News deserts are an oasis

Newspapers that promote the status quo do more harm than good

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern sounded an alarm recently.

Its press release said, “The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023 to an average of 2.5 per week, leaving more than 200 counties as news deserts and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information, researchers at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University have found.”

Medill visiting professor Penny Abernathy said, “The significant loss of local news outlets in poorer and underserved communities poses a crisis for our democracy.

“So, it is very important that we identify the places most at risk, while simultaneously understanding what is working in other communities.”

It’s a crisis for democracy — not to mention journalism schools that rely on journalism students. Without newspapers, demand for journalism classes should drop.

The Medill report attached a state-by-state map and said Putnam County, West Virginia, where I live has no local paper. That is news to the readers of the weekly Hurricane Breeze. It is a quirky little paper but it has been known to shed an uncomfortable light on public officials.

The whining about newspapers going belly up is of recent vintage. The Cleveland News died in the 1960s and the Cleveland Press in the 1980s — both victims of the Plain Dealer, television and the fact that they were afternoon papers. But the PD switching to publishing a few days a week is a cause of concern in the 2020s.

Newspapers have been crushing the competition for years. Charleston Newspapers, where I toiled for 30 years, published a weekly Metro West publication in the 1980s that put a couple of weekly Putnam papers out of business. Did Medill care?

Metro West survives but the last time that I received one as junk mail, all its news was about Kanawha County. A few years ago, it stopped sending them. It exists as a Facebook page. It no longer covers county commission meetings and the courts. But it has some nice recipes. I call it a news dessert.

It is not that Charleston Newspapers coverage of the Kanawha County Commission in Charleston is so hot. Consider that Kent Carper is seeking another six-year term as a county commissioner. He’s been there 24 years. When there were two competing Charleston papers — a moderate RINO one and a Marxist one — both endorsed him. There is now one combined paper that is slightly to the right of Lenin.

I am not saying Carper is a crook but in his 24 years as commissioner, the population of the county dropped, companies closed and housing deteriorated. It’s not his fault but a change in commissioners would bring in new ideas. Some of them may even work. Who knows?

I do know that if Carper did anything untoward, the one newspaper in Charleston would not break the story.

I know this because of Judge Charlie King. Having two newspapers looking over his shoulder — holding him accountable, as they claim — did not stop him from retiring for a month after his re-election as a judge and then going back to being a judge when the new term began.

This enabled him to collect a pension and a judge’s salary, which nearly doubled his pay and allowed him to divorce his wife, who happened to be the daughter of one of the two publishers at Charleston Newspapers.

Then there was the case of Allen Hayes Loughry II, a law clerk at the state Supreme Court who wrote Don't Buy Another Vote, I Won't Pay for a Landslide: The Sordid and Continuing History of Political Corruption in West Virginia.

Hailed as a great reformer, Loughry received the endorsements of both papers in Charleston in the 2012 race for the state Supreme Court, which he easily won.

On February 13, 2019, the Department of Justice announced, “Allen H. Loughry II, 48, of Charleston, West Virginia, a former Justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, was sentenced to 24 months in prison by Senior United States District Judge John T. Copenhaver, Jr., announced United States Attorney Mike Stuart. Loughry was also ordered to pay restitution totaling $1,273 to the State of West Virginia and the Pound Civil Justice Institute. After an eleven-day trial in October 2018, a federal jury found Loughry guilty of one count of mail fraud, seven counts of wire fraud, and two counts of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agents with the FBI and the West Virginia Commission on Special Investigations conducted the investigation.”

The surviving Charleston newspaper did not break the story that led to the investigation and the prosecution.

Kennie Bass of Channel 8 did.

Charleston’s two newspapers (at the time) also did not break the story of Governor (now Senator) Joe Manchin getting West Virginia University to give his daughter an eMBA. I know the man who tried to interest the Charleston Gazette in the story. No dice. WVU is in Morgantown and its paper also turned down the story. He finally pitched it to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which broke the story.

I get that even a good newspaper will pass on covering a big story. But it is a joke to bill yourself as The State Newspaper when you vouch for and call a man a reformer who becomes the first (and so far only) state Supreme Court justice to be convicted. And these were not Trumped up charges, either. He blew through a million taxpayer bucks.

And Manchin getting his daughter an eMBA did not stop the Charleston Gazette from endorsing him for the Senate three times.

Readers notice. If they want recipes, they will buy a cookbook. If they want to know what is going on, they will read Citizen Free Press, Instapundit, Lucianne.com and Twitter.

There are no news deserts — just newspapermen with their heads in the sand.