What’s happening to the free press in America is the most troubling development of all since the rise of Trump. While the media are definitely not perfect in a variety of ways, individual editors and writers have to a remarkable degree operated with an almost spiritual dedication to the truth on behalf of the public ever since Ben Franklin first utilized moveable type and a printing press to advance the causes of Enlightenment freedom of thought and practice that resulted in the American revolution and establishment of a constitutional republic.
Local news is the biggest victim, even though most of what impacts people’s lives gets decided at the local level. This week, our editor penned a submission to the Washington Post criticizing its decision to place its Metro, or local news, section behind Sports and Style, away from its historic position at the forefront of the second section just behind national and international news and opinion.
There is no expectation that the editors at the Post will publish it in their own pages. But it is on the record with them anyway, and our dedication to the kind of coverage of our local region in and around Falls Church remains undaunted. For many years now, the Post as the major daily in the region and one of maybe four newspapers with a significant national following has substituted so-called “parachute journalism” for the real thing in providing anything like adequate coverage of most of the local goings on throughout their coverage area, the DMV.
Back through the 1980s, there used to be seven locally-based bureaus of the Post in Virginia and Maryland, all gone by the 90s, that were able to follow important stories at the county, city and neighborhood level. Most importantly, journalists in those bureaus provided context for their stories because they lived, or at least worked full time in them and got to know the key people and histories behind events that mattered to readers.
One by one, local weeklies vanished, too. It’s a long and painful history right here in Northern Virginia. Now, there are almost no print newspapers here. Even online only news sources are barely able to scratch the surface with what is going on, with any of the kind of local flavor and personality that the public loves and needs to be told about. For some of them, almost everything they cover smacks of “parachute journalism,” especially in the case of reporting about Falls Church as an afterthought in their coverage.
The only solution to this lies with a public that demands more and is willing to make the effort to see it happen. Remember Bell, California, and what happened when lawmakers were not being held accountable by a newspaper. The leaders voted themselves ridiculous salaries that only came to light years later. Only a true, tactile newspaper, as an agency of the public, can stand up to that.
