Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
I grew up in Baltimore. My family subscribed to the Evening Sun, the evening edition of the local newspaper with the best reputation. As with most kids, my first brush with the newspaper was through the funny pages, the cartoons. They carried Peanuts, Nancy, Smoky Stover, Dick Tracy, and lots of other popular cartoons of the time. I didn’t pay much attention to the actual news component until two things happened. First was Watergate, when the nation was in an unprecedented crisis that had everyone I knew wanting Nixon out of the White House. Prompted by my social studies teachers, I started paying attention to the news. The other thing was, while in high school, I became a paper boy actually delivering the Evening Sun and the Sunday Sun, and it doesn’t hurt to become familiar with the product you’re selling.
I started reading the Editorial page. My favorite columnist was Russell Baker, because he was so effective in making his point through the use of humor. It didn’t hurt that he spent a portion of his youth growing up in Baltimore, and also worked as a paper boy for the Sun before, years later, he started his career in journalism as a cub reporter, again for the Sun. (Baker’s memoirs, Growing Up and The Good Times, gives account of the events that shaped his life as well as his involvement in the newspaper business with grace and a large portion of self-deprecating humor. I recommend both highly.)
I eventually left home, but my mother would weekly send me clippings of my favorite comics and columnists. Meanwhile, I had switched to the hard stuff: the New York Times of the 1980s (which had no comics, I noted, no doubt to enhance its aura of seriousness).
It was during this time that the local news business discovered its vulnerability. Corporate raiders, who were ripping apart profitable businesses (because they weren’t profitable enough) and selling off the pieces, turned their attention to the news business, and saw small, local newspapers as a target. As they were killing manufacturing in small towns and cities across the country, they were also killing their newspapers. The illness spread to larger cities as well. In Baltimore, The Sun’s principal competitor, the News-American, a newspaper that traced a 200-year history, ceased publication in 1986. A decade later in 1995, the Sun ceased publication of its evening edition.
The Sun suffered through all the financial problems common to other local newspapers, including closings of foreign bureaus, and disappearing revenue in the era of online journalism. But this week came the unkindest cut of all. Long owned by national newspaper chains with little interest in the quality of local reporting, the Sun has returned to local ownership—but these new owners, David Smith and Armstrong Williams, are fringe right-wing propagandists and operatives. David Smith is executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, that entity which in 2018, made sure all the stations they owned made identical broadcasts of a canned editorial bashing “fake news” à la Trump. David Simon, producer of the storied HBO series The Wire, put it best in a post on X/Twitter:
And now, the hollow shell of a once honorable grey lady has been again returned to local ownership. But instead of a family with deep civic roots and a sense of noblesse oblige that allowed for an editorial product that was not first beholden to any ideological fervor, the Baltimore Sun is now owned by someone who has delivered a news product that begins with a hard ideological premise and then tailors all coverage and editorializing to fit. The irony is perfect: In Baltimore, where a newsroom of 500 souls once labored to deliver a politically centrist morning and evening newspaper that gave good weight to trying to get stuff right, that newspaper has been returned to local ownership so that about 60 or 70 souls can labor to deliver a single, thin edition of a beholden political organ that will not give weight to any view of reality that cannot achieve some advantage or gain for a fixed ideology. Wall Street and out-of-town newspapering has, in four decades, devoured the very ideal of an independent newspaper in Baltimore. And done so at great profit.
So the Sun, a newspaper founded in 1837, continues publication, but ceases to be a newspaper publishing “information” with anything even approaching ideological balance.
Sad day.
Comments below the fold.
Read More