The San Diego Evening Tribune, back in the day.
Today’s column will come as a shocker to some folks. I’ve thought long and hard about this as someone who regularly offers up analysis of current events.
I grew up as a writer steeped in loathing for the establishment press. The hostility displayed towards the ideals and dreams of a generation that thought they could change the world needed to be answered. And our Smith-Corona typewriters were going to get it done.
Now I’m going to tell you the time has come where this attitude is counter-productive. A relentless assault on reason has led me to the conclusion that the best defense against propaganda is a flood of facts, even when the messengers aren’t on the same page as we are.
I started out in 1969 as a writer for the OB Liberator, printed in Norm’s garage and sold on street corners. The cops hated us. So did the good citizens of Ocean Beach, who knew even 50 years ago that our aggressive panhandling was going to ruin the place. Walking down Newport Avenue with the latest issue was an open invitation for ye olde field interrogation and pat down. The Nazi at the fried chicken place refused to serve us.
I went on to work with the old Free Press/Street Journal folk after a stint as editor of the–drum roll–City College FortKnightly, came back to help out with the OB Rag when Frank had to go underground for a while, and ended up being one of the editors at the San Diego Door.
There was another side to this story, one that was closely held. Some our best sources during the muckraking era at the Door were reporters for the Union and Tribune (Back then they were separate papers.) We’d started hanging out at the bar next to the U and the T‘s old downtown location, one thing led to another, and heard tales about stories falling through the cracks, or re-written to protect the owner’s social class.
We needed them because us scruffy types lacked access to the halls of power, and they needed us to make amends for what they perceived as the suppression of the truth. There was only so much we could learn from the Polk’s City Directory, and they had families to feed.
Fast forward fifty years (!) and I’m realizing those really were the Good Old Days of Journalism in San Diego.
Little did we all know…
The UT‘s been bought and sold, stripped of its dignity and its assets, left alongside the road of broken promises only to be used and abused by the next wannabe William Randolph Hearst. The public relations industry –mostly employing ex-newspaper types– now dominates the local information market.
The local daily paper has a new owner, one who promises to treat the organization as a community institution. I can’t say if this guy will keep his promises. What I can say is that what’s left of the paper is worth saving. Hear me out…
It is becoming increasingly obvious the expanded choices in news coverage many thought would come with the golden age of the internet aren’t happening. Monetizing information has, if anything, made our options fewer.
As ad revenue has shrunk for legacy media, so has their ability to inform. The aggregators of the ‘oughts have a diminished pool of ‘content’ to draw from, and apparently mostly lack the patience needed to create meat and potatoes coverage.
It was a slow news week.
One need look no further than the ‘above the fold’ part of Huffington Post to see the failure of the genre. The scope of what’s considered newsworthy has shrunk to a baker’s dozen stories, wrapped around celebrity nonsense and tales of the bizarre.
Self-generated content at Huffpo, some of which is excellent, must compete with stories about shark swarms and recaps of late-night tv. A window to the world of news has been replaced by a peep-hole. Links to other outlets from around the world are gone. Heck, I remember when HuffoPo put one of my dispatches from the Caribbean on their front page.
I’m having this rant because reading the stories of doom and gloom in the newsroom, the latest being the gutting of the Denver Post, has made me nostalgic for the days of dead tree media.
This revelation is coming from the guy who told middle school students at the OB Free School in the early 70s that people would be reading their news on their phones in the future. (They thought I was crazy)
Now I find the algorithms of my content providers to be shallow and stupid much of the time.
The March 23 story Google wants to serve me today about a forum in Ramona isn’t news or entertainment. Despite being a total news junky, Facebook can’t be bothered to share much beyond prepackaged pablum from providers who’ve never heard of climate change, racism, economic injustice, or the death throes of the patriarchy.
My Twitter feed (it’s figured out I’m a lefty) gets clogged with people sharing political minutia with clickbait headlines written by high school juniors.
The future of news has failed me. I want my newspapers back. When I lived in Washington DC in the days of Nixon, I had subscriptions to five daily papers. I want ink smudges on my fingers. (Truth: I bought a digital subscription this time, so no trees will be killed in the process of living out this story.)
This revelation is coming from a guy who loathed the Copley-hued vision of the world. If I had a subscription during the Copley era or the Manchester era I would have canceled it.
I understand any mass media will inevitably incorporate the biases of its bourgeois backers. I just think we should not blindly accept the takeover of information by the state or its apologists.
Now I’m just happy to have a local choice or two or three. And I fear the time when the Sinclair/Fox/OneAmericaNews outlets are the only things on the menu.
Do me a favor: starting paying for your news again. Pick one outlet (or more) and subscribe. Voice of San Diego has its moments. KPBS keeps me company in the morning. Or donate money to the Guardian if you can’t stomach any local outlets.
Today I added the Union-Tribune to my paid list.
This does not mean I necessarily approve of anything posted there.
I don’t have to love everything served at a restaurant to eat there. They just have to offer something I can’t get at home. Same day service helps. Cleanliness (coding!) is important.
It does mean the efforts of the reporters and editors at the UT deserve to see the light of day.
But what about the alt-press? The blogs? Or even the San Diego Free Press? What about the OB Rag?
I say read and appreciate ’em. Like and share ’em on Facebook. Give ’till it hurts when they ask for cash. The freedom they/we offer is precious.
And they, along with a few locally-based news outlets need to be part of a complete information diet. Citizen-based journalism will always be needed. The implicit bias and questionable motives of mass media organizations still need to be challenged.
Rant over.
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Doug Porter
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Whew, now I can admit to subscribing to the U-T (smile). Actually, I was beginning to appreciate the paper before Papa Doug, the thug, took over – because as part of the Editorial Advisory group (I can’t remember our actual name, in this moment, because I’m two days shy of being 80 years old) I sensed that they truly were trying to make their news offerings more reflective of the communities in San Diego at-large. We need as much good news as we can get.
I confess to receiving the San Diego paper via the internet also. I had checked it out when it changed ownership and noticed a big change. The right wing rant was gone. I don’t know who owns it now and don’t really care. As long as they print something close to the truth I’ll read it. I finished a book on journalism about a month ago. I had no idea about the job losses in the industry. I mean I didn’t realize they were as high as they were. I think they were approaching 50% . That is staggering, taking 1/2 of all the pros out of the pool has to hurt any business. Sunday mornings used to be my reading time, a veggie restaurant in Hillcrest for brunch with 2 different Times and the San Diego rag made for a good morning. Not any more.
Nicely stated, Doug. A friend with whom I shared your piece had this response:
re, “the best defense against propaganda is a flood of facts” the best thing i’ve read about that is this article that differentiates between echo chambers and trust bubbles. he does a good job of explaining how “the facts” won’t change people’s minds when they have been taught to distrust the source. He says it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult.
Escape the echo chamber
https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult
C Thi Nguyen. *Aeon* (09 April, 2018)
“… there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.”
Just saw this after a trip into New Mexico took me out of the loop for four days that ended yesterday… I’ve got nothing to add to what Doug says other than that when I ended an 8 year and 11 months trip as a reporter at Copley’s Evening Tribune I left behind a newsroom full of professionals who put together an afternoon daily with real skill that often was discounted and opposed by Copley management. Facts were surpressed when they challenged a Navy/Republican cabal. A police shooting of a schizophrenic black man downtown that showed he was lowering his gun when the cops surrounding him executed him. The video of the whole incident was only briefly allowed to air. I said that much in a story but it was excluded in the editor’s version and I quit… 13 months before i would have been vested in a retirement program. This city, now, has a chance to become a news industry survivor. If the present U-T improves, if only slightly, the city will drop its pretenses and recognize truth.
There’s an uprising afoot everywhere, including San Diego.
I subscribe to the digital edition of the Washington Post, the Guardian, Common Dreams and the LA Times. Also I make a lot of use of truthdig and Alternet. There are good sources out there, and one just has to make use of them. I canceled my New York Times digital edition because I just didn’t have the time to do it justice, but I do read occasional articles from there as well. Googling different subjects brings up valid new articles from many sources including the Wall Street Journal on financial stuff. I got a lead from the Guardian on chlorinated chicken which it seems Americans (but not Europeans) are forced to eat. Now the Brits will get it too.
Truthdig is running a great piece heavily quoting Mark Rudd, formerly best known as the leader of SDS during the 70s when police and city officials were tearing the limbs from lefties. Rudd condemns both left and right for falling into the trap of self-expression and resorting to violence as a means of overcoming The Beast. It’s at
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-cult-of-violence-always-kills-the-left/