Years ago, I knew an old boxer named Bob Evans who was a parking lot attendant, before automation eliminated his job. He told me his first job ever was selling the Chicago Defender on street corners. He’d chant, “Hey lady, with the bald-headed baby, buy the Chicago Defender!”
The Defender at that time was the nation’s best black newspaper, though the Pittsburgh Courier would eclipse it during World War II. The black and white worlds were rigidly segregated and very different then. But people in both worlds read newspapers. They read them and talked about them, loved them, got mad at them, canceled their subscriptions and started them again.
They argued with the editorials, laughed at the comics and cut things out. Immigrants often learned how to read from newspapers, and about life in these United States.
Some papers were corrupt or petty. Others, high-minded. But you got information from them in a way entirely different from on the Internet.
There was a human, tactile feel. Today, I can call up and scroll down a list of political stories I need to read. In the old days, I might have been reading an item about the state budget, and elsewhere on the page, a story about a giant squid might catch my eye.
And newspapers also were an answer to the question Plato posed so many centuries ago: Who will guard the guardians? Who will watch over those who supposedly are running our society? If the mayor and city council in Ann Arbor started spending like drunken sailors, we knew, in the old days, the Ann Arbor News would tell us.
But now there is no daily Ann Arbor News. The Detroit News, which sold 670,000 copies when I was there, now sells about 40,000. This is an enormous problem.
You can say, rightly, that nostalgia for old technology is silly. And there’s a lot to be said for pixels over dead trees, though I will always prefer holding paper in my lands. But we should also be more than nostalgic for a time when people were better informed, and there were more journalists to keep an eye on our local officials to make sure they weren’t stealing.
In a world with fewer newspapers, our democracy is also in danger of being choked to death by false information. Newspaper reporters and editors are trained in how to filter out lies and propaganda and report only what we were pretty sure is true.
That’s not the case on the Internet, where everyone can be a publisher but nobody has to work with an editor. People still claim on the Internet that Donald Trump really won the popular vote and that Hillary Clinton was a pornographer.
Both things are totally false, but are believed by millions. Newspapers face another new hurdle, too: Trump’s tariffs on Canada are adding as much as 30 percent to the price of newsprint, which may be enough to send more papers out of business. Newspapers still make far more money from ads in print than on line.
Thomas Jefferson once said he’d prefer newspapers without a government than the other way around. He knew government without newspapers meant tyranny.
We don’t want to find out what that looks like. Our only hope may be high-minded wealthy citizens buying papers and operating them as a public service, as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has done with the Washington Post. The next time a Shri Thanedar or Sandy Pensler thinks about spending millions on a hopeless run for office, someone should tell them they could have a lot bigger impact on society by investing in their local newspapers instead.
