We should be reading the Westerly Sun (Part II of II)

I started this piece with a description of the life of Joseph Pulitzer, but I didn't think it would keep your attention, so I dropped it. While I was researching his life, however, I came upon an interesting fact that is germane to the topic at hand: in the 1890s, for a city with a population of 1.5 million people (the size of today's Phoenix, AZ, more or less), New York City had 19 daily, English-language newspapers. That's right, 19, a figure that doesn't include the foreign-language dailies or weekly papers or specialty publications that served a particular political, social, or religious audience.

Obviously, there was no alternative media back then. If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to read a newspaper. So, let's assume you chose to read the New York Call every day (I'm fudging on chronology a little bit, because the Call didn't come out until 1908), which was one of the three English-language dailies in the United States associated with the Socialist Party of America. If all you read was the Call, you were getting the Socialist perspective on events, and you were getting the official party line of the Socialist Party, no other perspective, and no other point of view. You were being played by the Socialists.

Sound familiar? Actually, it isn't. I would hazard a guess that very, very few people read the Call outside of New York City. Folks living in Lincoln, Nebraska, or Providence, Rhode Island, or New Orleans, Louisiana, probably had no idea that the paper even existed. Whereas New York elected one of the two Socialist representatives (Meyer London) ever to sit in the United States Congress, cities like New Orleans and Lincoln cast no more than a couple of hundred votes for the Socialists at the height of the party's popularity in the presidential election of 1912.

I hope you don't think I'm suggesting that we are no better off with the media than we were a century ago. What I'm suggesting is that we have it much worse. These days, media giants control what we read and view more than they ever have before. Their reach is enormous. Let's take the media company, Sinclair Broadcasting Group. SBGI owns 193 TV stations in 89 media markets in the United States. (That number will grow once the merger with the Tribune Media Company is completed.) The knock on Sinclair is that it delivers conservative content. Perhaps that doesn't bother conservatives, but one needs to keep in mind that any agenda, in matter what it is, blocks full disclosure. If you're watching programming with an ideological bent, you don't decide what the whole story is, someone decides for you.

Would you like an obvious example? Take RT News. If you're watching RT News, if you've looking at RT News clips on YouTube, you are being played. You are being told what to think and what to believe by representatives of the Russian government, a foreign power with interests inimical to those of the United States. RT News lies through omission, obfuscation, and distortion. In other words, what they're showing you, on the face of things, is a version of the truth, of what happened in any given news story, but it's only a partial truth.

Without doubt, propaganda is a tough nut to crack. When I was living in Poland in 1986, I made a habit of trying to read Rzeczpospolita, the official government daily, every morning (as part of my regimen to mangle the Polish language at every possible occasion). One day I noticed an article on political prisoners in the United States. The writer claimed that minorities were in prison because of their association with political movements like the Black Panthers or MOVE. The paper went on to rail against the American hypocrisy of accusing the Soviet Union of having political prisoners because, after all, the Americans were doing the same thing.

That didn't seem right to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Some quick research at the American Embassy put the story straight. Mumia Abu-Jamal, for example, was a member of both organizations and is, to this day, sitting in a Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution. He has been imprisoned for the past 36 years, however, not for his political views but for the fact that he was convicted of killing Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Whether Mr. Abu-Jamal received a fair trial or not has been disputed up until very recently. Be that as it may, the Polish press said nothing about the criminal conviction, leading the reader to believe that people were in prison in the United States for their political beliefs. That was a deliberate distortion. Having the idea that something's not right is small comfort. As one Pole told me, "We know they're lying to us, we just don't know how."

Ladies and Gentlemen, we need to be careful about being played because there are forces out there that are trying to play us and the stakes are very high. A free, unfettered press is one of the cornerstones of our republic.

What's the solution? Allow me to suggest, yet again, that we all need to rely more on the local news. A few months back, Anne Applebaum wrote a very astute Op-Ed in The Washington Post entitled, "What a hurricane tells us about local news." In it, she argued that authoritarian regimes, like Vladimir Putin's Russia, do not tolerate news at the local level. As a result, if there's corruption in your home town, or some kind of scandal, you won't hear about it in the media, all information is controlled by the government. Applebaum also noted that local news is on its heels in the United States, not for governmental interference, just for the fact that Americans don't support their local newspapers anymore.

We should really work to reverse this course. If you don't know what's going on in your local community, other people are making decisions for you, about your taxes, about your schools, about quite a bit in your life. If you're reading the local paper, you have a much better idea what your neighbors think and what's going on in your community. Moreover, the local paper and local writers are much less likely to misinform you. (After all, you've got eyes, don't you? You live there, too.) If they do try to distort a story, it may mean their job. It's the reason why we should be reading The Westerly Sun.

Here's a really radical thought: if you don't recognize the name of the person reporting the story, don't read it. Imagine how quickly we'd rid ourselves of fake news then. Maybe we should all give that a try. We might even be able to start talking to each other again.