The headlines

There’s a lot of unnecessary complaining nowadays about “the media,” about misrepresentations and non-creditable information, about the decline of American society as traditional reporting on local issues, local leaders, local events and local conditions disappears with disappearing community newspapers.

But none of it need be true, even though traditional community newspapers printed in ink or delivered in digital formats, either one, have shrunk in number.

In historic photos of commuters pressed into subways, almost every shoulder to-shoulder rider clutches an open newspaper. More recent photos show every rider clutching a cellphone. Maybe things haven’t changed as much as we thought.

Still, by the end of next year a third of the nearly 8,900 American newspapers that existed in 2005 will be gone, according to a study by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Almost five out of every six remaining publications will be weeklies. A single century earlier, with the population of the country less than a third of the count today, just over 106 million citizens relied on almost 24,000 newspapers.

Roger Williams

What should we make of all this?

In the first place, there’s no such thing as “the media,” anymore than there’s one thing called “the people.” We have old people and young people, male and female people, Black, white, brown, red, yellow and sometimes neon-purple people. People who live with anger or with peace.

In news and information — in the stuff that can educate and inform as well as entertain — we have printed newspapers and magazines, radio broadcasts, and television news stations, both public and private. We also have online publications that never appear in print, and print publications that have a limited online presence.

There’s “social media,” of course, a term to describe how we can talk to each other, buy or sell to each other, opinionate to each other, and behave either decently or indecently in public to each other, just like people have always done in small towns or big cities.

And there’s anti-social media, if I can call it that — the polemic spittle that rides the coattails of the rest of our vast and transforming news enterprise.

All of it’s always existed for Americans, one way or another. We get to choose who and what we embrace, each of us. To some degree, our choices reflect our characters.

Nowadays we can get all the news that’s fit to print — the motto of The New York Times — and plenty of news that’s not fit to print, from all over the place.

We aren’t generally foolish. Most of us can tell where to go to be informed, and where to go to be reassured, no matter how many newspapers have vanished into the ether.

When you decide to get informed, you might not like what you hear. When you decide to be reassured, you might not hear what’s true, but you will like it.

The nation has Florida Weekly, it’s true, so all is not lost.

We also have The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Des Moines Register, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, and in Florida such straightforward newspapers as The Miami Herald, The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post, the Tampa Bay Times, The Sarasota Herald Tribune, The Naples Daily News and The News-Press in Fort Myers, to name just a few.

All of them, fundamentally, are designed for people who want to be informed, not just reassured, like public radio and television stations and a number of the mainstream private stations.

In Florida, some of the best online news anywhere — the kind whose editors and writers pay scrupulous and necessarily skeptical attention to people with political power and money making claims or decisions — include the nonprofit Florida Trident, published by the Florida Center For Government Accountability, and Florida Phoenix, part of the States Newsroom.

But you have to be willing to read, and more than just headlines, if you want to know anything.

Headlines alone are cotton candy and I like them as much as anybody. So I found myself signing up for daily email injections of them from something called “Headline Reporter,” and a related one, “interNewsGroup.”

Remember the supermarket tabloids? Well, this is that, but digital.

Just in a handful of recent days, for example: “Woman’s Execution Broadcasted Live”; “10 Hospital Patients Dead in IV Swap”; “Young Football Star Shot and Killed at Party”; “Missing Teen Found Murdered in Woods”’ “Judge and Wife Found Viciously Murdered”; “Actor and His 2 Children Killed in Plane Crash”’ “Trumps’ Marriage Hits Tabloid Turmoil”; “Mass Shooting: 3 Dead, 5 Injured at Party”; and “Wal-Mart Employee Kills Customer.”

I’m surprised that doesn’t happen at Walmart, every Walmart, 15 or 20 times every day, aren’t you? The headlines were so satisfying, I read none of the stories.

Just delicious — mayhem and chaos all over the place.

So how could anyone go back to the staid old headlines in the gray lady, as they used to call The New York Times? They’re about as exciting as Brussels sprouts after all that candy chaos.

But let’s not be too quick to dismiss the old and venerable. Monday’s New York Times came out swinging with this headline: “Authorities Seize Alligator Being Held Illegally in Home Near Buffalo.”

I read the subhead, too, just like you would have. “The alligator, Albert Edward, had been with his owner for 34 years.”

Nice. To make the digital headline tabloids, though, Albert Edward would had to have eaten his owner, his owner’s wife, and all three of his owner’s children. ¦

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