riots,” as they were called by the Attorney General, against anti-war protestors went on for days at the Democratic Convention. Thus, I started paying more attention to the front page news in my teens, but it was college which really awakened my interest in following a daily newspaper. In 1973, my sophomore year, I vividly remember a classmate asking our history professor about Watergate. The Nixon scandal that led to his impeachment was just heating up, but I hadn’t paid it much attention to that point. The student asked, “Do you think this stuff will make it into the history textbooks someday?” The teacher looked flabbergasted and, struggling to find words, finally replied, “They will be writing . . . volumes about this in the future.” I felt guilty about not realizing the import of this event, and, from that point on, reading a newspaper became a big part of my daily routine. That routine has continued for the rest of my life.

It was the Washington Post, with reporters Woodward and Bernstein relentlessly pursuing the truth, that finally exposed the Nixon cover-up and helped bring down a corrupt president. Good newspapers have cautious editors who won’t print a story until they are certain it is accurate. Fact-checkers follow through meticulously to assure the veracity of every detail. This process stands in sharp contrast to web-based “news” sources in which any idiot with wi-fi access can voice an opinion and pass it off as “news.” (You are reading one such idiot’s thoughts at the moment.) There is no guarantee of accuracy, integrity, or even an attempt to discover the entire truth. Those stories might even be picked up and reported on cable news channels. I shudder for the future of democracy in a nation that gets its news exclusively from the internet or television.

When I first moved to Nashville in 1997, the Tennessean was a first-rate newspaper. Moreover, the Nashville Banner was an evening paper that provided healthy competition which, in turn, kept both papers on the top of their game. I didn’t realize it, but right at that moment, the nature of the daily newspaper was changing. By 2000, people began discontinuing their newspaper deliveries and getting their news on-line. Advertisers shifted away from newsprint to digital sites, circulation began to plummet, and newspapers faced economic disaster. Soon the Banner went out of business and the Tennessean, without competition, went steadily downhill. Each year, the price went up considerably, and the content went down to the point where it had become a provincial, small-town newspaper. In recent years, the editors made a conscious decision to cover only local events and issues, to the exclusion of any national news or sports. There were only rare exceptions to this rule, such as when a former student, Jamie McGee-Chenery, wrote an award-winning, multi-part series on Haiti in the aftermath of a natural disaster. But those stories were anomalies. By the time we moved from Nashville, the paper was feather-light (both literally and figuratively), expensive, and seemed to cover only country music, the Titans, Predators, and the Vanderbilt and Tennessee football teams. No baseball, basketball, or high-school sports with the exception of Saturday coverage of HS football games. Moreover, any games that finished after 5:00 p.m. were deemed “too late” to make the next day’s paper. For example, if a Saturday football game started at 2:30 in the afternoon and finished at 5:30, the story about the game would not appear until Monday morning. National and business news were non-existent.

When we moved to Wisconsin, we knew that River Falls was too small to support a daily newspaper. We also thought that the decline of Nashville’s newspaper was an endemic problem affecting all papers. We believed that our beloved daily newspaper was dead and buried in a six-foot grave reserved for outmoded forms of communication and technology. Still, we wanted a daily paper to read each morning and sampled the two papers from Minneapolis-St. Paul, only 20 miles away across the St. Croix River. We have been delighted to find that we were wrong about the demise of the daily newspaper. Both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis appear to be first-rate newspapers. We chose the Star-Tribune for a trial run. The paper is expensive to have delivered, but having a newspaper is important to Kathleen and me, so we bit the bullet. From the first issue that landed on our doorstep, we could see a noticeable difference. Instead of a story about still another country music awards show or the Titans NFL game on the front page, there was a headline about the impeachment inquiry into the dealings of another corrupt president. I felt as if I had come full circle from that history class in 1973. I could almost hear that history professor saying, “They will be writing . . . volumes about this!” On a daily basis, the paper contains a full section on national and state news, one on local events, one on business, one on entertainment, and a 12-page sports section. And when I say “sports,” I mean more than just football. A World Series game had been played the night before and ended late, yet the full story about the game was included. There was coverage on basketball, hockey, football, and other sports. Several pages were devoted to the high-school soccer and tennis playoffs, as well as results from cross-country meets. Even the letters to the editor were intelligent and well-reasoned. In short, it was everything we were hoping to find in a newspaper, but had not seen for years in Nashville.

Since the Peter Zenger case in 1735, long before the US was even an independent nation, freedom of the press has been a hallmark of American democracy. That freedom was under attack during the slavery debate in the early 1800s, in World War I under President Wilson, and at other times in our history.  In recent years, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Donald Trump have attempted to silence or intimidate newspapers that voiced a disagreement with them. As we watched the steady decline of our newspaper in Nashville, we thought that the same thing was happening across the country, and that democracy itself was endangered. In our minds, however, the newspaper has clawed its way out of the grave like a Halloween Zombie. So add another item to the list of reasons we are happy we made the move up here.