Consider It Killed
Media’s Death Spiral: When Editors Play God with the News
NOTE: Last week, this publication ran Greg Maresca’s column, questioning whether Trump's selection of J.D. Vance for VP signaled a shift from identity politics or at least the promise of it from Republicans.
Many other publications ran Greg’s column. One did not. And the reason may or may not surprise you.
By Greg Maresca
Society is stuffed full of news and information, while it desperately starves for wisdom and common sense. Since we are fully immersed in the silly season of electoral politics, this could be the understatement of the year.
As the world accelerates even faster on the Autobahn of the Information Age, the last thing it needs is some benign editor taking it upon himself to edit a columnist’s work because he didn’t believe the ending worked. “It will just confuse readers” was his objection. The column he is referring to was last week’s offering.
Mr. Editor took it upon himself to request an edit to a column he obviously did not agree with. He was the only editor among a dozen that had an issue with the piece. Refusing to make the edit, I told him via email if he didn’t agree, he would feel free to kill the column. His reply minutes later was equally concise, “Consider it killed.” Yet those like him in this business – and there is an army of them – wonder why the newspaper industry remains in a death spiral.
Mr. Editor treats his readership like the deplorables he believes they are.
Proof can be found at the MediaNews Group, a Colorado-based publisher and a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital a Manhattan hedge fund, who cuts his checks. The group bought Pottsville’s The Republican Herald and three other regional newspapers from the family-owned Times-Shamrock Communications of Scranton, Pennsylvania in August 2023.
The group’s credo is “transforming the future of media,” which, taken at face value, can mean virtually anything. If censorship is considered “transforming,” then count me out. And you can bet they certainly will and at the whim of one rogue editor. The two prior editors to who I had submitted my work over the past eight years both left within the past 60 days. As the paper shrinks, so does its masthead and staff. Mr. Editor is not on the masthead of The Republican-Herald but toils at a sister publication.
Unlike many who spill their opinions weekly and, in some cases, weakly, consuming all modes of news and commentary is a must. Most of it is generated by the mainstream media that serves as the Democrats’ house organ. A columnist or any op/ed writer does their readers a major disservice not to because it reveals what the left is thinking and ultimately doing. Some of its sour fruit delivers satirical and sarcastic material practically writing itself. Such a broad-based perspective affords balance, something every op/ed page should provide but doesn’t.
The credo of any op/ed page should be balanced, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, while the rest of us are entitled to ignore it. Mr. Editor only accelerates his dwindling readership by acting as their appointed censor. Too many media types and so-called influencers are apt to delete any material that isn’t ideologically pure. They make the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s computer servers seem amateurish.
The censorship-industrial complex’s ascent is reminiscent of the predictable Warsaw Pact’s historic overreach and underscores how the need for critical thinking and advancing truth is not only needed but paramount.
One paradigm is how Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop story from being shared. Facebook concealed the story, while Politico said it might be “Russian disinformation.” The Washington Post called it “laughably weak.” Then there are Hunter’s gun crimes, tax evasions, and foreign cash extractions that came with the implied promises of benefits and threats from “the big guy.”
Note to the FBI: The RICO Act doesn’t only apply to Italian-Americans.
This censorship of Hunter Biden’s crimes is as corrupt as the crimes themselves.
Power is found in knowledge, information, and experience, which grows from the ground like a banana stem. If you lose touch with that, you are ripe for the peeling.
Censors want submission and unquestioning conformity. There are no exceptions, especially for nonconforming columnists.
The media’s blatant censorship is a miscarriage of civility, justice, and the rule of law; it is nothing short of a treasonous arson of our representative republic. These Marxists want the cost of speaking freely so high that Americans would rather just keep their mouths shut to avoid the hassle and cost.
I will not acquiesce and neither should you.
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