By Raleigh Perry
BUFORD, Ga. | Coming from a family in Chattanooga with a lot of newspaper people in it and having a newspaper on my breakfast and dinner tables, I have an appreciation of the printed media. There were two dailies. The Times in the morning and the Free Press in the afternoon. One leaned left, the other right.
Perry
My grandfather was an editor for a while with the Times and my uncle was an editor for the Free Press. My uncle bought a small weekly which he published while working at the Free Press. He did not compete; it basically ran legal advertisements .
My uncle died just after World War II and the management of that paper fell to my aunt, my grandmother’s sister. She ran the paper from then to late 1975. It had never lost a penny since its inception.
The problem today is that newspapers, per se, are falling by the wayside. Everyone that is interested in the news gets the blather from radio, television and now their phones and computers. Just looking at today’s New York Times and remembering the national/world news that was presented on CBS’ Evening News is shocking. The CBS news is about 15 minutes of news and 15 minutes of advertising. On most days, like today, it took me well over 30 minutes just to read the Times front page. That id is real news, while what is presented on CBS is somewhat trite.
I can remember when The Atlanta Constitution was a very good paper. It no longer has its own staff as it once did, and they have lots of stories from other newspapers of the Associated Press. There is little Atlanta (and almost no Gwinnett) coverage there. Today there are not only fewer stories, but many long (often boring) stories, often rehashed.
You think you are getting the news important from one of the news channels – CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX? If so, you miss a lot. The cable channels like MSNBC and CNN are more commentary and opinion on the news. The basic anchors of yesteryear, like Walter Cronkite and John Cameron Swazye, read the news without any obvious bias. And then the television news was more news than advertising.
Any daily newspaper should print more national and international news than it does. Most of what we get from overseas are condensed squidgets. And all too often in the AJC, all it tells me basically is how many people were shot in Atlanta or some other bizarre crime stories. It is easier (and cheaper) to present “emergency” news than hard-digging exposes.
The really sad part is that, without newspapers, people don’t get in-depth news, nor much news about the everyday working of government. That, in the long run, weakens our democracy, and not just a little bit, but tremendously. Can we recover this?
Yes, I get the AJC and the NYT in my driveway. I subscribe to the Washington Post online. I read articles from other papers as well as four other outlets online. I want all the news that is fit to print rather than some of the news that fits, we print.
I was raised by those who worked in the field, and once you get printer’s ink in your system, it never goes away.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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