Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
The National Journal has a good column about the impact and role that newspapers play in our lives:
When some people first heard the news about New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and a prostitution ring, they thought: How awful, how tragic, how corrupt. When I first heard it, I thought: Thank God for newspapers.
As you probably know, it was The New York Times that broke the story, igniting the kind of “firestorm” that prompts breathless news junkies everywhere to burble cliches like “firestorm” as they drool at the TV screen and click desperately from channel to channel.
After all, TV was just following The Times, as were the bloggers and the Twitterers and the Diggers and the Yahoos and the Googles and everyone else in the media universe. This is how it works, even today when there are so many cooler, shinier ways to get news. For the real thing, the stuff that outs corruption and hypocrisy, revealing the powerful for who they really are and shaking things up in the most immediate, consequential ways — in short, the scandals that are truly scandalous — nobody else can touch newspapers. Where would we be without them?
It’s not an idle question. Even when they’re not digging up the dirt themselves (Spitzer was undone by a criminal investigation), the prestige dailies have the credibility and reach to make a scandal like this one fly. On the day it broke the Spitzer story online, the hard-copy Times ran a story on page one of the business section about two hedge funds, Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, that together have acquired a 19 percent stake in The Times’s parent company and are using this leverage to try to change the way the company is managed.
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What’s strange is that while society is working on this puzzle — and the vultures swoop overhead — there isn’t a wider appreciation for exactly what newspapers do for us. We all depend, literally, on such great broadsheets as The Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post to ferret out news with real meaning and impact, of which the Spitzer resignation is just this week’s specimen.
