Rob Rogers finally tells the whole story over at the Nib, and it's both fascinating and unsurprising. Go read the rest of it.
There are elements of the story that should seem familiar, but it was, on the whole, outrageous enough that it's a lesson in Where We're At.
Any time you have a change in management, you see changes down the line. I was at a paper where the publisher took "early retirement," which may have meant that they were trimming senior positions to save money and made her an offer she couldn't refuse, or it may have meant that she could see the trend ahead and didn't fancy playing the role of Lord High Executioner.
Machs nix. She was leaving, and I realized that, as one of her pet projects, my ass was grass the minute she was out the door.
She had appointed me "Readership Representative," which primarily meant that I ran the paper's educational programs, but it also meant I was on the United Way Board, the 4H Board and the board of the local historical museum, and staffed booths at trade shows and country fairs and was the person who got the odd phone calls from people asking bizarre questions that would send me into the microfilm from decades past.
If I had any doubts about the impact of her retirement, they vanished at the cake-and-punch reception for the new publisher, who shook my hand and told me how important he thought educational outreach programs were.
Thus began a program of harassment designed to force my resignation so they could hire a part-timer to do the bare minimum for very little pay and no benefits.
It took about six months because I refused to quit until I had a new gig lined up, and I certainly wasn't the only person over that period to either jump or be pushed overboard.
Rob's story, then, sounds very familiar, except that he was such a fixture that it's not surprising that they'd try to lure him over to the Dark Side, and I'm sure they'd have rather accomplished that than forced him out.
As said, it's a lesson in Where We're At, and, if my story is sad and familiar, Rob's is far more chilling.
My situation was simply cost-cutting and the abandonment of community service most papers have adopted over the past two decades.
Rob's is part of the shift towards propaganda in place of fair coverage.
Here's a critical factor in it all: Thomas Nast was a partisan pit bull with a lot of prejudices and a taste for the jugular.
He not only worked for publishers who reveled in his excesses but who often built pages of opinionating around his work, whether it was a case of them writing to expand on his views or of him creating cartoons to further illustrate their planned essays.
But if you didn't like their Johnny One-Note political tone, if you found his anti-Irish-Catholic harangues unpleasant (like this 1872 attack on NY gubernatorial candidate Francis Kernan), you simply bought your town's Democratic paper and skipped Harper's Weekly entirely.
It wasn't just cartoons and commentary: You would see the governor's speech bannered across Page One of one paper in your town, and tucked away in a single column on Page Five of the other.
However, as newspapers began to merge around the turn of the 20th century, their first hyphenated issues invariably pledged an end to divisive coverage and commentary, and a promise of fairness to both sides.
Then, throughout that century, most editorial pages offered a variety of opinions, with the exception of a few notable rightwing journals like the Orange County Register, the Manchester (NH) Union Leader and the Chicago Tribune.
Now we're headed back, with the difference being that, while you can choose between Fox News and MSNBC, you probably only have one newspaper. (See yesterday's discussion of newspapers as public utilities.)
Rob is now free to express his opinions, but the key word here is "free" because he'll have to figure out things like rent and groceries on his own.
Still, lean freedom is preferable to fat slavery, which brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
What I don't understand is the growing appetite for lean slavery, but it falls under the heading of both the Big Lie and a sort of Triumph of the Will approach to governing.
Trump promised that his trade war would quickly bring back jobs and, as Heller and Margulies and any literate, thoughtful person who reads the news can see, it has instead choked off a lot of important trade and will cost even more jobs than his much-ballyhooed Carrier deal that fell apart before it touched ground.
If you don't like comparisons to Goebbels, how about a comparison to OJ Simpson? You simply deny the obvious, over and over, and count on your fan base to be so loyal that it falls under that well-known expression, "Who are you gonna believe -- me or your own lying eyes?"
And the comparison that won't go away is that between his constant electioneering and the speeches Leni Riefenstahl memorably caught on film.
Trump can, of course, draw a crowd, and whether his cheering fans are wise and well-informed or gullible tools doesn't matter: They are a self-selected crowd, not a cross-section.
Their cheering projects a message of popularity that may not represent the average American, but, if you show it often enough, eventually it will.
The Glorious Fourth
I'm seeing a lot of dogs-and-fireworks cartoons this year, but I like Bob Englehart's because he turns it into a political point.
I've had dogs that cowered at fireworks, but my current boy just turns to me at the first bang to inquire, "Do we care about this?" and, if I don't act alarmed, he doesn't, either.
So we're cool on fireworks, but I'm hesitant to discuss politics with him.
Now here's one for Rob ...
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