Matthew Dowd, a political pundit, noted that the major broadcast networks rushed to carry King Charles’s speech. None carried President Biden’s primetime address on threats to American democracy.
It was a telling comment about priorities.
When I was a young reporter, I’d have said that fact reflects the difference between newspapers and broadcast news. I would have argued that the press, by and large, was more serious.
But then I became an editor, and the responsibility of editing a newspaper that was worthy of a literate, diverse and well informed community knocked a little of that hubris out of me.
Now I’d say this is closer to the truth: Newspapers are written and edited by a great variety of people with a great variety gifts and limitations. You’ll find, among writers and editors, enormous differences in politics, competence and talent. About the only thing all these people have in common is that they’re fallible, and their mistakes end up in print. Their errors can be corrected, but not erased.
It’s a humbling experience.
When I saw Dowd’s comment in my daily reading of Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art, I thought of William Allen White, the old editor of the Emporia Gazette. He wrote:
Of course our country papers are provincial. We know that as well as any one. But then, so far as that goes, we know that all papers are provincial. How we laugh at the provincialisms of the New York and Boston and Chicago papers when we visit the cities!
I was lucky to work for the newspaper in an interesting place: Galveston, Texas. The people there read the newspaper. They would have expected more about the president’s speech about threats to the democracy and less about the new king.
I noticed on MSNBC the other day a commentator saying that “the big question” now is when we’ll next see William and Harry together. No, there are bigger questions. : )
ReplyDelete