By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff
With the exception of bagging groceries at the Sandpoint Safeway, running the fryers at Serv-a-Burger, bartending at the long-lost Downtown Crossing and selling books at a shop in downtown Boise, I’ve never done anything to make money other than work in newsrooms. Journalists are my tribe. They’re my people, and even though we might compete for readers, scoops and ad revenue, my allegiance lies with them more than any workers in any industry.
So it was with immense sorrow and dread that I read about the recent mass layoffs by the McClatchy Media Company at the Idaho Statesman.
If the state has a newspaper of record, it’s the Statesman. Based in Boise, the venerable news institution lost 10 reporters and three editors in a wave of cuts across its other newsrooms around the country on Sept. 10. That was even after previous reductions left only about 22 staffers to helm Idaho’s flagship print paper, serving as the daily for nearly half the state population, including the capitol city of Boise and seat of the Legislature.
“These severe cuts will hobble these news organizations and leave the public throughout the Northwest less informed about the events and decisions that affect them and with fewer people holding the powerful to account,” stated the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
When I was a kid of 23 or so, I went to the Statesman to look for a job. I remember being awed by the operation, which looked like the scenes in any number of movie depictions: rows of desks and cubicles in a mostly windowless room under unforgiving fluorescent ceiling lights, people running around with sheafs of paper, gabbling over each other on the phone with sources, laughter and shouting, the reek of burnt coffee in the air.
They didn’t hire me, and I suppose I’m glad for that — not least because I wasn’t just laid off, but also because it shunted me into the arms of independent media, ultimately starting this very rag and having the honor of serving as editor-in-chief of the Boise Weekly, which was like the Statesman’s bratty little third cousin until it, too, was ruined by corporate ownership.
This trend of accumulating wounds to the Fourth Estate has been ongoing for decades, with the litany of causes mostly too rote to recount — shorthand: the internet and venture capital. The one that most sticks in my craw, though, is the very people who journalism evolved to serve seem to increasingly prefer propaganda to honest accounting of events that ruffle their comfortable preconceptions or, God forbid, make them think about something real for more than the span of a viral hot take or the time it takes to take in a meme.
As with so many of our current civilizational woes, President Donald Trump is a centrifugal force of the damage. If he’s not calling us the “enemy of the people” or “the lying press” (the latter a bald-faced reference to the literal translation of the Nazi-era slur lügenpresse), he’s imperiously banning legitimate outlets from access to the White House, insulting reporters to their faces, filing patently frivolous lawsuits based on personal grievances, calling for unconstitutional limits on the First Amendment (up to and including jail time for uncomfortable truth-tellers) and generally encouraging a climate of hostility toward the one profession that pays people for exerting sustained attention to What’s Going On.
I have to emphasize a central fact of the job: We are not your enemies. We feel our butts go numb sitting through civic meetings that any schmo could and should attend, but do so with the intention of relaying what happened so you don’t have to bother. You’re welcome. We ask hard questions of people who we’d rather drown ourselves in the nearest toilet than stand next to in an elevator so you don’t have to. You’re welcome again. We don’t get rich doing it.
We put our names on what we write, give you our phone numbers and email addresses, even invite you to come to where we work to tell us how you feel — all free of charge. Then we do our damndest to translate whatever it was you told us into a format that can be shared with other people so that you’re empowered in the community in which you live and work.
And for all that, we get downsized, ridiculed, distrusted and denigrated — to the point that even the “powerful” who want so much to tell you how to live and work won’t participate in the basic functions of communication. Politicians — notably all on the right-wing, Trumpian side of the spectrum — won’t even sit for election forums, much less interviews, because they can’t control the narrative to their total benefit. They’ve already opted out of speaking to constituents through a press-mediated forum ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
I won’t pretend that my lifelong business is perfect (far from it), but its practioners’ hearts are in the right place. Mine is breaking for my colleagues at the Statesman, and for all of us who are worse off for the loss of their labor, which seeks to serve us all and whose absence harms us all.
