Missing The Disappearing American Newspaper

A few sobering notes from a report called “The State of Local News 2025” by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Since 2025, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has declined by 40 percent. News deserts, defined as a county in which there is no local news outlet, increased from 150 in 2005 to 210 in 2025.

Well, I don’t live in a news desert, but it is getting dry out there.

Map of news deserts--there are still a lot of local news sources in U.S., but many local outlets like The Gazette are far less robust than they recently were. Map from: 

https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/

In November, The Gazette, my local newspaper, announced that it was being sold—going from an employee-owned local company to the property of something called Adams Multimedia.

And the change comes with cuts to the shrinking Gazette news staff. For example, long-time sports journalists Mike Hlas and JR Ogden wrote farewell columns. I’ll miss then both, but JR in particular, since he was very kind to many students of mine over the years.

As an old news man, of course that makes me a bit sad. Four decades ago, I was working hard as a local journalist in a small town in Missouri. Those were difficult, busy days, but rewarding ones, too. I later became a business journalist covering banking and then a professor at a small university teaching media writing and editing skills. Because of my background, I can’t claim to be neutral about news nor the decline in the newspaper industry.

But I also firmly believe we, the larger “we,” are suffering due to the loss of local news. It does feel like we’re living in a time and culture that celebrates ignorance and doesn’t discern well between fact and nonsense. Our “marketplace of ideas” is too often a cacophony of competing “realities” where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening nor watching the watcher.

Dec. 8 front page of The Gazette.

As the Gazette continues, it feels like it’s a shadow of its old self, an army on a long death march that sadly seems to have the end in sight.

The world turns and changes. Back when I was a reporter for The Boonville Daily News, there wasn’t an internet. Communication scholars were aware of a growing online world and anticipated something that they called the “information appliance,” without necessarily understanding it would be our phones that would come untethered from our desks and walls and start accompanying us everywhere and seducing us with their siren call of social media—and, these days, AI deep fakes.

When our attention shifted to the online world and ad revenue followed our ears and eyeballs, the demise of the local newspaper became an almost inevitable byproduct. But the shift of my local newspaper from local ownership to a Minnesota based regional media chain still hurts. In the 1980s, the newspaper I worked for went from being owned by a small chain to a larger regional company, and the shift was catastrophic—the paper became un-tethered from serving its audience and entered a deep decline.

I would wish that a similar fate doesn’t await The Gazette. The loss of many respected and experienced staff members doesn’t bode well. Then again, yet that doesn’t mean that The Gazette could have continued operating the way it had been. The meta forces at work in the media world are inevitably going to reshape who informs or misinforms us and how.

Nothing is as it was—that’s life. The world turns. We hope that the long arc of history is bending towards a better future, but that is clearly not always the case.

I can’t help the feeling that part of our current cultural, political mess is an extension of The Washington Post’s tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Maybe there are glimmers of light in new online media yet to emerge but it’s feeling very twilight out there, and that makes me melancholy.

Cue Joni:

 

 

Is Cedar Rapids Fading into a News Desert?

Front page of Jan. 31 edition.

On Jan. 14, the Gazette, the daily newspaper of Cedar Rapids, announced that it’s following the trend of many other newspapers in the U.S.: Daily will soon not mean every day.

Starting Feb. 17, the Gazette will print only three editions per week, on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Otherwise, news of the community will be available via the Gazette’s web site.

Meanwhile, the cost of a print subscription remains the same. The Gazette is making an iffy gamble that people are willing to pay, in effect, much more per printed paper. Their argument, made in a follow-up column by editor Zack Kucharski, is that their cost of reporting the news justifies the continued price.

We’ll see. My wife and I are still discussing what we might do—I am sure we’ll still want the Sunday paper, but if the others papers are available online, is paying for the very occasional print product worth it? Reading the Gazette is a daily habit, it gets passed around the breakfast table, and I don’t think my relationship with the digital product will be the same. But it cannot be a daily habit if the paper no longer is delivered daily.

Well, the Gazette isn’t the only paper that I have an online relationship with. I subscribe to The New York Times, and enjoy skimming its list of stories and picking what I want to read, so the idea of treating a “paper” as an online source is not alien to me.

I hope The Gazette can make its digital presence a bit easier. With the NYT, for example, it was “one and done.” I subscribed, signed on, and their app just keeps me signed on. On both my PC and my phone, the Times seems to know who I am, instantly.

As a print subscriber to The Gazette, I’m supposed to have full digital access to their site, too—but it’s not as smooth. It seems very frequently the Gazette demands that I sign in. In my digital life, I have multiple usernames and passwords, and remembering which applies to The Gazette is not easy for me, and there have been days that I just give up and prefer not to read a Gazette story on their web site rather than find and dig through my password file.

So please, Gazette, if I’m going to depend on your app, keep at it making the app more user friendly. Aim for NYT-level ease.

Gazette web site.

Another issue is that the print Gazette gets passed between my wife and I, and our grandson when he is staying with us. When we’re accessing digital content, only one username or password works, I assume. Is there a way that 2 or 3 “readers” can be associated with a digital subscription so my wife could just as easily install the app and access content as a “household” subscriber who lives with me?

Those are technical issue, adjustments I’m sure The Gazette will consider. The larger issue, to me, is what this change means to The Gazette and to my local news environment.

I know the situation is different, but the same forces that the Gazette contends with have changed the nature of the university newspaper, the Mount Mercy Times, that I advise. We made the decision to cease print operations altogether, as it was be coming too expensive and our readers were out of the print habit anyway.

Unfortunately, at the moment, the status of the Times is not great. Our staff has slowly shrunk, our frequency of updating our news has declined and our online readership has not grown as it should. I hope to encourage students to try some new strategies to boost the Times, but first I must recruit more students, and somehow that was easier when there was a print artifact that reminded everyone that student journalism exists at Mount Mercy University.

I hope that The Gazette can maintain a sense of status and strength when it become more ephemeral, when it’s just dancing digits rather than ink on a page. I’ll miss the morning tug of war over who gets section A first, and the experience of skimming the headlines in my hands rather than on the tiny screen of my phone.

Too many communities in the U.S. have become news deserts. That’s not happening here yet, but it does sort of feel like we’re going from a lush news jungle to a drier, dicey news savanna, where the desert no longer seems so far away.

As a customer, paying the same for less product doesn’t make me happy. But as an old news person, a former newspaper editor, I hope the Gazette finds a way where so many papers have stumbled. Society as a whole is no longer as willing to pay for news, and that has left too many of our citizens subsisting on the junk food of social media disinformation, rather than the richer, healthier diet that a quality daily newspaper provides.

The daily Gazette isn’t perfect. But it will leave a hole, for me, when it is no longer there.

So, from a disgruntled customer, to the Gazette: Good luck. I hope you find a way to make it work but I’m worried.

Does it Matter if Donald Trump is a Fascist?

Self-disclosure. Yes, all my yard signs are for Democrats. Republicans this year scare me too much.

Is Donald Trump a fascist? His own former chief of staff kind of did a decent analysis of this question, ticking off the criteria. Hyper nationalism? Check. Racial identity politics? Check. Treating political opponents as “the enemy” and threatening them with prison? Check. Calling for mass roundups into detention camps? Check. Admire Adolph Hitler and “Hitler’s generals?” Check.

Clearly, a fascist. But is that the key question?

Half of America doesn’t see it that way, and we’re only six days away from (knock on wood, it could take longer) seeing if America chooses fanatical fascism or traditional governmental competence. Will we choose the felon or the prosecutor? The jury is still out, and it makes me anxious.

But even the “f” word and f question isn’t the key issue, to me. Whether wanna-be Hitler wins next week or not, we’re at a strange place politically when he’s got a very good chance. And it does, partly, reflect a wholesale breakdown of the troubled relationship between the American public and America’s journalists—we don’t trust our own trustworthy voices in the news anymore.

Because, yes, the New York Times has a strong liberal bias. Yet it works a lot harder to report facts and correct its reporting mistakes than the entire weird alt universe of right-wing disinformation systems that have grown and spread and become many people’s main sources of social media lies wearing fact Halloween costumes.

Oct. 9--Visited Czech and Slovak Museum. One theme there is long-standing thirst for freedom and democracy.

The key question to me is: Is America in 2024 too much like Germany in 1924?

Germany: Had recently lost a cataclysmic war that most people thought it had won until, suddenly and shockingly, it hadn’t. Germans had thus grown cynical and untrusting of a nascent free media and the lies government told them. After all, while Germany was the cradle of the press, it was not the cradle of the free press.

America: We recently experienced a collective trauma, a pandemic (which, by the way, was badly mismanaged by none other than President Donald Trump, although much of the story of that time is being badly rewritten now). We also face challenges abroad, reacting to a bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan and seeing conflict spread in the Middle East and Ukraine. But despite our challenges today, we’re not a defeated power like Germany was in the last century—we just seem to weirdly feel like one.

Germany: A century ago, a young country, around 50 years old, that had, for most of that history, weak democratic institutions, and monarchial rule. By the 1920s, a republic had been established—but it was also seen as the government that betrayed the Fatherland by signing the Treaty of Versailles.

America: The world’s oldest functioning federal democracy, with a strong history of constitutional, lawful government. That history is not perfect, and there are all kinds of issues facing our democracy, including that it seems to be for sale for the likes of shady billionaires like Elon Musk, but for all our faults we can’t validly give our own institutions the kind of side eye Germans cast on the Weimer Republic. And yet, we do. It’s sane and very American for us to be skeptical of our government, but deeply and foolishly cynical to dismiss it altogether.

Germany: In the 1920s and 1930s, riots and political violence became an increasing part of the politics of the day.

America: Yeah, sort of. In 2021, a violent mob (prompted by none other than President Trump) stormed our Capitol and tried to stop the count of the 2020 election results. Granted, riots and violence aren’t exclusively the purview Trump or of the right, but despite a history of sometimes violent civil unrest in these United States, we don’t have a history like that of Germany a hundred years ago. Yet, this one is more of a tossup—our rhetoric has become rougher and more violent, and workers in our democracy such as election volunteers face unprecedented risk from delusional vote second-guessers who threaten and intimidate. So, maybe this is a criterion in which the parallels are a bit valid.

In summary: We aren’t Germany of the 1920s or 1930s. But half of our electorate is ready to give an incompetent strong-man who failed miserably at the job the first time a second chance to remake America in his own sick, twisted image. And Trump himself is quite clear that he’s running as a revenge candidate—he has no positive plans for a better future; he wants retribution for often imagined slights of the past.

And that’s what gets me. That the election is still so close and that we are flirting with decisions as wrongheaded as Germans did in the past. I hope that Trump loses in six days, but it’s even money right now.

In October, my wife and I visited the Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids. Many of the displays recount the struggle for freedom the Czech people endured, from the Soviet crackdown in 1968 to student resistance in the 1980s to the eventual Velvet Revolution that brought democracy to that land.

Student hand-drawn protest poster of the 1980s at Czech and Slovak Museum.

Not sure why mutant Smurf is a symbol of freedom, but another student protest poster.

Not sure why the Czech fashions represent freedom, but to me, they do.

Never fear books. Even a book robot just looks friendly.

Czech out the art protesting lack of freedom in the Communist era.

We Americans constantly talk about the heroes of our past who fought for our democracy. Yet too many Americans today seem to dismiss Trump’s own words as bluster and exaggeration and resent his being classified as a fascist when he loudly and openly threatens attacks on all of the guardrails that keep our democracy functioning.

I’m ashamed of Republicans who won’t call out this anti-democratic strain in their party and its stain on our democratic ideals. Best case: Harris wins by a whisker.

And that’s a true shame. Really, America? I do hope Trump loses—but even if he does, the disfunction in our politics doesn’t go away. Our obsession with competing media universes remains. Trump and Trumpism is a symptom of something dark and enduring. We are badly in need of lots of clear-headed and effective political reforms, even given the best case, and we badly need to rebuild a more respected news media system.

Decades ago, the Czech people took to the streets in a desperate, dangerous call for freedom. We need a similar rebirth of the spirit of freedom here. To me, the election next week is not the end of the story nor the end of the danger.

I don’t have the cure, sadly. But I can see the disease.

Newspapers: Foundations of News Echosystem

This week's issue of MMU's own newspaper.

 “Newspapers are in a perilous position: Traditional readership is declining even as papers are struggling to create a profitable online business model.” Understanding Media online text.

In 2021, newspapers are a shadow of what they once were. In media history, we are studying the legacies of the great 19th century publishers, Hearst and Pulitzer. In their era, they wielded power and defined a whole new, important information industry.

Newspapers are at the root of news in this country, and those roots are deep and ancient. Thomas Jefferson, the country’s third president is often quoted by newspaper fans: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Those are Jefferson’s verified words, but he also wrote: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

Clearly, Jefferson was conflicted, but the papers of his era were deeply partisan and not at all neutral in their reporting. In media history at the end of this week, we’ll talk about why that dramatically changed, first with the rise of Pulitzer who emphasized fully reporting each story, and then with Adolph Ochs, the “New York Times” publisher who will reshape the media industry early in the 20th century.

For more than 200 years, newspapers were the key way most people got information about the events of the day. That monopoly on news ended in the 20th century with a series of three media revolutions—the coming of radio, then TV, then the internet.

This century, the 21st, has seen a great decline in the number of papers published, the number of journalists working at papers and the profitability and viability of many newspapers. The public has broken its newspaper habit in this century.

Two newspaper front page from Feb. 20, 2021. Note that both in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (above) and San Antonio, Texas (below) the ongoing winter weather crisis in Texas is top news--although in Iowa, it's all about a local restaurateur going to Texas to help.

And the unfortunate truth is that nothing has yet arisen that neutrally, effectively and objectively reports news the way that newspapers did. Many of our current political problems are partly due to competing versions of reality that can exist in a social media environment—a reality that did not exist in that form in the newspaper era.

It’s also true that part of what has ended the newspaper era is declining literacy. There are young readers—I’ve had spirited discussion with more than one MMU students about the new novels by Hank Green, for example. Yet reading is not understood as central to getting information as it once was.

But it is. There’s the rub. To a frightening extent, people who say they get their information from sources other than the printed word—who don’t read newspapers—are often people who don’t know disinformation from information—fake news from reality.

I don’t mean to imply that I think all is lost if we don’t go back to the newspaper era. It’s something that can’t and won’t happen—history doesn’t move in reverse. Yet, the energy in news media today, the innovation and creativity, is around new online sources.

In Iowa, for example, The Gazette works hard to be an online publication as much as it is a paper newspaper. New sources such as Little Village Magazine compete to delivery news. The investigative role that newspapers in Iowa once fulfilled is partly taken on by an online nonprofit, Iowa Watch, located in Iowa City but independent of the university there.

Home page of Iowa Watch, an investigative foundation in Iowa City that distributes its news stories for free.

 What is the role of a newspaper? Here are its traditional functions:

• Acing as Gatekeeper or agenda setter. Local papers still help define the conversation, the issues that people talk about or care about; yet they are not as important in this area as they once were, as social media today creates the cultural “buzz.” When papers did act as information gatekeepers, one advantage society had was that there was some sense of professionalism in terms of what was treated as a fact—whereas today, the information environment is looser and less easily defined. Newspapers saw their agenda-setting function degrade when radio and TV came on the scene, but it was the internet that mostly ended this role.

• Being a watchdog. That’s honestly one of the key roles newspapers still provide. What does a “watchdog” do? Think of what you know about the Watergate scandal of the 1970s—at the time, it was two reporters for “The Washington Post” who uncovered corruption that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Even today, some papers, such as the Post and “The New York Times,” and, in Iowa, “The Gazette” still strive to fulfill that function. But an issue in our culture today is that many communities have become “news deserts” where local papers have failed—and that can create a situation where actions of government are not monitored much anymore.
  

• Providing “objective” information. Media bias is a complex issue, and not a “fake” thing because all media has some point of view—it’s just not the simple case of “liberal” mainstream media that is sometime portrayed. Nevertheless, traditionally, newspapers provide the most basic, factual account of events of day. They still do, where they exist, but it’s more important for consumers of information to be wary of the cacophony of disinformation available today that can drive out information.

Feb. 20 front page of
Iowa's largest paper.

Anyway, we are in a state of flux in media. The “news” function that newspapers fulfilled is still important, and the remaining newspapers are still often the best sources you can find about events in a community. Yet the culture is shifting away. Dried ink on newsprint is the 19th century way of sharing the news. Sadly, for all our modern sophistication, the 21st century media has yet to evolve something that can take newspapers’ place.

Perhaps it won’t be one thing. Perhaps there is some new balance between competing sources that may yet emerge and provide us with some clarity and some insight that we need. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, be aware that whether you’re looking at Fox, CNN or the New York Times, you may be looking at lots of different kinds of materials in the same place. To be a literate consumer, recognize that most media outlets may give you:

• Opinion writing. The Gazette has two on-staff opinion writers whose stories are not meant to be objective journalism, but are interpretive. Often, inexperienced readers or student researchers will quote something from, say “The Wall Street Journal,” without realizing they are quoting an opinion writer or columnist, not a news report. When you consume news, understand what you’re looking at.

• Inverted pyramid reporting. “Plain vanilla” news stories—most reports of breaking news that you can read either online or in print—use this format. The story starts with a “summary lead,” a first paragraph that states what the latest development is. It then reports information in descending order of importance. One way to know whether you’re reading someone’s interpretation of the news or an actual news report is to be used to seeing and recognizing this story format.

In sum: Newspapers remain, even in 2021, an often important, fundamental part of the news ecosystem. But they are not the central element that they once were.

As with last week, here are some additional posts that cover important newspaper-related topics:

Thoughts on MMU’s newspaper, which won seven awards from a state media organization, February, 2021.
https://iowamedialife.blogspot.com/2021/02/mmu-times-wins-7-icma-state-awards.html
A previous post about a previous semester of this class, has spoilers about your next paper, February, 2015.
https://iowamedialife.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sudden-appearance-of-newspapers-for.html
How newspapers fix the memory of national trauma, thoughts on the Parkland, Florida school shooting, February, 2018.
https://iowamedialife.blogspot.com/2018/02/front-pages-fix-memory-of-florida.html
Why the student newspaper experience is important—why you should join the staff of the “Mount Mercy Times” even in this post-newspaper world, April 2009.
https://crgardenjoe.wordpress.com/2009/04/19/future-of-college-newspapers/
Some thoughts on the role of newspapers as a Mount Mercy journalism class tours The Gazette, April 2015.
https://crgardenjoe.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/drinking-from-the-firehose-learning-what-journalistm-is-like/

Honest Joe vs. Dishonest Abe

Trump speaks, Biden and America cringes.

Donald Trump says 2.2 million people were going to die. That only 210,000 have is thus a great success.

It’s a lie. A rather vile lie, since it traduces human lives. I know, Trump is not responsible for 210,000 deaths—many would have died had the country taken adequate action against COVID-19. But the death toll could have and should have been much lower, and the spike can be lowered now, with effective, science-based action that this president can’t wrap his head around.

It was a night of lies from Donald Trump. The final presidential debate of 2020 is over, and I have to admit I am relieved.

Trump did score some points. His contention that Biden’s environmental plan spell economic disaster is going to be the point pounded on again and again in attack ads for the next 12 days. Not that it’s true. As is much of what Trump said tonight, it’s a lie.

A lie delivered coldly and calmly by a president who dismisses severed families as the fault of coyotes, COVID-19 as the fault of China and economic meltdown as—well, I’m not sure who he is blaming. Trump claimed the economy would be a disaster if Biden is elected, but who the heck was president this year when the recession kicked in?

Typical Trump. "Don’t elect him or the chaos I have caused will continue." "Elect me so that I can put out the fire that I lit in the first place."

Sigh.

Some keys in tonight’s debate:

• Biden nailed Trump on his tax returns. Trump tries to paint Biden as corrupt, but one of Trump's consistent patterns is to project his own flaws onto his foes. I don’t think Joe is pure like the October snow—but on the corruption meter, Trump has pretty much everyone trumped, yet he says Biden is corrupt. And Biden is the one who has released his tax returns, not Trump. Tell me again how Trump is more honest?

• Trump made anybody with a brain sick to their stomach with his Lincoln lines. No, Trump, you are not the “least racist” person in the room. As Biden said, his dog whistles are fog horns. In one breath, you’re the least racist, in the next, your saying immigrants who show up for hearings have low IQs. You’re blaming China, coyotes and claiming not to be racist.

• COVID-19 should be the nail in the coffin for this president. Just consider this exchange: “People are learning to die with it,” Biden on the pandemic. “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault.” Actual comeback quote from Trump.

I do think that Trump did better tonight than the first debate, although he set a rather low bar to lumber over. Trump was still spouting insults, lies and trite campaign lines.

Biden speaks during debate.

Trump needed to change the dynamics of the election tonight. I do not think he did. I think Biden held his own, which I hope is all he had to do. And what was that about pillows and sheets? Earth to Trump: What?

Image by Gage Skidmore from wikimedia commons. Kristen Welker of NBC in Arizona in 2018.

Kristen Welker of NBC News did pretty well, I thought. She had been insulted by Trump before the debate, but was praised by him during the debate. Despite that, I think the use of the enforced time limits was good. There was some cross shouting, but not the chaos of the first debate. Her questions were decent and she stayed calm.

Well, that phase of the campaign is over. Five-thirty-eight is starting to write about a possible blue wave that could take the Senate, keep the House and win the presidency. Trump’s fantasy about taking the House rang very hollow, and I don’t think Trump built much of a flood wall against the coming blue wave.

The Key Word: ‘Impeached’

How my local paper reported the news.

The Poynter Institute had as an interesting page that shows a few front pages from the impeachment of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, two of the only three U.S. presidents to be impeached.

I know Donald J. Trump, despite being manifestly unfit for office and clearly guilty of all kind of impeachable shenanigans, is pretty much assured of acquittal by the Senate. Still, he is forever an impeached president.

It was kind of interesting reading Facebook comments on The Gazette’s image of their front page from Thursday, covering the news. Several comments were along the lines of “he hasn’t been impeached” and “fake news.”

Because he will win in the Senate. But, legal eagles, impeached means “charged,” and the Senate merely renders a verdict on whether to remove the President. Because the House has voted, he has been impeached.

And that word “impeached” screamed from many front pages.

Anyway, downloaded from the Newseum web site, here are 25 front pages to mark the big event for this week in history:

The Newest Attack on the Fourth Estate

Newsprint—it’s the news media’s Achilles heel.

President Trump has called mainstream news media “enemies of the American people,” a rather startling escalation from “fake news” by an irresponsible national leader. It’s language that echoes sentiments of dictators and totalitarians, rather than a responsible U.S. President.

But I don’t think many intelligent adults would consider Trump to be a “responsible U.S. President.”

Earlier this month, in the wake of another Trump attack on the media, CNN’s Jim Acosta asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to say the press isn’t the enemy. “It’s ironic Jim, that you attack the President,” she shot back. And she listed a litany complains, noting she is the “first press secretary to require Secret Service protection.”

Well, that’s terrible. But Sanders doesn’t own any of her own part in creating the divisive discourse that tears at the fabric of our democracy and makes it seem impossible these days to have a civil discussion of real issues. And she never acknowledges the bedrock principle that Acosta asked her about: The press is listed as being free in our First Amendment because a free press is a necessary ingredient for a self-governing body politic to function well.

And we, that body politic, are growing less functional, partly due to the current horrible administration that keeps scooping sand into the grease of the gears of our government.

Still, it’s not news that Donald J. Trump, an immature narcissist, only likes sycophantic media attention. And Sanders is a spokesperson for Trump. Her job is to preach his message, no matter how bad or wrongheaded that message is.

And Trump’s message, on this point, is authoritarian. It steps over the line of endangering an already endangered species—the few journalists that remain active in this country, nowadays. Those reporters work with targets on their backs placed there by an unashamedly shameful President Trump.

Yeah, as a journalism professor, former reporter and media writer, I’m bitter about the horribleness of Donald J. Trump and his minions and his alternative media universe. But I think I have rational grounds for that bitterness.

Remember how President Trump as a candidate mocked a New York Times reporter’s physical disability? I’m sorry, Sarah Sanders, that you feel you’ve been personally attacked. But look at the conduct of your boss and tell me he’s not setting a low tone for public discourse.

Image of early press in Oregon from Wikimedia Commons.

And Trump’s war on the press includes an important recent jab. The free press in this country grew historically with loads of indirect government support. Newspapers used to be sidelines of print shops that sprang up in county seats as the country grew, partly to handle government printing. The U.S. Postal Service, the internet of the early Republic, offered very favorable rates that allowed newspapers to circulate and exchange information easily.

Of course, the press-government relationship can be too cozy, and a free press needs to guard its own independence. I recall once on the final day of the legislative session in Missouri, excitedly entering the tiny office of the newspaper Capitol bureau in Jefferson City and telling my editor that “they are offering free hot dogs in the halls.”

My editor fixed me with a dour stare. “I. Do. Not. Eat. With. Those. People,” he informed me.

Well, from his physical appearance, I’m not sure he ate anywhere—he was a wiry old codger who seemed to subsist on caffeine and nicotine (It was the ‘80s, a world that has long passed away). (Note that I'm attacking the physical appearance of a person who I respect and who I agree with—for effect, by the way. Sarah, if you are reading, that's an attack on physical appearance--you burning lies for a perfect smokey eye isn't the same.) But I mostly remember his point. He didn’t say I couldn’t have a hot dog if I wanted (and truth be told I’ve never let my sense of professional ethics stand in the way of free food), but I admired his spirit.

And his idea. Be independent of your sources. Don’t get too chummy. You are you and they are they and you both need to understand your often-adversarial roles. But I didn’t hate the Missouri politicians that I wrote about, and I don’t think they hated me.

I don’t trust politicians, yet I still have respect for them. Their motives aren’t pure and they bear watching (which is what a press is for), but they are also, most of them, motivated by a sense of mission and public service.

Government is messy, sometimes corrupt and often inefficient, but since we try to be governed by “we the people,” we can’t point our finger at “them” without some fingers pointing back at us. Or as Pogo put it: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Anyway, one of President Trumps recent initiatives is to instigate trade wars as a bargaining ploy for better trade deals. I am not an economist, and despite my trepidation at what seems to be a wrong-headed policy, I’ll conceded it’s possible he’s playing some international game of chess that may help equalized past inequities in trade. Frankly, I doubt it, but it’s something that I can strain to imagine.

However, his targets are often odd. Canada? We have an intertwined economy with our friendly frozen neighbors to the north, and we can’t hurt them without hurting us, too. And one product in particular that’s caught up in the this tariff tiff is newsprint, the price of which is expected to rise 30 percent due to Trump’s import tariffs.

This comes at a time when newspapers are already in a steep decline as a part of the overall news media system. Trump didn’t cause that decline, but he’s kicking a part of the historic media system when it’s down.

Making the Trump paper tariffs go away won’t revive the newspaper business. It’s likely the New York Daily News would be letting go of half its news staff anyway. But Trump's trade policies are yet another blow to an ailing free press, another hit on his “enemies.”

And democracy in American is less healthy as a result.

Sarah Sanders, if it were up to me, you would not need the Secret Service to protect you. But don’t blame the “enemy press” for your personal safety issues—you are caught up in a firestorm that your own boss keeps pouring gasoline on. As I’ve said before, the current biggest enemy of the American people isn’t the press that brings them the bad news of the day.

It’s the incompetent president who keeps generating more bad news—and is now making that news more expensive to print.

What I Think of The Post

An old friend, some weeks ago, posed a question to me: What do I think of the movie “The Post?”

Well, spoiler alert, I love it.

For one thing, it has a trio of giants—it was directed by Steven Spielberg and stars both Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham. The movie does a decent job of telling the story of the Pentagon Papers, although it does fudge it a bit—the eventual Supreme Court decision to allow both “The Washington Post” and “New York Times” to publish information from a secret government history of the war in Vietnam was not a total victory for the free press because there were so many decisions issued.

True, the papers won 6-3, but those six judges who favored the papers had were too divided in their reasons to set clear precedent.

Still, the movie seems, to me, to be fairly true to the people, the times they lived in and the historic story. And if the story seems to resonate now, it’s not an accident—President Nixon made some long term political strategic decisions that set his party on the road (the highway to Hell) to where it is today.

Beyond whether the narrative is capital T true, I also laud the film for its feel and texture. Journalism is often represented badly in the movies. Romantic comedies, in particular, often present newspaper writers as leading glamorous, odd lives that correspond not all to the actual life of any correspondent.

For example, in case you wonder, neither “Sleepless in Seattle” nor “Runaway Bride” has any character who appears to actually be a newspaper journalist.

“The Post” is not a rom-com, and it gets the feel of a newspaper and news people right. I especially appreciated how it brought the media world of 1971 back to life—the clacking typewriters all over the newsroom, the copy editor using a pencil to mark up a story, and the many montages featuring a Linotype machine setting the words in hot metal for printing.

A lying Republican president attempts to use his powers to thwart and punish mainstream journalists, particularly those of “The New York Times” and “The Washington Post.” Yeah, the movie is set in 1971, but it sure does echo in 2018.

I also liked that the movie made Katharine Graham something of a feminist icon—because she was. The journalism world of 1971 was very masculine—indeed the whole power structure of society was. That hasn’t exactly changed since then, but sexism was more overt and obvious in 1971.

Anyway, I also just liked the movie as a movie. Hanks and Streep, why has it taken so long? They are America’s top actors at the top of their game in this movie—and it’s not just them. The characters that surround Bradley and Graham are written well and played by actors who make them interesting and complicated.

And the lemonade? It’s the kind with lemons in it.

Which is the best lemonade, unless you have vodka.

So, old friend, in short—“The Post” has the Joe seal of approval. Six of six QWERTY marks.

A Stormy Feeling in the Air

Stormy chats with Anderson Cooper. All images on this post are screen shots from CBS News web site. I was flying back from England Sunday and missed the interview on TV, so I caught it online. Yay for the internet. I think.

How do you feel about 60 Minutes and the Anderson Cooper interview with Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels?

I am unclear in my own mind how I feel. On the one hand, Ms. Clifford seems to have candor and credibility. The president’s lawyer, in what may be an illegal hush payment just prior to an election, didn’t pay her because she didn’t have sex with President Trump.

He paid her because she did.

On the other hand, the sordid fact that Donald Trump is a pathetic man who would have casual sex with a porn star shortly after his third wife gave birth to his fifth child seems simultaneously extremely icky—and possibly not all that relevant to public discourse.

Liberals can’t have it both ways. If what President Clinton did with an intern while in the White House wasn’t an issue, then neither is the Donald being a pig at a golf tournament. We already know Mr. Trump is a misogynist hypocrite. That it doesn’t matter to his base may be weird—what are all those Evangelical Christians thinking—but it is worth raising the relevance question: Do we expect Presidents, or public men in general, to be saints?

As for me, I always disliked President Clinton’s behavior. His sexual pursuit of a young intern in the 1990s was irresponsible and immature. But it didn’t necessarily disqualify him to be an effective politician.

To me, the worst part of the Clinton affair was the aftermath—the president using legal babble to try to wiggle out of his problems, and his associates attacking the object of his lust. And we know enough now about Bill Clinton to know that his public service record will always include an asterisk caused by his appetites.

So, I’m not a big Bill fan. But I voted for Hillary. I’m not sure why she stuck with Bill, but that’s her business, and I really don’t care all that much.

As for Donald Trump, he is already going down in history as the worst American president. Not the worst in recent history, not the worst since World War II. He’s a man of extremes.

Worst. President. Ever.

That’s partly because he changes his mind on fundamental issues of policy at a dizzying pace. He’s cancelling DACA. He’s blaming Democrats for the collapse of DACA. He’s not beholden to the NRA, but he’ll do exactly what the NRA wants. He’s for compromise legislation that he threatens to veto. He waffles like that not because he’s having second thoughts—as Stephen Colbert pointed out, he never bothers with first thoughts. He’s living proof that a show business career—while it requires some ability to banter, some on-camera force of personality—doesn’t need any depth behind it.

And now his presidency, which has always been on the edge of collapse, is teetering yet again because of a porn star who appeared on 60 Minutes. And Ms. Clifford has the advantage partly because she’s not at all unrealistic about who and what she is. She is not ashamed to be in the adult entertainment industry.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, is his own worst enemy because he insists on constantly presenting himself as things that he is not. He’s not at heart a Republican (he’s not at heart a political animal at all), he’s not a hero, he would not rush in to a school to save students during a shooting (as his exemplary record of dodging the draft in Vietnam seems to prove). He did not have an impressive Electoral College victory--he barely got elected and lost the popular vote. He did not have an impressive crowd at his inauguration, and can't get over those facts--in fact, can't seem to grapple or bother much with facts at all. If still waters run deep, Trump is proof that the loudest babbling brooks are usually shallow.

He does have some abilities. He can command an audience of like-unminded people. He can pander to the camera.

But he’s outclassed by an intelligent exotic dancer/adult entertainer.

It’s delicious, but also unsettling. Donald Trump deserves to be removed from office for gross incompetence and for financial frauds and crimes. He’s working hard on the mid-term elections primarily because a Democratic majority may mean impeachment.

I just hope it’s not impeachment for cheating on his wife. Do I care when political men treat women as objects of lust and pleasure to the exclusion of their identities as intelligent coequal humans? Yes … but.

More than the Stormy affair, it’s the Don’s behavior during the election—the hush money—that can cause Mr. Trump problems. Whether there was collusion with the Russians isn’t the only unseemly secret that could yet trip up Teflon Don.

Trump loves to play at the edge of rules, and he’s not exactly a legal eagle. He often suggests actions that are outrageous or illegal, without any sense of where the lines are. I won’t feel any sympathy for him if, as seems likely, he loses his presidency because he didn’t care about the law. And yes, the Clintons often lived in the same shady universe of ill behavior—but both Hillary and Bill have sharper legal minds than Donald Trump. Frankly, most cats have sharper legal minds. The Clintons play hardball in ways that often make them unattractive. But, Trump plays ball without knowing what the rules are—he just wants to win, and doesn’t care if he brings a baseball bat to a tennis court.

Stormy chats with her lawyer. He's a better lawyer than Donald Trump has, because The Donald has no ability to gauge the abilities of other humans. Spank him again, much harder this time, Stormy.

And, isn’t there, or shouldn’t there be, some latitude for private lives to play out in private—even for a president? Ms. Clifford pointed out to 60 Minutes that she was not a sexual assault victim—the raunchy sex which reflected neither physical attraction nor human affection was consensual and was years ago.

Which means maybe it was nobody’s business.

Anderson Cooper, you’re a pretty potent journalist. You topped the ratings charts. Trump probably cares a lot about that because ratings are always his main scale for deal with reality.

As for me, I’m not so sure how I feel about the whole turn of events, other than I wish I wasn’t posing the question to myself in the first place. 60 Minutes is a venerable news show. One of the worst aspects of the Clinton scandal was it caused serious news outlets to carry detailed reports about semen spots on clothing. We’re there again. If I ran the shop at 60 Minutes, I wouldn’t be comfortable with that fact.

But then again, we’re in the gutter mostly because of you, Donald Trump. Your total lack of self awareness and sense of shame has put us there. Thanks a lot. Rex what right about your intelligence.

MAGA. Make American Groan Again.