Approaching Election Day last month in the Old America, all the dreariest talk of journalism centered on the Washington Post, whose boss thought about integrity and decided to take a pass.
Never mind the old Post days of Woodward and Bernstein. This is the new Post, where owner Jeff Bezos cowers from Donald Trump in our New America.
It’s the America where the Post’s silence seems a harbinger of more silence to come, lest some wayward opinion offends the new Trump administration’s Department of Justice.
But there was something almost as troubling as the Post’s decision not to officially endorse Kamala Harris as she ran for president against the felonious, insurrectionist, sexual predator Trump.
Bezos’ cowardice at the Post is a once-in-four-years decision. One day, it’ll fade into the darkness. But what happened recently to the Baltimore Sun stays with us, at least until that newspaper’s current death rattle becomes the real thing.
How much sadder can conditions get at The Sun?
It was depressing enough when The Sun cut its newsroom staff from more than 400 people to about 60, and bad enough when ownership slipped from one icy corporate hand to another, each new owner interested in nothing but the bottom financial line.
And it was bad enough when the most recent control went to a man, David Smith, who owns the most conservative TV news operation in town — and has inflicted the historically superficial standards of local TV news into the once-rigorous newsroom standards of The Sun.
But then came news about The Sun’s Features department, which once had a staff of about 50 reporters and editors — and now has none.
In an Oct.28 statement, the Baltimore Newspaper Guild said, “The Baltimore Sun dissolved its Features Department Monday, reassigning its staff to news departments — the first time since at least 1888 that the newspaper won’t have even one reporter dedicated to covering the city’s cultural life.”
At first glance, you might say this isn’t entirely awful. They’re shifting people around to cover hard news. But it leaves the paper with a terrible void.
The Features section is where a newspaper gives its readers a sense of relief. Our community is more than the sum of our homicides and school failures and political corruption.
The Features section always told us what makes us a community. It’s where we’ve always gone to read about neighborhood festivals, ethnic celebrations, new art exhibits, restaurant and theater reviews, fascinating cultural personalities.
It’s where the best writers on the paper tended to gather, too. Over the years at The Sun, that included Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Steinbach, Stephen Hunter, Pat McGuire, Carl Schoettler, Mike Klingaman, Mike Ollove, Mary McCauley, John Dorsey. They brought a little poetry into journalism.
And something else.
As Jeannie L. Howe, executive director of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, told the Sun Newspaper Guild, it is “unconscionable and bad business for the Baltimore Sun to eliminate coverage of arts and culture. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the culture sector contributes $11.7 billion to Maryland’s economy. Around the country, robust journalism which reflects the community continues to decline. Let’s not let this erosion in vital coverage happen here.”
Over the past decade, as The Sun’s coverage has shrunk and local TV news has never matured beyond its “If it bleeds, it leads” approach to news, we’ve lost a sense of who we are.
Daily journalism is supposed to give us a mirror image of ourselves. But if the only image we see is the one that’s self-destructing, then that’s who we believe we are.
And it’s why you hear so many people in the modern era say, “I won’t go into the city anymore.”
Because the only image we have, day after day, is the city clawing itself into shreds.
Is it a fair image?
Of certain sections of town, of course. But like any big city, Baltimore is more than one city. There are neighborhoods absolutely flourishing. But in the modern telling, they’ve become invisible because newspapers like The Sun make self-destructive decisions on coverage, and TV news still behaves as if it’s in its infancy.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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