Your Local Newspaper
More essential to our political life than most realize.
There is no replacement for a local newspaper. Neither 24-hour TV channels nor internet chatter can fill the void. Over and over again in America, the local newspaper has given renewed strength to our democracy.
I understand the present decline in readership and advertising revenues and how they reinforce each other. I therefore respect the efforts that staff, editors and owners of hometown papers have been making to ensure their survival.
Can we, the public, do more to help, besides supporting the advertisers and becoming subscribers? I think we should reexamine its value, believe in its importance, and encourage our friends to subscribe and read.
In a local newspaper you are offered background essential to understand current “news.” In a local newspaper you hear, in their own voices, advocates for different sides of issues, many of whom are our friends and neighbors. Online news briefs and ‘breaking news” summaries skim the surface and are often partisan and misleading.
We know better than to trust internet voyeurism. We must stop believing that local online announcement blurbs satisfy our need for the kind of information and commentary that is necessary if we are to fulfill our role as citizens.
Even national news sources offer less than we need. The bottom line, the test and the proof of decisions made at the national level is their effect on us--in the town where we live, with respect to the choices that we have, and the quality of life of our neighbors. As citizens and voters our best lens to judge national leaders and their policies is to understand its effect on our everyday lives. That is what local newspapers provide. They lay out and map the sources that affect our lives (national and international news) and then spell out their concrete outcomes, block by block, street by street, our lives as they are lived.
On the pages of a local newspaper we discover all that we share with our neighbors. We celebrate with them their births, weddings and anniversaries. We grieve with them for their losses. We see firsthand the results of corporate greed and government neglect. We see first-hand the successes of local philanthropy, new investments and public improvements. We can trace lines of causation and judge the value and failures of government policies at all levels.
Our vote has no “voice” if it is a blind reflex. Informed voting is more than partisan voting. It is more than emotional responses to slick TV ads. To be effective, to be aligned with our interests, it must be grounded in fair, accurate, local reporting, news that is based on the lives lived on our streets, in our neighborhoods and community.
Our local paper will not be always accurate. We will read opinions that we find offensive or wrong. We are all human, that is flawed, observers depending upon other human sources to challenge our errors and supplement our own experiences. Few sources of news in America, however, report as accurately as the local newspaper.
Our Democracy depends on their being local news sources that cover things in depth, written by people who live here with us and that we can trust.