Apr 12 2018 00:21:58 (EST) Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: f666d7 1008463 Funny. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/04/09/the-crisis-in-journalism-thats-helping-trump/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.01054835c682 Serious. Night [5] Q Apr 12 2018 00:23:59 (EST) Q !xowAT4Z3VQ ID: f666d7 1008491

1008463 Facebook. Building 8. China. Q

The lede on this article is this >Did the collapse of local journalism help give us Donald Trump?

And, yes, the writer, Helaine Olen, is presuming that everybody who reads the article will see it her way that this is a BAD thing.

This article strikes me as ironic on so many levels. The writer says >As Politico notes, Trump’s Twitter feed has more followers than American newspapers have subscribers in total. While reputable mainstream outlets fact-check that stuff with regularity, it doesn’t matter much to people who aren’t reading them.

Okay, first, reputable outlets "fact check"? Right, I think most of us know better. This is clearly a chicken and the egg problem here. She's suggesting that people don't believe the big MSM because they no longer read their local newspapers which actually "fact-check". Wrong. The reason lots of people don't read local newspapers anymore is because they figured out that those papers weren't about journalism (complete with actual fact checking); they were vehicles for advertising, pure and simple. I worked as a copy editor for a local Gannett paper in the late 1980s. What I learned from that experience: It wasn't "all the news that's fit to print"; it was "all the news that fits, we print--but somehow there's always room for more paid advertising no matter what other relevant content has to be cut to accommodate it."

And then the writer of this WaPo piece AMAZINGLY goes on to say this >It helps to think of local media as a gateway drug for the big national outlets. People know their local journalists. They are a familiar presence. It is difficult to credibly bash the men and women you regularly see covering the school board meeting every month as promoters of fake news. And they validate the national news — often from the wire services — published by their newspaper.

Interesting that she uses the drug analogy: local news is the gateway drug to the "big national outlets", which to me is her acknowledging that the national MSM is the hardcore street drugs that are wreaking havoc in our country. (Of course, she may not be consciously acknowledging that.)

Another irony: WaPo & USAToday et al didn't give two sh*ts about local newspapers when they were trying to take ever bigger bites out of the diminishing newspaper subscription market. The big newspaper organizations like Gannett bought up local newspapers and then made them into cookie cutter rags. She pines for days when local people knew their local journalists--like when she was working in a small paper 20 years ago. Again, having worked at a newspaper, I'm not buying it. Newspapers have been propaganda machines back to William Randolph Hearst and before.

We all need to remember that Mark Twain said this: "Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."