Light On Dark Water

As we were discussing a week or so ago, the Sunday September 30 edition of the Mobile Press-Register was the last daily edition of the paper, presumably forever. In it, Frances Coleman, who had been the editorial page editor for many years, and is one of the people who will not have a job in the new state-wide organization, published this final column, and I'm a little surprised that the new powers printed it. It isn't so much a lament for the changes, the technological and social obsolescence of the old ways of doing things, and so forth, as for a whole way of approaching journalism, independent of its medium. It's quietly incendiary–read it and you'll see what I mean. 

Like almost everyone who has definite opinions about politics, in particular those whose opinions are on the conservative side, I complain a lot about the news media. But the complaint is about their malpractice, their failure to fulfill their own mission of informing the public as fully and fairly as possible. In a society where the people have the last word, that's an essential function. We're moving back into a situation like that ca 1900, when newspapers were openly partisan. And maybe that's ok; maybe it's even better, in a way, because it encourages a certain skepticism about all of them. But the pretense of fairness remains, even when the product resembles Pravda, and is the occasion for quite unjustiable self-congratulation by many journalists, and that's pretty annoying.