It wastes our time. It rots our children’s brains. It robs our local businesses. It puts down our defenses to allow foreign countries to meddle in our elections. It ruins families with pornography. It gives hate groups like ISIS a platform to recruit within our nation.
Think I’m exaggerating the evils brought on during the last 20 years by the World Wide Web? Remember the former cheerleader and robotics student – how’s that for diverse talent? -- from right down the road in Vicksburg who tried to join ISIS and is now serving 12 years in the federal pen? How do you think that 20-year-old, impressionable mind got indoctrinated? It wasn’t from reading the editorial pages of The Vicksburg Post, I can assure you.
For sure, this confrontation with the internet is personal for me. It has wounded, although by no means defeated, what I consider our nation’s most important private business venture: newspapers. No other industry is listed and protected in the Constitution (“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom … of the press”). That shows the imperative nature of newspapers to democracy. You think the internet can replace that? Please. It’s just a forum for the most obnoxious, most self-centered people to see who can blow their horn the loudest.
Newspapers are the Fourth Estate, the one who watches and sheds light on the other three — nobles, representing wealth and its importance to a society’s wellbeing, the clergy, representing the spiritual side of life, without which man is no different from the beasts, and the commoners, representing the people, for whom paths taken by society ultimately matter.
Who else is going to do this? TV does very little original reporting. That is, they’re not out there spending the time and money paying reporters to find out information meaningful to society, as opposed to sensational happenings that attract lots of eyeballs but have little substance. Real reporting requires attending meetings, going through documents, interviewing people. TV typically waits to read it in the newspaper and then dispatch their talking heads.
Online only news outlets? Good luck paying the bills with just online ad revenue, which is driven down to ridiculously low levels because of the high amount of fraud. That is, there are far more views for sale than actual views because unscrupulous dealers manufacture fake ones to sell to advertisers. Predictably, that large supply drives down prices, thus requiring a massive, nationwide audience to get enough views to sustain a newsgathering operation. Want local coverage of what’s happening in your community? That’s not going to happen anytime soon with a digital only news site.
So that leaves newspapers to fight the good fight. Hey, I signed up to do this and love the work, but I think we need to do a better job of promoting the value of what we do rather than just letting the internet run roughshod over us.
I’ve been talking about news here, but that philosophy applies to just about any industry, from a shop on Main Street to a manufacturer of American-made goods. It’s important to state the value of locally owned businesses that are invested in a community rather than an online alternative that sucks dollars out of the local economy.
I may be ranting like the Unabomber here, but I promise I’m not as unhinged as I sound. I’m just tired of everyone barreling over the waterfall to adopt the newest technology without ever thinking about what it’s going to be like when we hit the bottom.
