NEXT, THEY’LL COME FOR THE NEWSPAPERS
A Fearful Screed on the Great Journalism Die Off
By Alan Goldfarb
Sept. 13, 2022
First, they came for the news racks on the street, most filled with penny-shoppers and porn papers. Most of us ignore them. But they’re first amendment documents. They clutter sidewalks, most with broken glass and oozing with city detritus. Next, they’ll come for the daily newspaper racks. And then, they’ll come for the newspapers.
You can’t blame me for sounding the alarm about what is The Great Newspaper Die Off and soon We’re All Gonna Not Know What the Hell is Going On, for Real. And so, I’m a newspaper alarmist on several levels.
Formatively, I was brought up in New York when we had about six or eight dailies. My family read two: The Daily Mirror in the morning and The Post in the afternoon. The latter had the best sports page in New York; and it was pre-Murdoch. Because of The Post and its great sportswriters like Lenny Koppett, Maury Allen and Vic Ziegel (who were known as The Chipmunks. You can look it up), I wanted to be a sportswriter. I was the sports editor of my junior high paper, The Spectator, I was the sports editor my senior year at SIU for The Daily Egyptian, and I was a sportswriter for the once-great Newsday when Bill Moyers was publisher, the original San Francisco Examiner and the Associated Press.
I have newspaper ink in my blood, but I don’t miss news ink all over my hands. I couldn’t believe it when I began reading the papers on my phone; eschewing paper papers. I got used to it. (Maybe I’m the reason there are less newspapers.)
But I’ll never get used to witnessing the slow, agonizing, contraction of one newspaper after another, year after year, day after day. There are whole cities left without a newspaper; or sans one that reports local news.
Do you know what that means? It means that our society knows less and less about what goes on in their municipalities, in the country, and in the world. And the powers that be -- corporate entities and government operatives -- want it that way. It seems the less Americans know, the better it is for the technocrats, oligarchs and the suits up in the suites, to conduct their business, unfettered.
Because at their utmost, this is what newspapers are for: They serve as a check against corruption and falsehoods. By decree, newspapers and the media are the Fourth Estate. The media are that part of society like the other branches of government –working in concert and with a degree of transparency – which are the pillars of our democracy.
But I digress. It’s easy for me to get on a tangent and a rant about what turmoil we’re going through, so I’ll get back to the kiddie section of the paper – the sports pages and the wine columns.
As with newspapers in general, there aren’t many outlets publishing much about wine any longer. And that’s what really worries me because I work with the wine media. I engage with it in hopes that it’ll write about my winery clients. I love writers. I love wine writers and I love my clients.
I live to witness all flourish. But the noose is ever tightening; and I fear we’ll continue to lose meaningful, substantive wine writing and wine journalism. And then we’ll all know less than we know today.