It is well known by both of this website’s regular readers that I like to cite newspapers as my sources. Part of the reason is that I am mostly deaf; I simply don’t get my news from television, because it is much easier for me to read the news than listen to it. And newspapers usually cover stories in greater depth than television stations.

More, I have been an adamant defender of the First Amendment, and its protection of freedom of speech and of the press. The government should not have any control of, or censorship authority over, the media, whether it’s a big corporate entity like The Washington Post,, or an individual blog like The Pirate’s Cove.

Which makes this begging OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer all the worse:

A call to action as a key deadline looms for the federal proposal to help local news

Support for the sustainability of local journalism, what should be viewed as the very glue that helps hold our democracy together, may be seen as expendable as the Build Back Better act is finalized.

by Jim Friedlich^[1]Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit organization that owns The Inquirer. | Saturday, October 30, 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT

Deadlines are a fact of life for the reporters, editors, web producers, visual journalists, and others at the heart of America’s free press. But today we face a deadline of a different sort. The number of newsroom employees in the United States has fallen by almost 60% since 2000. Since 2004, over 2,100 newspapers — including 70 daily papers — have stopped publishing altogether.

In the next few days, Congress will decide the fate of a federal bill called The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, designed to help reverse these trends.

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has been the subject of earlier advocacy by The Lenfest Institute, the nonprofit owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier versions of the bill included proposed tax credits for consumers buying news subscriptions, for small businesses advertising in local news publications, and — most critically — for news organizations hiring and retaining journalists.

This provision is now part of the Build Back Better bill, the major legislation pushed by the Biden administration. The current version of the bill has jettisoned the subscription and advertising tax credits to reduce cost to the American taxpayer. But the bill retains its most important and direct support, a refundable payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist to help local news organizations hire and retain reporters and editors, the lifeblood of local news coverage and the democracy it helps sustain.

There’s more at the original, but let me be the first to say: not just no, but Hell no! How can newspapers be independent of the government if they are going to require government largesse to operate? How can we trust coverage, by the Inquirer or any other credentialed media organization, if those media are dependent upon $25,000 for every journalist’s and editor’s salary?

No, Uncle Sam would not be paying the salaries directly, but tax credits would come right off the news organizations’ tax liabilities, and would be very much reducing the newspapers’ costs of employing people.

Mr Friedlich noted that, over the past 17 years, over 2,100 newspapers, including 70 daily newspapers, have gone out of business. To quote from the source he linked:

When the 127-year-old Siftings Herald in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, printed its final edition on Sept. 15, 2018, there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents. The community was one of the poorest in the state. For decades, the paper had been published daily, Monday through Friday. But as both subscriber and advertising revenue dropped, publication was first reduced to two days a week in 2016, and then in early September 2018, the owner, the Gatehouse chain, announced the simultaneous closure of the Siftings Herald and two other papers in nearby counties. A former editor, now a columnist at the Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, took note of the closures, writing, “The watchdogs of school boards, city councils and quorum courts are gone. The chroniclers of high school sports teams are missing. To say that this is a sad thing for these counties is to understate the case.”

For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

If there were only 1,600 subscribers in a community of 10,000 residents, it’s pretty obvious: the majority of the community didn’t care enough to subscribe. Whatever value the residents of Arkadelphia saw in the Siftings Herald, it wasn’t enough to actually pay for it. What Mr Friedlich is asking is that people who don’t care enough about a particular newspaper to subscribe to it should have to pay for it anyway, through their taxes.

In 2019, Ralph Cipriano of Philadelphia: magazine wrote of the Inquirer:

As of May 7^th, the circulation of the daily Inquirer, which once stood at 373,892 copies in 2002, was down to 101,818.

Using the same metric as was used to describe the Siftings Herald, to which only 16% of the residents subscribed, with a circulation of 101,818 daily copies, in a city of 1,603,797 souls, the Inquirer is doing much worse, with only 6.35% of Philadelphians buying it.^[2]Full disclosure: I do pay for a digital subscription to the Inquirer.

And it’s actually worse than that: the Philadelphia metropolitan area has roughly 6,108,000 people, meaning that the Inquirer’s circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its service area.

If the Inquirer is valued that little by the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, why should all of those people who don’t find it worth the cost of paying for it be taxed to support it?

Journalists have always had an exaggerated opinion of their status. Because freedom of the press is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, the so-called Fourth Estate tends to see itself as somehow specially privileged, and owed support. And for centuries, the public did support newspapers, because they were the source of information from near and far.

The above mentioned quote from one of Mr Friedlich’s linked sources is important:

For more than two centuries, newspaper editors and reporters, more often than not, served as arbiters of our news, determining what made front-page headlines read by millions of people in this country. They were the prime, if not sole, source of credible and comprehensive news and information, especially for residents in small and mid-sized communities.

What is an ‘arbiter’? Arbiter is defined as:

1. a person with power to decide a dispute : JUDGE
2. a person or agency whose judgment or opinion is considered authoritative

This is how the credentialed media see themselves, and they were, for centuries, the gatekeepers, the decision takers of what would, and would not, be published. With the arrival of that internet thingy that Al Gore invented, that gatekeeping function passed away. The First Street Journal may not have the circulation of the Inquirer, but as long as I pay my site hosting bills, the editors of the Inquirer cannot stop me from publishing.

It was 2004, when the sites Powerline and Little Green Footballs destroyed that lofty air of authority the credentialed media enjoyed, when, working only on the low resolution television screens of the day, they managed, independently, to spot the forgery with which Dan Rather and CBS News tried to turn the presidential election against the younger President Bush.

Seventeen years later, the Inquirer has announced, in public, by its publisher, Elizabeth Hughes, that it would not publish the unvarnished truth, but only those things which passed muster through the lens of being “an anti-racist news organization,” censoring information which might reflect poorly on “people of color.”

Why should people pay for a newspaper which has announced that it will deliberately slant the news?

It’s hardly just the Inquirer. We noted, just three days ago, how The New York Times, supposedly the ‘newspaper of record’ for the United States, ignored a rather large New York City story, because the editors didn’t want to admit that resistance to COVID vaccine mandates was leaving the trash piled high on the streets in two boroughs. This site has pointed out, many times, how my ‘local’ newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, censors news that is freely available on the local television stations, because of political considerations rather than any journalistic imperative to actually report all of the news.

If the Inquirer is to survive, it must make itself a newspaper, whether in print or digital only, that the people of the Philadelphia metropolitan area find valuable enough for which to pay. If it can’t do that, it does not deserve to survive.