Just deranged, not unhinged. But the former Philly Inquirer newsman nonetheless touches on some very salient facts — and myths — in the course of his indictment of modern newspapering. First, the myths.
As we noted some weeks back, the sale of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to a bunch of Texas ad execs would send Newspaper People around the bend. For some reason Newspaper People like Lundy think that newspapers have been operating at a loss all these years and just recently has evil Wall Street tried to squeeze some cash out of them. In fact, newspapers have long enjoyed fat profit margins and only recently have seen those margins squeezed as they were forced to compete with New Media for eyeballs and ad dollars.
From this flawed premise Lundy deduces that newspapers are rushing to print happy news and cost-cut to the bone, putting our very democracy as risk. Let’s slow down.
Papers do print too much soft-focus pap for the same reason it fills TV screens — it is the lowest common denominator, most likely to find an audience. Such stories are also easy to churn out in that all of the skill in producing them — and well-done, feature stories are an art form — is located within the writers and editors. This means you pump in raw material — facts, relationships, events — and out pops a feature, usually with lots of eye-pleasing art.
Hard, in-depth news is harder to do on the front-end, day-in, day-out as you cannot always know exactly what expertise one might need to fill out the story, much less bring cold, hard data alive for readers. Throw in the time crunch and it is little wonder 1500 word features tend to get the nod in newsrooms. Nothing nefarious there.
Lundy is also onto something when he says newspapers, and the Uptown paper of record in particular, need to raise hell more. But take a look at his proposed list of targets. The Bush administration — who cares? Some of us have been hitting those yahoos between the eyes for six years now to no effect, and before that, the lying, mendacious Clintons, also to little effect. The simple fact is that the American presidency is largely beyond the reach of today’s media. So let’s move on, Walker.
Charlotte’s sorry road system is another of Lundy’s targets for some hell-raising. Welcome to the club there, too. But understand that the Observer has totally endorsed the anti-car, anti-suburb, anti-road mindset of city planners going back, oh, at least 15 years and certainly since the 1998 vote for the half-cent transit tax. Any hell-raising by the paper here would have to start with a “We Were Wrong” editorial followed by support for the repeal of the half-cent sales tax come November. Don’t hold your breath, Walker.
Smoking ban. Lundy evidently favors one, thinks there should be more hell raising for one. But Lundy does not seem to understand that the way North Carolina works is that everything not expressly permitted by the General Assembly is prohibited. As such, the hell-raising needs to be directed at the Down East kleptocracy in Raleigh. Again, welcome to the club there and recall how very, very, very hard it was for the Observer to say anything bad about Jim Black.
Lundy also asks, “Charlotte is considered one of the most pro-business cities in America. Why is this and what are the positive — and negative — ramifications to this?” No hell-raising there, far too tame.
We’ve already said that Charlotte is not pro-business; Charlotte is the most fascist city in America. When fascism is properly understood as a tight, almost seamless interconnection of government and large corporate interest, often with a thin veneer of highly circumscribed electoral input, Charlotte’s true nature becomes clear. Add in the almost unlimited power of the city manager form of government and you have a political system designed to make the trains run on time, with or without public input or approval.
Finally, Lundy misses that many, many local people have already given up on the Observer as anything other than an apologist for the status quo. That is why its circulation continues to drift downward and so many alternative forms of media — blogs, Podcasts, weekly papers, talk radio — command such attention in Charlotte.
And Lundy has it exactly backward when he asserts that a hell-raising newspaper “will get you the kind of democracy you deserve.” The Observer was on the wrong side of both 2001 Uptown arena vote and the 2005 school bond. Local residents used democracy to demand a different approach to politics and policy in Charlotte. For their trouble they were ignored, insulted, and in the case of the 2001 bond package, rolled over, reversed, and backed over.
The Uptown paper of record gleefully cheered the steamroller on. No hell raised, just dissent tamped down.
