About 2 months ago I was roped into purchasing a physical subscription to The Tennessean. For those of you who don’t know, which is probably a good deal, that’s Nashville’s biggest newspaper. To be honest I had my reservations but the dude pitching it to me seemed liked an honest, hardworking sort and for only $8.00 a month I figured maybe it was worth a shot. As I mulled over the offer I was reminded of blissful weekend mornings of my childhood reading the comics and pouring over the sports sections with Mom’s home-cooked breakfast — crispy bacon, fluffy, scrambled eggs and toasted English muffins covered in jam. Sensing my nostalgia or banking on the trend of young people’s affinity for old-timey, obsolete things, the salesman became visibly more confident. Only $8.00 a month, he reminded me, and I could cancel the subscription at anytime.
After about 6 days of newspapers piling up on my doorstep I realized I had made a big mistake. I just wasn’t going to read these. Maybe an article or two here and there that caught my attention and a crossword puzzle but an entire newspaper? That was just too tall an order — a millennial’s attention span just isn’t that long. In the time it takes to read a newspaper front to back, I speculated, I could have watched three episodes of Game of Thrones, played half a game of Civilization or caught several pokemon in my area. The possibilities of how else I could have been spending my time absolutely bloomed. I canceled my subscription the next day.
The representative on the phone did everything she possibly could to convince me to keep my subscription. She offered me deals, laid out long-term strategies, tried to persuade me that I was keeping a bastion of culture and integrity afloat in an age of misinformation. In the end, out of pity and a slim hope I would actually read it, I did opt for the digital subscription (only $10.00 for two years) but I must ashamedly admit I still haven’t looked through it. The desire isn’t there.
As a writer a part of me feels sad. Shouldn’t I be trying to convince myself and others of the importance of print journalism, fact-based reporting and keeping up to date with current events locally? Perhaps I should, but I can’t stoke a desire that isn’t there. The truth is television and the internet have made it so easy to get news that we show little reaction to it and take much of that constant influx of information for granted. With Facebook we don’t even have to worry about searching out news — it searches us out. And we don’t even have to face news that we don’t like or that challenges our beliefs. It’s easier than ever before to keep your belief bubble airtight and free from threat. Just look at what all the networks said prior to the 2016 presidential election and then look at the results. They hardly influenced people’s opinions at all.
Newspapers are dying, that much is true. Perhaps they’re already dead. But if there is one thing that we should take from this antiquated establishment it’s the spirit of integrity and truth in reporting the news that has stood for so long. We all remember the movies about the brash, young reporter with an inspired vision of giving the people the unbridled truth even when that truth was hard to hear. If you want you can completely avoid the truth and shut yourself in with clickbait articles that kowtow to your own warrants. That is your right after all. But if you want to know what’s really going on in the world read the newspaper or any publication that holds itself to a standard of excellence. The future of journalism may not be on paper but it must carry that same spirit of truth in the face of all else.
This Side of Purgatory 