The Great Gadfly

Public Disservice

 Now you see it... now you don't

Well, here we go again, the local daily rage-of-record is once again excavating deeper to find its new standards in community service. They have so far failed to hit oil but China cannot be far off. They have been digging continuously for years. While I tend to admire honest effort and the kind of grit it takes to continue an unpopular fight just because it is the right thing to do I have to say to the rag-of-record ....enough already!

No matter which side one takes in the debate over Cape Wind the idea that our local puppy pad told us that their weekend edition would dish new dirt on the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound only to leave us wondering on Sunday where this momentous story had gone, without so much as a whisper of explaining is rediculous. Did someone jump the gun? Did someone fib to an editor? Did someone simply screw up? Be still my heart. This followed what I thought was a simply stupid piece telling us how many times candidates for local public office had voted over the past few years. With  a war raging @ $12 billion per month, towns facing shrinking revenues, national recession, local crime on the rise and all the other goodies available for reporters to chew on...what the hell was that story about?

This country finds one half of one percent of its people serving in the military and another one percent serving time in jail. When there are twice as many people locked up as locked and loaded would you think the local newspaper could find something meaningful to write about? Well, I can and here it is: the local daily newspaper does an absolutely lousy job of covering local politics and government, absolutely awful. In particular our local daily rag-of-record is an embarassment and a public disservice. The Barnstable Patriot is a marvelopus little weekly newspaper that picks clean the shell of town of Barnstable doings every week. The Community Newspapers do a fair job and freely admit that they are limited by time and budget. CAPECODTODAY daily beats the CC Times to traffic accidents, local affairs, county scandals  and assorted doings. But the Times, with its billionaire owner and its pompous executives consitently fails to deliver the goods.

Here is a question for the Times publisher; since we are talking about the past record of individual voters, implying some connection between the number of times they have voted and their worthiness to run for or hold public office...how many weekly meetings of the Board of Selectmen in Yarmouth does the Times cover, start to finish? For that matter, how many meetings of any and all public bodies Cape-wide are blessed with live coverage by Times staff on a regular basis? Where does the Times get the notion that it is competent to comment on local affairs?

I think we should develop a local affairs test and see how many people on Main Street in Hyannis can pass it. We shall start with Peter Myer, the Times publisher. We shall publish the test questions and his answers...and his pathetic reasons for the failure I feel certain he will achieve.  Over the years we have all watched helplessly as good reporters were shifted from assignment to assignment, beat to beat. We have seen the Times descend from being a pretty fair local paper to being what it is today, wall-to-wall carpeting for bird cages. The staff who can research and write are increasingly not given the resources or the back up to perform as they could and would like to do; the paper's substantial net income never makes it to the local bank but is skimmed by far away ownership so that the rich get richer and we get re-heated syndicated tripe instead of hardhitting local news. And sometimes the pain-in-the butt variety are kicked upstairs called editor and allowed to do real damage, instead of being shown the door. What can we expect from a newspaper that cannot get rid of incompetent management but cannot keep good reporters?

Times are changing for nearly every industry and type of commerce. The newspaper business is not exempt from these changes, but the lack of originality in how newspaper management approach the challenges of these changing times is stunning. Happily, the world of the blog is expanding. It is no longer necessary to have one's mind formed by schools of journalism and one's views dictated by Daddy Warbucks, right or left.  Unhappily, anyone can blog.  Oh well, at least bloggers can claim amateur status while outfits such as the Cape Cod Times are hard pressed to justify their professional journalists' credentials.

I'll let everyone know when we will be administering the local affairs knowldge exam, or AKE. Right about now Peter Myer is probably developing a severe head AKE.