If only I could have come out as a bloody liberal

Or maybe that should be, “bloodied.” The experience has been bruising, even without physical violence.

For the record, half of the newspapers where I worked had Republican identities on the editorial page. Of the remainder, one was liberal, one was neutral, and two did not endorse political candidates, period. And in the ‘80s, when I was presenting editors with a range of political columnists, the only ones that sold were conservative.

Early on in my career, I learned that as a true journalist I had to put personal feelings aside and attempt to listen to both sides of an issue. Much later, in Quaker decision-making I saw how that could lead to a third, and much better, solution to a problem before us, not that the general public seems open to that these days.

As for critical neutrality, the critical lesson came the time I was an intern and wore a Nelson Rockefeller button sticker into the newsroom after our paper endorsed him for president. I was told to remove it, and I did. Remember, he was a Republican and this was a Republican newspaper in a town that still had two – the other one was pro-labor and Democratic and had the bigger circulation. And this was during the period presented in the TV series Mad Men. My daughters are still aghast and intrigued by the outrages and great fashion style of that period the series presented. They’re still appalled by the hippie influences that followed, the very ones I found liberating.

As a journalist, the point I learned was that to listen to people, I had to be neutral, all ears. Unlike Fox TV, still far off in the future. It’s still not news in any vein I respect. But I come from a camp that abhors sleeping with your sources, OK?

Apart from that, the reporters and editors I knew weren’t paid enough to identify with the rich? Our incomes were an embarrassment, even to the local Catholic priest the first time I married. As well as my-then wife’s uncle. If we identified with the poor at a gut level, we had good reason. And, across the nation, most of our newsrooms were non-union – trying to organize in the face of national conglomerates was suicidal, since they could outsource at a moment’s notice. Do note the party divide here.

For much of my career, newspapers were incredibly lucrative. Period. Not that pay levels reflected that. But then the business model, sustained by advertising far surpassing the newsstand or subscription price, came crashing down. Somebody has to pay the bills of covering a community. Walmart definitely wasn’t, nor were the other Big Box stores and their colorful inserts didn’t match the rates of those local ads abutting the news.

So, even apart from that, I’m not surprised American newspapers are in crisis. In my four decades as a professional journalist, I saw news coverage under attack – not just from the outside, but more crucially from owners who first bled billions from its renewed growth and vitality and then started giving the product away online without a viable business model in sight. My novel, Hometown News, paid homage to the battle and what could have been, along with journalists’ role in the survival of communities across the continent and democracy itself. In the book, it was like Richard Brautigan and Molly Ivins met Dilbert and Kafka in an industrial city vaguely in the Midwest, even when their names, sex, and races were changed.

My career as a journalist placed me in enough decaying Rust Belt industrial cities to shape one novel of high-level global investor intrigue, though it will likely remain in unpublished draft. It definitely rambles.

What is available for you to read begins as a factual distillation of some of the communities and newsrooms where I labored, but it soon turns surreal in the face of corporate management (make that mismanagement) and global conglomerates that step-by-step decimate the local economy and very existence.

While the initial draft of the book was completed in the mid-80s, revisions took time, and the work failed into fall into a marketable genre. Publishers saw it as too much of a risk and then, as newspapers lost their power and prestige on the public stage, reader interest in what really happens in newspapers dropped sharply. We are in trouble.

Let me emphasize, though, I never saw political arguments sway the development or placement of developing news stories. The decisions were made on other factors, like is it interesting? Does it have impact? Oh, really?

If we true journalists do have a bias, it’s for factual truth. We hate being lied to or being used as unwitting dupes. The consequences to that, unfortunately, have been diluted under the right-wing deluge.

For local perspective, let me recall a candidate for the board of education telling me point blank, for the record, that he wouldn’t be moving away after winning reelection and renewing the contract of a controversial school superintendent – and then he did precisely that, It still leaves a dirty taste in my mouth, may he rot in hell, no matter his professions. We ran his quote, that much was exactly what he said. But he lied, on behalf of a Republican majority on the board. Would that affect how I saw the rest of them? You betcha. And it wasn’t the first time, even back then.

But they would still get a fair hearing, even if I hadn’t moved on.

Something similar went on elsewhere with a maverick sheriff who got elected to Congress as a Democrat while being investigated for Mob connections and a host of corruption charges. Somehow I’m recalling that an undercover agent fell from above the ceiling and onto the restaurant booth table where our suspect was dining – or whatever. We pursued that story and more, not that it didn’t keep him from winning and being reelected. For details, look up Jim Traficant’s wild record.

For that matter, he could have been an inspiration for Trump.

~*~

Leap ahead to the current polarization in the political spectrum. My decision to subtitle the novel “Reports from Trump Country,” seems prescient, given the array of Blue states as metropolitan centers with a sense of vibrancy and a future – largely on the East and West coasts – while the Red states are more rural and stagnant in between.

The hometown in my novel wound up on the rocks and, from what I’ve seen since, that hasn’t changed.

What I am finding disturbing is the rampant spread of patently false stories. It appears that way too many people don’t want to face verifiable facts, like half-empty arenas. As journalists, we knew all too well that some seemingly great stories proved baseless once we made “one phone call to many.” Do note the unsupported delusions being repeated by people with very definite biases.

Maybe I’m shouting in vain to the wind, but I’ll leave that up to you to determine.

You can find Hometown News in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. It’s also available in paper and Kindle at Amazon, or you can ask your local library to obtain it.