A Death in New Jersey
“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson
Imagine if at the beginning of each morning, Tony Soprano stumbled to the end of his driveway in his tattered bathrobe to pick up that day’s edition of the Wall Street Journal instead of the Star-Ledger, the unofficial newspaper of record in the Garden State for almost 100 years? Obviously, the job of running North Jersey for the Mob required a daily dive into the politics, official corruption and all things high school sports in the Garden State that the Ledger provided. Without it, the show might have taken on a completely different tenor.
Well, that might be the case if the show were set in the here and now, as the Ledger will cease publishing a print newspaper after today. It will continue to produce a stripped down online version without an opinion page but will cease being the ubiquitous presence it has been for generations of New Jerseyans.
I must confess that I feel a certain personal sadness for the imminent absence of the Ledger’s familiar place on doorsteps and news stands. After eighth grade, I took over our local delivery route from a classmate and faithfully got up every day in the summer at 6 am to get it to the local readers before breakfast. When my stack of papers was missing one or two copies, instead of waiting for the extras, I would plunk down a whole nickel at the local candy store for each of the missing papers so I could get it to the subscribers faster. When I got to high school in the fall, my schedule forced me to trade my route for the Ledger’s afternoon rival, the Newark Evening News, but my heart remained with the Ledger.
Why is this story important when the internet can provide unlimited amounts of information in a more efficient and timely manner? Call me old-fashioned but, in a time when our precious democracy teeters at its most precarious level since the Civil War, there is more need than ever for a vibrant press that conforms to strict journalistic standards instead of the free for all that is social media, but is the primary source of news and information for most Americans, especially those under 40, today.
Yes, newspapers make mistakes and most have their political biases. However, they mostly maintain an editorial process that aims to separate the true from the false while many in this country are screaming that responsible fact-checking on sources of information amounts to censorship in the name of “freedom of speech,” a thin veneer that really means the right to lie without anyone questioning disinformation and outright falsities that permeate the dominant sources of information today. Sadly, many billionaire tech moguls are willing to acquiesce to such logical fallacies.
Freedom of speech is used these days as a euphemism for spreading untruths and disinformation. We don’t have to look hard to find an example in history in which the integrity of the press was questioned and then controlled to spread propaganda. It was one of the key factors that allowed the Nazis to win the hearts and minds of its citizens through the spread of its own distorted version of reality. The dynamic in our country today is eerily similar.
I am not in any way suggesting that journalistic integrity cannot be maintained in an online format, and that is certainly the way of the future. I hope that the Ledger will upheld its journalistic standards and continue its tradition of being the primary source of information for all matters that affect the Garden State. But something is lost when the tactile experience of reading a printed paper is no longer there. After today, New Jersey will be a little poorer for it. I am sure that Tony S. would agree.
