The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If our democracy is so under threat, Covid is still surging, workers and the economy are still suffering, climate change due to global warming is all around us and we’re about to be at war with Russia, why are these talking heads on TeeVee so freaking happy?

I asked that on Facebook recently and got a few comments.

I was trying to watch “CBS Mornings” with Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, Nate Burleson and Vladimir Duthiers, and even with all the bad news, they were all smiling and laughing as if the world was back to normal and Covid was cured, democracy was safe, we had solved the climate crisis and Putin had been pushed back from invading Ukraine.

We expect nothing less in the morning from NBC’s “Today” and ABC’s “Today Show,” where “Happy News” took over 40 years ago when focus groups showed that smiling, happy people on the tube in the morning would get people to watch and that would help ratings. Corporate advertisers liked it too so they didn’t have to be associated with all that sad, bad news every day.

I used to wake up in the morning listening to NPR, but the coverage on public radio of late has just been incredibly annoying, starting with their over obsession with what President Biden did wrong by pulling the U.S. military out of Afghanistan. They covered it for weeks, long after every other news organization had moved on.

And forget PBS. Public television has been so corporatized in recent years and the so-called broadcast “journalists” they have on air seem to be reading the news wires for fifth graders. Nobody on television gathers their own news anyway, unless they are out getting rained on in the wind during a hurricane. They rewrite what newspaper reporters put together and pass around on the news wires.

Everyone knows the newspapers all over the country are all out of business or intellectually dead, with the notable exceptions of what’s left of The New York Times and The Washington Post.

I still pay for both of those newspapers online, and share some of their most important stories on social media every morning. But no one is paying attention anymore. No likes. No shares. No comments. In part because Meta owns WhatsApp, the share buttons every news site online uses. Facebook has the app programed so that links disappear, because Facebook hates external links that take people away from it’s multi-billion dollar program.

The vast majority of the American public will not pay for real news anyway. Apparently they are perfectly sanguine to watch the “Happy News” on cable TV, most not even realizing that they can still get a free over the airwaves broadcast signal on any television with a digital antenna.

And I’m talking about people with a college education here, liberals and Democrats, not the idiocracy that listens to talk radio and watches Fox News and shares Breitbart News links on Facebook.

People think they are smart on both sides, but we passed the rubicon a few years ago when dumb became the new smart.

The average IQ in America is about 95 for a reason. Most people have an IQ of 100 or less. This number appears to be going down, and there appears to be a correlation with the death of local newspapers and the decline in the reading of books.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We could reclaim a shared narrative of the world, if we could get everyone onboard sharing the same smart hypertext links on social media instead of the stupid memes.

One of the writers I tend to read in The Washington Post online is Margaret Sullivan, The Post‘s media column. She is not read much by the general public. She writes about the press and media for other reporters and writers.

But even she has been annoying to read lately, because like the Columbia Journalism Review and the Neiman Report at Harvard, she still seems to think the way to save local journalism is to save the damn local print newspapers.

Oh, she will give credit to ProPublica or The Texas Observer, never mind The Post‘s competitors Politico or Axios or the New American Journal.

I started publishing independently on the web long before there was a Daily Kos blog, the Huffington Post or Politico, and covered quite a bit of local news in the American South for many years, including the United States Senate race of Birmingham Democrat Doug Jones, who we arguably helped beat the pedophile religious nut Judge Roy Moore in that special election back in 2017.

The Washington Post tried to claim all the credit for that, however, and won a Pulitzer Prize for it, never acknowledging that I broke the story about Moore being banned from the Gadsden Mall that no doubt carried the day in the final two weeks of that race, especially after it made the Colbert show on CBS that night. Colbert credited the New American Journal, as did The New Yorker. But not The Washington Post or the Newhouse newspapers in Alabama.

Not many people in Alabama were paying to read The Washington Post back then, although many did read our free website which was getting up to 2 million hits a month then. Most people probably learned about that story from MSNBC or Fox News, however, since most people get their news from television and don’t actually read news at all.

But forget all that for a minute. I want to harken back to another time to tell another little story from my experience.

The story is in my book, Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again. But since most people won’t pay for books or read them anymore either, here’s the story I’m thinking about today.

Back in 1989, before the internet had come to American homes on personal computers through the phone lines, I was hired by a chain of newspapers on the Gulf Coast specifically to specialize in covering the environment as a beat. That was right after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince Williams Sound, Alaska, and dumped 11 million gallons of dirty crude oil into the environment and became one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Newspaper publishers recognized the public interest in reading news about the environment, so they began hiring specialized reporters to cover it. I had an interest in this kind of news and a few clips to show.

But of course when I got on the job in Gulf Shores, Alabama, it became obvious that I would not just be covering the environment. I still had to cover local and state government politics, and there was also a need to cover some entertainment news on the Gulf Coast. Without a wire service like AP or UPI, there was a big news hole to fill in all six twice-weekly papers in Baldwin County, Alabama, across the bay from Mobile, so I started cranking out about seven to 10 stories a week.

Some of those stories were news features and investigative reports about local and regional environmental issues, and some did make the UPI wire and got on cable TV on CNN out of Atlanta.

After a year of doing this, the circulation of The Islander newspaper doubled, then tripled, and we got letters to the editor from Michigan snow birds saying our newspaper was better than The Detroit Free Press, a newspaper of some note back then.

I won awards, and made a difference.

Drawing from this experience years later, I started doing the same thing on the web in 2005. And we have been doing it ever since, although we simply get ignored by the mainstream media, which still seems to think it’s the local Gatehouse Media newspapers that must be saved.

If our democracy is so under threat, Covid is still surging, workers and the economy are still suffering, climate change due to global warming is all around us and we’re about to be at war with Russia, who are you going to trust for news? The happy, smiling talking heads on TeeVee? The dead or dying local newspaper? The big national online newspapers that charge you to read it?

Or us?

That is the question. Does education and experience matter? Or not?

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