Most of my posts have to do with natural history, but every once in a while my ruminations go elsewhere, this is one of those times.
When I was a kid, the paper came every morning. Sometimes if I were awake early enough, I’d hear the sound of a car driving up our cul-de-sac accompanied by the thwap, …thwap, …thwap sound of the papers hitting the driveways, then the car would drive back down the hill.
Our dalmatian, like all dogs, loved routines. Every morning we’d let him out of the house to check his pee-mail and do his “business”, then he’d run down the driveway and get the newspaper. The Sunday paper or holiday editions could be especially entertaining watching him muscle the huge wad of newsprint into his mouth and haul it back to us. Once delivered he knew he would get his morning biscuits.
This tradition carried on with our next dog, and then every dog since then I’ve trained to retrieve the paper. The dogs loved it, it was their job, their morning routine. Except now, my newest dog Jasper doesn’t get the paper because there isn’t one to get. He doesn’t know what he’s missing but I do, and I miss it more than just something for the dog to do. I feel the loss of a local newspaper being tossed onto everyone’s driveway in the morning reverberates throughout our society.
I’ve heard the arguments, “It’s fine, we’re saving paper and trees by not printing so much”, and “We can get our news online or from other media”. Yeah, yeah yeah. But much more than just news was associated with getting a daily paper.
For example, the comics or, the funnies as my dad called them. These were a gateway for kids to start reading, following characters and plot lines. How many of us grew up reading Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, B.C., Calvin and Hobbs, Luann, For Better or Worse, The Far Side, and many others? For myself, the comics also made me more politically aware. I thank Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury for giving my young brain a different perspective than what was in the headlines on topics like Vietnam, the Nixon administration, or hippie counterculture – thanks Zonker!
I also think the daily paper provided a sense of community. Local papers cater to the local community and can act as a buffer for news stories. They’re less likely to go too far to one extreme or another because their owners and editors live and know their communities. They know they need to keep the area’s schools, businesses, and job creators thriving and advertising.
Some sections discussed issues affecting our neighborhoods, schools, and businesses. The sports pages allowed us to follow our local teams and student-athletes. There were games, classified ads, theater schedules, restaurant reviews, and articles on things you never thought of reading about that sparked your interest in another direction! The habit of reading the paper, or even skimming the headlines, widened our outlook and created a more well-informed citizenry.
I just read about a recent study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern that said in 2023, the loss of local newspapers went up to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
This leads to one of the biggest things I lament about the loss of the daily paper, it provided common ground. When I was young we had one or two papers and the big three networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) from where we all got our news. But that paradigm changed starting with cable TV and CNN, then FOX arrived with its agenda and others behind them. When the internet came online the paradigm shattered; as can happen when new technologies burst onto the scene. (Similarly, over 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade following the birth of network radio.)
With social media and other specialized news services taking over as the main source for news, many rejoiced at the “Mainstream” media’s loss of dominance in the newsscape. Today, instead of everyone receiving their news from the mainstream, they can get their “news” from any stream, trickling creek, backwater, or stagnant pool they want.
If someone sees something reported about their favorite cause, interest, or politician, that makes them feel bad or question their beliefs, they can easily search for a “news source” that will make them feel better. A source that will feed them the “truth” they want to hear. All the search engines, social media platforms, and associated algorithms are only too willing to help us curate our news, feed our confirmation bias, and funnel eyeballs to their advertisers.
The daily paper is a thing of the past and I don’t see it returning. So, it’s up to us to expand our perspective, to get out of our tribe’s narrow feed of information and bias. It doesn’t take that much effort. A simple thing is to vary your news feeds, I read both the NY Times and The Wall Street Journal, and I listen to NPR and conservative talk radio. Ground News is a platform worth checking out. It makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. I’m always attempting to see multiple perspectives.
But more important than your news sources, curate your contacts, I truly value the relationships I have with my conservative friends, family members, and neighbors. They may not agree with me on everything but they are good people who love their pets, kids, and country; they give me that needed perspective.
Let’s not feed off the toxic narratives spewed forth from the screens, whose only purpose seems to be to keep us outraged, divided, glued to our screens and scrolling. Instead, talk to our neighbors and seek out common ground, seek out connections, and try to cultivate mutual respect, start there. We won’t always see eye to eye, but we can disagree without being disagreeable.
In the end, we truly are lucky. We are way better off than most folks in this world. Most of us don’t have to carry water every day, we can get electricity with the flick of a switch, we don’t have bombs or missiles dropping down on us, and if we hurt ourselves some good people will help us, we have amazing choices of food, drink, music and entertainment and so much more. People are literally dying trying to get into our country and participate in this good life.
It doesn’t mean there’s no room to improve but it’s bad for the soul to live in a perpetual state of outrage, to only focus on the dark side. There is always a silver lining, sometimes it just takes a little effort to find it glinting in the shadows.