The Union – no room for blasphemies du jour

‘All great truths began as blasphemies.’  GB Shaw

George Rebane

[This commentary was published (here) as an Other Voices column in the 30Oct21 Union.  As usual, the leftwing commenters on the newspaper's website continue to demonstrate their total ignorance of who has been censoring whom across the land.  Add that to their reading comprehension and reasoning abilities, and the nature and content of their comments becomes clear.  gjr]

We have broken bread with our newspaper’s publisher Don Rogers, communicate with him regularly, and consider him a friend.  Don is a likable and honorable man with clear ideas about the kinds of content that should appear in The Union, ideas that he most recently shared in the 22oct21 edition of his weekly column.(here)  Writing about the criteria for acceptable commentary, he informed us, his readers, that –

Facts and evidence must check out with conventional, legitimate sources. We try to keep it within the mainstream guardrails factually for more grounded discussion than, say, on Brunswick street corners or at the start of county supervisors meetings.

Swimming with the times, the newspaper’s editorial policy has noticeably tilted leftward.  I sensed something had changed when a recent Other Voices submittal of mine (here) on some new research by sociologist Charles Murray was rejected for containing subject matter outside established norms, content that would violate the sensibilities of the newspaper’s readership.  It was my first and only rejection in twenty years, and since then I’ve almost learned to behave myself.

These are trying times and new ideas are a messy business, often rejected by minds more careful and staid.  And as a private enterprise, The Union has every right to determine what it chooses to print.  Nevertheless, this is my lament about our hometown newspaper which we eagerly consume daily.  It is also an appeal for more latitude in the ideas it sees fit to print.

With its current editorial policy in place, the writings of thinkers such as Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, DaVinci, Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Pasteur, Mendel, Edison, Bell, Einstein, Fermi, Payne, Revere, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, … would not have passed muster to grace the pages of today’s Union.

As a student of both history and science I am reminded that, fortunately, our beloved land was born on “Brunswick street corners” and in exciting “county supervisors meetings”, all of which then as now were considered outside “the mainstream guardrails factually”, violating the “more grounded discussions” of the day.  So now as then, such out-of-box expressions have again been proscribed, and it appears that The Union has joined the ranks of today’s publications with an editorial policy distinctly of a medieval bent.  But I wonder, does it have to be this way?

Comments

[The Estonian Fox]

It seems someone has a conscience, and not so left-leaning.

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association severed ties with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) over a letter comparing parents' behavior at school board meetings to "domestic terrorism or hate crimes."

The letter sent to Biden on Sept. 29 from the NSBA requests the assistance of federal law enforcement officials and agencies in quenching the parental anger toward educators and school board officials in regards to mask mandates, curricula such as critical race theory, and other polarizing issues.

"The Governing Board of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association has voted unanimously to cancel the PSBA's longstanding membership in the National School Board's Association," the memo said.

"This misguided approach has made our work and that of many school boards more difficult," the memo said, referring to the letter's likening of parents to domestic terrorists. "Now is not the time for more politics and posturing, it is time for solutions to the many challenges facing education."

Finally, a state organization standing for critical thinking. Gov. Tom Wolf would most likely be on the "thumbs up, good job" side of the NSBA.

[scenes]

re: The Union.

No offense to your columns, but if I ran The Union I'd drop the locally written national political op-ed stuff and the online comments section (although it probably drives some traffic). I'd then make an honest effort to really flesh out local reporting and avoid puff pieces.

More articles like this:
https://www.theunion.com/news/a-symptom-of-much-deeper-problems-grass-valley-officers-focus-on-issues-of-mental-illness-drug-abuse-poverty/

It's funny how newspapers in days of yore presented an absolute wall of text, especially considering the physical difficulties in producing a paper. Evidently writing, especially the slightly longer form, is a dying art. You'd think there'd be more dredging of city council meetings and the like. Of course, local fire news by most sources seems to consist of asking Pascale a lot of questions.

OTOH, the modern newspaper website is a travesty (all of them). Software obviously written at the mothership company and repurposed everywhere, absolutely insane things happening in the backend to detect who you are, auction off the ad space, dredge up an ad and present it. Crazy. The earlier internet favored users, the late model variety favors corporations.

[George Rebane]

scenes 607pm - None taken. But providing a trumpet for local opinions on any number of topics drives a lot of traffic and keeps the print readership up. Apparently people like to see what their neighbors are thinking and up in arms about. It is one of the main functions that remain to local newspapers, everything else they can get online.

[scenes]

"But providing a trumpet for local opinions on any number of topics drives a lot of traffic"

You bet, but I doubt the fact that it's local opinion makes all that much difference.

Basically newspapers are driven by the same market forces and tastes as Twitter or Facebook, so they tend to take on all the trappings. The most ideal situation tends to combine the joy of outrage with user-supplied content. A few kilomillionaires have been made that way.

I suppose that observing that newspapers/magazines evolve towards Twitter (ever shorter stories, surveillance advertising, outrage in the comment section) is like noticing that movies inch towards video games in terms of aesthetics or that many documentaries tend toward tiny cuts in the editing suite. It's true but both unstoppable and useless as an observation, it just is.

[Gregory]

Linda Campbell, having abandoned the other names she's used in the more recent past, has a new Other Voices in The Union and it is a howler.

The question that came to my mind is... how did that disjointed screed pass muster but george's review of a new Charles Murray book did not?

[scenes]

re: Gregory@2:39PM

You'll have to tell me how it turns out.

She so obviously had no clue what a 'pyramid scheme' is that I had to quit reading right about there.