Editorials:

Editorial: Trying to Blow Down Walls With Words

Well, it’s “whither journalism” time again. Straws in the wind: Thursday’s Chronicle, with the top story, over the fold, complete with big picture, about our friend Jane Stillwater, whose comments sometimes appear in these pages. Jane’s off to Iraq, trying to get herself embedded in an army unit, and her saga will undoubtedly be reported in exquisite detail on her blog, as are other events in her never-dull daily life. The jump headline says it all: “64-YEAR-OLD BERKELEY BLOGGER OFF FOR IRAQ.” This story has everything: “elderly party still full of beans,” “beloved-tho-quirky Berzerkly hasn’t changed,” “elderly newspaper HAS changed: now it reads blogs” and “foreign news is OK if it has a local angle.” More power to Jane for capturing the zeitgeist, perhaps finally getting the attention of anyone who doesn’t already know that there’s a mess over there. Maybe a 64-year-old Berkeley blogger can clean it all up. Or if not, at least it makes entertaining copy for the Comical.

And on the back page of the Chron’s diminished Datebook section, often transplanted inside to make way for a big ad, Jon Carroll and Leah Garchik, two intelligent and thoughtful people, try to hang in there. On Tuesday Garchik inserted a poignant reflection on the Iraq insanity into what is supposed to be a gossip column. On Thursday Carroll abandoned his recent jolly-grampa posture for an incisive reminder that even when Bush is gone the damage he’s done will linger. Both of them deserve thanks and praise for keeping their eyes on the prize in difficult circumstances. It’s not that readers don’t enjoy chit-chat and schmalz occasionally, but it’s too bad that these have become the staple offerings in the only big paper in the Bay Area not controlled by Media News.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose. The more things change, the more they’re the same. That staple proverb, remembered from the dictation exercises in my high school French class, never leaves my mind. (In fact, when I Googled it to get the accents right, one of the first hits was one of my own editorials of a couple of years ago.) That’s what Carroll’s column was exploring: even if Bush goes, will anything change?

And the corollary question du jour is whether print newspapers make a difference anymore. Does telling people the truth make them free?

We recently had a visit from a bright young cousin, the object of a bidding war among top graduate chemistry programs around the country and also politically admirable (she runs a soup kitchen for homeless people in her spare time). She’s been in school in St. Louis, the home of what was once one of the great papers, the Post-Dispatch. We asked what paper she reads. Well, she said, she’s busy, but she occasionally skims the New York Times on the web. That’s it.

And no, she wouldn’t read a print paper more often if it featured ever-larger pictures of celebrities and more human interest stories on the front page. Intelligent young people like her are not looking for dumbed-down papers, contrary to urban legends, nor do they watch much broadcast television. If anything, she said, the reason she avoids the local metro daily is because of how much junk and how many ads she’d have to wade through to find the tiny bit of news still left.

Markets are not always as wise as some economists would have you believe, but they’re speaking clearly now on what’s happening to newspapers. According to a Bloomberg report yesterday, a rich developer’s recent takeover bid to buy the Tribune Company (owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) shows that investors’ view of the value of newspaper shares is dropping. The buyout offer on the table for Tribune is equal to 9.2 times the company’s 2006 earnings, while newspaper companies sold for 11.5 times to 13.5 times earnings between 1995 and 2005. Mind you, that’s not a bad return on investment, but it’s down. Still, we should be so lucky.

Share prices of course tell us nothing about whether the truth will make us free. It’s the Joshua question that matters: If we sound the trumpet, will the walls come tumbling down? Recently the media in all its manifestations has been trying harder to sound the trumpet about the disasters now besetting this nation, but the Washington Follies continue.

Here at the Planet we continue to sound the truth trumpet as often as we can. We’re proud that we’ve been the first paper to report on many significant stories which were then copied by big media: the push to build casinos on the Richmond shore, concealed toxic threats on building sites, plans to sell off Oakland School District property to developers, the secret sweetheart settlement of the city of Berkeley’s lawsuit against UC, the downside of the university’s deal with British Petroleum and more. We’ve reported the local stories too, like the recent attempts by Berkeley’s Mayor Bates and Councilmember Capitelli to purge dissident commissioners. (That one has stalled for now, but the targets shouldn’t be complacent.)

What’s sometimes discouraging is what doesn’t change, despite exposure. When the latest crusade against street beggars was announced at City Hall, a friend unearthed the clippings from the previous round, now 13 years ago, including a handsome full-page ad which ran in the newspapers, back in the bad old days before the Planet when you had to pay money to express your opinion. Signers warned that the city of Berkeley’s proposed course of action was unconstitutional, but Then-and-Now City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque forged ahead at taxpayers’ enormous expense until a federal judge set her straight. And now she and Mayor Bates want to do it all over again. When will they ever learn? Will having a free public forum make a difference? One would hope so, but probably not.

Many in the Berkeley Bubble still manage to ignore the news, even when the Planet presents it to them on a silver platter absolutely free of charge. Citizens caught up in one of the now-inevitable struggles with a Berkeley city administration in thrall to developers always seem shocked to learn that it’s happened before. Case in point: The Fantasy tenants, intelligent persons all, appeared not to know that the West Berkeley Plan, designed to protect people like them, is under siege, and that it’s the city that leading the charge.

Coming up on Sunday is the fourth anniversary of this endeavor. Every year at this time a variant of J. Alfred Prufrock’s question comes to mind: Will it have been worth it after all? If the clever young no longer read newspapers, do they still read T.S. Eliot? Late in life, he described what we’ve tried to do here:



...Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating...



Have we accomplished anything? Have any walls come tumbling down? Who knows? Eliot’s answer:



For us, there is only the trying.