I just got back from an extended trip to my hometown in New England. I hadn’t planned on staying for almost two weeks, but my Dad got sick and my sister needed help and a long weekend turned into 12 days of hospital visits, nursing home arrangements, and a lot of sorting, packing and moving.
It wasn’t until the last day that I realized something had been missing: the arrival of the local daily newspaper each morning. Had my sister canceled her subscription? Nope. The local paper is dead.
I used to tell people that one of the best things I did when I visited my hometown was to read our local daily paper. Not because it was a paragon of journalism – it wasn’t. Not because the writing was inspiring or poetic. Again – not. The reason I loved that paper was because it reminded me of the real world outside the DC bubble.
When you live in the Washington DC metro area, “local” news is usually dominated by national or even international headlines. Stories about the local high school baseball coach or repairs to the old library are nonexistent — or buried somewhere in Section F. But in my hometown paper, that was front-page news. It was great to realize that most Americans were living in communities that cared about what was happening around the corner and down the street, and about the neighbors who lived there.
But my hometown’s local paper is dead. And with it, I fear the sense of community has died as well. Instead, we are fed a constant barrage of disaster stories: COVID deaths, hundred-year floods, collapsed buildings, mass shootings, celebrity lives that seem more like freak shows than real human drama.
And quite strangely, despite the far greater range of possible stories to cover when you have the entire world as your “local” beat, we seem to hear the same stories over and over and over again. How many times do I need to hear about Brittany Spears’ conservatorship? (Answer: none.) How many versions of the COVID epidemic story can there be? (Don’t worry – after the COVID epidemic, we have the variant epidemic, and now we have the non-vaccinated epidemic!)
I’m truly not a conspiracy theorist, but the style of “news” being peddled by network TV and social media feels very much like propaganda. Which, according to Google’s Dictionary, is:
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.
I was relieved to return home to rural Virginia, where we still have a local paper, albeit weekly. Yesterday’s front page headline: “County to Evaluate Site for Business Park Potential.” On page 2: “Broadband Shares Progress on Countywide Internet Expansion Project.” And my personal favorite: “Cat of the Week” — this week, it’s Sneakers, available for adoption if you want a cat who “would love to hang out with you while you read a book or do housework.”
We need these sinews of community, now more than ever. They are a dose of real life, a healthy infusion of normalcy, a reminder of what really matters. If you have access to a local paper – buy it, subscribe to it, read it. Consider it a health tonic in our current pandemic of toxic media.