Abandoned

The world seems a fretful place these days: climate change, storms, wars, anger, unrest.
We once learned what was happening and why from daily newspapers, and what to think of it from their editorial pages. This continues at the big outlets in New York and Washington. Elsewhere, not so much.
In Kansas, the daily news in most places is left to word of mouth and the Internet. To be sure, specialists are at work online: The Topeka-centric Kansas Reflector surges with deep coverage of state government and politics, and Kansas News Service, also solid, offers an occasional bonus from farm country.
In most communities and small cities, the daily news is left to the wind. This month and next, cities, counties and school boards will outline taxing and spending plans for next year and estimate the money involved in budget proposals. Public hearings will be set. Votes will be recorded.
At best, reports on this are superficial, from Johnson City in the rural southwest to Johnson County in the metropolitan northeast. When it comes to one of our chief concerns ‒ taxing and spending ‒ valid local reporting goes begging. Rumor or speculation may surface on Facebook or Twitter but such posts are usually from the ill-prepared or uninformed or, at times, the malicious.
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Most daily newspapers in Kansas are owned by giant corporations or hedge funds; these component cousins mirror each other; one design fits all, in print or online. News coverage and advertising are reduced sharply. The circulation “department” for the Salina Journal is in Augusta, Ga.
Many publications have abolished their editorial pages or cut them to a few days each week. Hedge fund journalism sees opinion pages as a waste; thoughtful examination of important matters – our schools, cities and counties, our state, our lives – is a lug on readers’ time and a drain on the company ledger.
But the news today is often complicated, matters that even experts have trouble unraveling. Local taxes, government finance, infrastructure and social issues are among the elaborate and mazy knots in our lives. In better times, editorials and editorial pages sought to help readers understand difficult facts and reach conclusions about them.
Traditionally, editorials had three goals: To persuade, or to analyze and inform, or to entertain. These purposes aren’t mutually exclusive. An entertaining editorial, well-crafted, can be more persuasive than a clubbing from the Daily Bugle.
In recent years, the daily newspapers were corroded by “managers” who only posed as editors or publishers. Lacking editorial sense, new bosses fell to the clutches of survey results and policy training. They were more inclined to shove a predicament onto a focus group or a “business model” than to find out what was wrong (or right). They might have understood the numbers in a bond proposal, but little of the thinking or the history that had led to it. It made them easy prey for technology’s siren chorus.
In the face of complexity they established “policy,” bane to the thoughtful, resourceful editor. Policy can throttle creativity and invention; it stifles ingenuity, talent, productive thought.
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Corporate newspapers publish the infrequent editorial page, or no opinion page. Instead we have the “guest opinion” or syndicated column and for “balance,” the faceoff: a screech from the far right against howls from the far out. (Symmetry is important, lest readers think an opinion page is biased.)
The best opinion pages were never about bias versus balance. They were about helping people think. Editorials and cartoons may not persuade readers to act, and they seldom persuade them to act in the way an editor hoped. But if they stimulate thought on a particular problem, if they prompt reexamination of attitudes toward the world around us and the people who live in it, then the page served a purpose.
In America’s growing news deserts and opinion wastelands, citizens are left to themselves with no editorial compass, abandoned to gathering storms and the Internet.