The Big Picture: Caveat Lector

WAUWEEP, Arizona — The young guy at the helm wasn’t thinking about a raging pandemic, a raving president, or anything else beyond submerged logs and sand bars as we flashed past spectacular rock formations on Lake Powell. That morning, his wife said she was leaving him.

Sparing him questions, I reflected instead on a conversation in Paris with a visiting editor pal as we watched flotsam drift down the Seine through the heart of a city that has seen so much during its 2,000 years.

Americans once saw news as a lake, he said. With a sense of its shape and depths, they shared a common idea of reality when the water suddenly got rough. News is now a river. People see only what floats by if they happen to be watching, with little thought to its origin or import.

If black type suddenly screams, “China Invades Taiwan,” it is too late to react. Stories that matter are part of a continuing process that confounds headlines. Reporters on the ground, permanently in place with solid sources, need to watch closely as ripples build into waves.

We need correspondents to warn us of smoldering conflicts ready to flare into flame and runaway pathogens leaders try to hide. We need local reporters to expose authorities who betray our trust and erode the underpinnings of democracy. But we’re losing both.

Solid reporting competes for attention with infinite crap, from outright propaganda to well-intentioned karaoke journalism, off-key with garbled lyrics. Closed borders, official harassment and government coverups mask truth. Today’s watchword is caveat lector. Reader beware.

Those who care about our overheated, overamped planet need to do what real journalists do: Question everything. Test one source against others. Tune out noise to listen for a ring of truth. Read history with an eye on the individuals who make it. Times change; human nature doesn’t.

History doesn’t just repeat itself. It gets more complex, with cumulative impact. Past mistakes, geophysical as well as geopolitical, have pushed us to the edge. Billions struggle for their very survival, and we are fast running out of time to mitigate, much less resolve, long-ignored crises.

Donald Trump, buoyed by American inattention, is the most dangerous man on Earth. He ignores past miscalculations at home and abroad to push greed-obsessed, shortsighted policies in calamitous new directions. Lake Powell is a brushstroke in an alarming global big picture.

The vast reservoir, 140 feet deep on average, is a monument to human folly. It flooded Glen Canyon during the 1970s, submerging dramatic sandstone gorges and rock wonders carved out over eons, inundating ancient remains of civilizations that knew how to coexist with nature.

Engineers dammed the Colorado River to harness its flow through the Grand Canyon. Along with Hoover Dam farther west, it ensured a steady water supply to Arizona and surrounding states and protected downstream banks after occasional freak heavy snowfall in the Rockies. 

The reservoirs made deserts bloom, irrigating fields of alfalfa and cotton, orchards and sprawling cattle ranches. Copper mines and industries boomed. Fast-growing cities with lush green golf courses and exotic gardens squandered water as if there was no tomorrow.

Tomorrow is upon us. The water-starved West suffers endemic drought, rising heat, forest fires and steadily growing populations. Vast amounts are lost to evaporation. Magnificent splendor is gone forever. The “tamed” Colorado is a trickle as it enters Mexico and dies in salt marshes.

Across America, we need to cut back and reengineer. Trump does the opposite, letting mines, fossil-fuel producers and agrobusiness plunder at will. Slashing regulations, he says, makes America great. Abroad, his narrow focus raises the potential for conflict, cold or hot, to an unimaginable degree.

Yet with so much at stake, our tower-of-babble news media no longer shape a critical mass of public opinion. Without a clear idea of the existential threats we face, we cannot do much about them.

After a lifetime of “mainstream” reporting, it is time to step back and say what I see and hear, unfiltered, about an imperiled world as it is. My goal is to help readers connect the dots into big pictures.

Television once helped set the agenda, teaming with newspapers to add images and analysis to bring distant reality into living rooms at home. But take a look, for instance, at CBS Morning News on the network that gave us Murrow and Cronkite. 

It begins with a montage, “Your World in 90 Seconds.” The other day, that was a minute of Trump snippets and a video, suspiciously improbable, of a father trying to keep three infants from besieging an open refrigerator. Cute. But what about that world?

We need newspapers. “Dead trees” is passé; they are also online. Reporters on the spot, with time to reflect and space to write at length, need to tell us why stories matter. Without them, TV would be mostly conjecture and argument.

In the last decade, American newspapers have cut more than half their newsroom staffs, and that is it not nearly the worst of it. They are bought up, eviscerated or put to death. Hedge funds and private equity firms trade them as if they were pork-bellies or junk bonds.

I started out in 1964 at the Arizona Daily Star, one of two thriving family-owned Tucson dailies. Staff reporters, the Associated Press and other agencies filled news pages. An editorial board and the publisher wrote opinion. Advertisers had no say in what went into the paper. The line between us, unlike Trump’s porous border wall, was impenetrable.

Most publishers back then believed in civic responsibility. Some were independent; others leaned right or left. But all knew their fortunes depended on credibility and public trust. Editors stormed out the door if ordered to slant news.

When John S. Knight took his Akron Beacon Journal public in 1960 to start the Knight-Ridder chain, he told financiers, “I do not intend to be your prisoner.” He built an admirable empire and then died in 1981 before having to rethink his motto: Don’t be afraid of change.

Knight-Ridder covered the world with intrepid pros from its star papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald and Detroit Free Press. In 2003, its Washington bureau was alone in reporting that Iraq no longer had the banned weapons George W. Bush claimed it did.

Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune correspondents were mostly superb, deep diggers with a poetic bent. Editors allowed them ample wordage and generous expenses. They often outshined the New York Times with stories that brought to life other cultures for readers back home.

The Tribune Company bought the L.A. Times in 2000 and ran it into the ground from Chicago. Real estate scavenger Sam Zell acquired the company to sell off pieces. When a reporter asked at a newsroom meeting about quality, he glared and told her: “Fuck you.” Zell moved on, but the saga continued. In 2018, a billionaire doctor rescued the Times, a shadow of its former self.

Knight-Ridder, meantime, was swallowed up in 2006 by McClatchy, which choked on it. After eviscerating fine old papers, it filed for bankruptcy early this year. The California-based chain, owned by the same family for 163 years, will likely be run by Chatham Asset Management, the New Jersey hedge fund that controls the National Enquirer.

As America turned ironically inward after 9/11, and recession bit hard, the industry crumbled. Ads shifted to the internet, which provided news for free. Executives tried to slash their way to profitability, firing journalists and letting advertisers influence what they called “content.”

Wall Street raiders scavenge “properties” with what is known as vulture capital, although even buzzards wait until their prey dies before moving in. The most voracious is Alden Capital Fund, with various subsidiaries all under SoftBank of Japan.

 In 2018, Alden swooped in on the Denver Post, and its staff rebelled. Its CEO brushed off appeals to maintain its quality or find a buyer that would. Alden issues edicts and fires those who don’t comply. In a business built on asking questions, it routinely says nothing.

 “The public shaming of Alden for its greed and disregard for newspapers’ historic community-serving missions hasn’t seemed to make an iota of difference in the company’s behavior,” media analyst Ken Doctor wrote in the Nieman Report in 2018.

Alden could reinvest its 17 percent profit margin in the newsrooms, he said, or put its properties actively on the market. It hasn’t. Its books are as opaque as Trump’s taxes, but a lawsuit and sources suggest it uses newspaper profits for real estate deals and risky ventures.

The New York Times just ran a long frontpage profile of one Alden victim, the Mercury in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a scrappy little daily with 30 journalists that displayed two Pulitzers at its 25,000- square-foot landmark building, now sold off to be a boutique hotel.

The Mercury, with a daily circulation of 27,500 across three counties, is down to a single diehard reporter: Evan Brandt, 55 with a wife and kids, who makes $47,000 a year and works from his third-story attic.

When Alden took over, he drove to the CEO’s lavish Long Island home with a sign reading, “Invest in Us or Sell us.” He was ejected from the property without a hearing, and the hedge fund has done neither.

Now Alden is after the Chicago Tribune. Early in July, it negotiated a deal for a third of its stock now, and it appears ready to push for a takeover in 2021.

Alden’s style cost it the grand prize. Gannett has been the big dog since it moved out of upstate New York, subsuming hundreds of dailies under its flagship, USA Today. Last year, it rejected an Alden offer and merged with GateHouse Media, keeping the Gannett name.

Now the vultures are circling my old Tucson paper. The afternoon Citizen is a memory. Gannett bought it in 1976. but killed it in 2009 to profit from its assets when circulation dropped to 17,000 from its 1960s peak of 60,000. But the Star survives. So far.

The Pulitzers bought the Star in the 1970s, long after the family’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch lost its luster. In 2005, Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, added Arizona to its galaxy: along with the Star, it owns the Sun in Flagstaff, down the road from Lake Powell.  

Lee stripped the Star bare, with an overworked and underpaid small staff. Its editorial page is mostly unpaid op-ed contributions and a few syndicated columns. Now Lee Enterprises is on the skids. Alden has taken a small of bite of it and seems hungry for more.

Public funding and philanthropy help fill the widening void, particularly for investigations into single-topic stories. But 18,000 communities have no local news coverage. And few newspapers give readers a cogent overview of interlinked global crises.

Technology is not the answer. Covering city councils and school boards by remote cameras is no better than stenography. What matters happens in the hallways. World news pooled from shared networks of untested stringers only scratches at the surface.

The spiral downward now heads toward freefall. Americans badly need reporting on a runaway pandemic, but newspaper cutbacks limit their ability to provide it. Advertising wanes and hard-pressed families cancel subscriptions.

A Pew study late last year found nearly half of Americans rely on Facebook for news, essentially exchanging dubious information with their friends. Television follows closely behind. Only 18 percent still read print newspapers.

But television stations, with few reporters of their own, are increasingly politicized. Sinclair Broadcasting is a rightwing behemoth that champions Trump.  It owns 193 stations, reaching 40 percent of America. If FCC negotiations are successful, that could expand to 72 percent.

Sinclair distributes canned “must run” newscasts, neither fair nor balanced, to all of its stations. Meantime, online organizations like Breitbart News follow the tactical approach that Steve Bannon once outlined simply: “Flood the zone with shit.”

Tragically, few Americans seem to care about all of this. Trump’s relentless “fake news” assaults and mindless generalities about “the media” shake faith in the best of American organizations. And it is hard to exaggerate the danger.  

Consider that distraught young helmsman on Lake Powell. His mind is on a wife who is packing her bags and a bunch of other worries. But if he doesn’t keep an eye on those submerged logs and sandbars, and he goes down with his boat, nothing else will matter.