To assuage the most critical of Arizona Daily Star readers — those who believe the Star is simply another channel of the crazed, left-wing media or to those who believe the Star is actually a running, rabid dog on the capitalism gone mad — I have to say up front: I don’t care about your politics. You should understand the why and wherefore of media.
I would not argue that media doesn’t matter, any more than I would argue politics doesn’t matter. Thomas Payne probably did more toward the successful completion of the American Revolution than any other Founding Father. Jean-Paul Marat was the journalist who composed the list for the Guillotine during the French Revolution. Ricardo Flores Magon started the movement that created the Mexico Revolution, only to die in an Arizona prison. When Lyndon Johnson heard Walter Cronkite describe the War in Vietnam as unwinnable, he said, “If we have lost Cronkite, we have lost the war.”
Unfortunately, there is usually more pragmatism than idealism in the press, and greed often overcomes common sense.
I am not exactly a stranger to all of this, having spent 30 years as a newspaper person. I have edited two daily newspapers, more than a half a dozen weeklies and my last job was working as the first American copy editor for the Shenzhen Daily, one of three English language newspapers in China back in 2003. I can only tell you one thing with certainty: media outlets are not, for the most part, propaganda outlets — they are businesses.
I had one publisher tell me, “the basic function of a newspaper is to make the reader feel good enough about the economy to use his credit card.” Another told me: “I want sex, crime and violence above the fold every day!”
Even Rupert Murdoch was more interested in making money than ideological changes — his first “investment” in America was the National Enquirer. MSNBC was created because Fox news was profitable.
Unfortunately, newspapers are often managed from above by people who make some bad decisions. In the 1960s, they began investing heavily in shoppers – creating their own competition. In the 1980, they invested in computers to get rid of those pesky copy editors and followed that by charging for obituaries, one of the main reasons many people read newspapers.
Having said all of that, I still read three newspapers (including the Star) every day because there is still some common sense out there. Because I read the newspapers, I learned about city parks closing before any of my friends who get their news from Facebook. Because I read the Star, I knew there was going to problems when a man died in police custody.
Because of the Star, I have some idea what is happening with rental prices and business in Tucson, and scan the letters to the editor to see how many crazies I am sharing Pima County with.
The one thing all of these papers have in common is fact-checking. To brandish the idea of “fake news” at any newspaper with that can demonstrate “absence of malice” (basically meaning it is professionally edited) is both unfair and foolish.
I have been extremely critical of the Star from time to time (as its editor will attest), but it is the community newspaper and the city is better for it.
