The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Upon graduating from the University of Arizona in 1977, I’d scan the back pages of “Editor and Publisher” magazine hunting for newspapers seeking an earnest editorial cartoonist to grace their opinion pages. The help wanted ads in newspaper trade journals often posed this question to wanna-be journalists: ”Do you have ink in your veins?”
If the lifeblood of journalism is ink then the opinion page is the beating heart. It’s where emotion, subjectivity and debate are encouraged. It’s where, in my youth, I discovered columnists like Molly Ivins, Mary McGrory, E.J. Dionne, Royko, George Will and Leonard Pitts. It’s where I’d find stirring editorials, great written oratory, surprising guest essays, provocative analyses to challenge my assumptions and the most popular and enjoyable feature, letters to the editor, where our neighbors vent, praise, and fret over our Republic.
Well, fret away, dear readers, because across our troubled democracy many a corporate high priest is cutting the beating hearts out of their small town and big city newspapers on the sacrificial altar of profit.
Permit me here to suck up to my employer. I am grateful to work for the Arizona Daily Star, a rare newspaper that genuinely values local opinion. This lucky cartoonist, as I often note, is also fortunate because my weekly cartoons are syndicated globally by Daryl Cagle’s Cagle Cartoons, Incorporated. When I returned from celebrating my semi-retirement last week I saw this notice from Daryl Cagle informing we cartoonists Gannett has given notice to all syndicates they are terminating all content produced by editorial cartoonists and opinion columnists. All of it.
That’s huge. Gannett owns one-fourth of America’s dailies and already many Gannett papers have jettisoned their opinion pages. Today, Gannett’s flagship national paper “USA Today” runs no editorial cartoons. Gannett and Lee jointly own the Star, but the newsroom typically follows Lee guidance.
A devotee of the Google News Initiative, Gannett argues that opinion content is divisive. And unpopular with readers, readers who end up canceling their subscriptions. I am reminded of the great editorial which ran in 1897, in the New York Sun, that begins with “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” only, in 2022, Virginia, there is an Ebenezer Scrooge and he is the CEO of Gannett. And he believes opinion pages are a humbug, obsolete Ghosts of Journalism Past that spook readers, along with those pesky political endorsements and letters to the editor.
A Gannett cabal noted at a spring meeting, “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think. They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues.”
Readers will simply have to rely on Fox News and Twitter for analysis now in democracy’s most perilous hour.
“They perceive us as having a biased agenda.”
Did anyone stand up at this gathering and note all opinion pages are wells of bias, leanings, viewpoints and perspectives and that any reader who thinks opinion pages are intended to be beacons of pure objectivity are ill-informed fools?
Opinion is “our least read content.” And is “frequently cited by readers as a reason for canceling their subscriptions.” Must be after they don’t read them.
Opinion pages are going out with a whimper.
A far more noble end — and one desired by editors everywhere — would be what befell Mark Twain when he worked for one week, editing, the “Morning Glory and Johnson County War-Whoop.”
Twain noted, “vigorous writing is calculated to elevate the public,” but, he’s reluctant to attract the attention “it calls forth.” His writing spurs a “gentleman” who shoots at him through a window “and cripples me.” A bombshell comes down his stovepipe. Next, a reader ”freckles“ Twain with bullet holes, “till my skin won’t hold my principles,” and another throws Twain out the window, followed by another angry reader who tears all his clothes off, and an “entire stranger” who scalps him “with the easy freedom of an old acquaintance.” His opining career ends “in less than five minutes” when all the “blackguards in the country arrive in their war-paint, and proceed to scare the rest of me to death with their tomahawks.” Twain writes what he’s written “today …will wake up another nest of hornets. I shall have to bid you adieu ... journalism is too stirring for me.”
Like craven Twain’s trembling editor, Gannett, afraid to poke the hornet’s nests, has found 21st century commentary journalism “too stirring.”
I was privileged to work for the late Tony Snow when he was editorial page editor of the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia. The future press secretary for President George W. Bush would answer every irate reader with the same admonition, “Thanks for your view. I am confident our democratic republic will survive our differences.”
Today, I am not so confident, fearing for the press that fears such differences.
