This will likely be my last word on the Connie Schultz-Plain Dealer proposal to gut fair use doctrine and the First Amendment in order to save their own jobs. It’s plain to me their effort won’t make it past their lawyer’s conference room, and in that spirit, I think a step back is in order.
Someday, when students study the twitching convulsive death of newspapers, and this very Cleveland-like episode in particular, one coincidence will jump out - that the PD’s top brass spent the entire period before, during, and after July 4, Independence Day, pimping a proposal to turn the First Amendment into their very own federally enforced cash cow of extortion just to keep their paychecks fat, and incoming. And they quite purposefully used a Pulitzer prize winning wife of a US Senator to kick it off, pimp it, and push it for weeks.
Wherever he is, Edward R. Murrow probably just killed off a bottle of Jack Daniels by now, and is frantically asking around for something stronger.
It gets worse, of course. Should those students decades from now dig any further into this period of time, they will also discover the PD’s simultaneous silence regarding a journalist in the PD’s own hometown, who has spent the last 3 months under assault from a sitting elected official who is also turning the First Amendment into a weapon against speech, using it to get journalists fired for reporting truth.
The hushed, stunned silence in that classroom decades from now will be deafening.
Much has been noted about the knee buckling arrogance of Ted Diadiun, Connie Schultz, the PD, and the newspaper industry itself, as they all clamor for a life raft, begging for sympathy even as they spit bile at the people holding the life preserver. But while they whine, wheeze, and die in ever increasing spasms of dementia, media and news are regenerating at the speed of the internet, every single day.
The world these self-imporant incompetent toffs wish to stop from coming is already here, thriving, and will instantly take the place of every newspaper that dies in the coming months or years, without the slightest fanfare. It’s all very American.
For example, this blog, BLACKHEARTCleveland, didn’t even exist three weeks ago - a period during which Connie, Diadiun, and the very top of the PD intelligentsia cooked up with their employer and their “First Amendment attorney” a frenzied display of breathtaking hubris aimed in direct assault at the First Amendment. In those three weeks, as the PD desperately abandoned any pretense of protecting the rights by which their industry was given birth, this blog, and others, took up defense of that right, both in opposition to the PD’s laughable proposal, and in defense of a journalist who must wonder every day what it takes to get his local paper to give a fucking shit.
And we all did it for free. On our own time. For the sole reason that it was the right thing to do.
So fear not the end of newspapers. They will come back someday, when they learn how to make money without extorting it from the First Amendment. When their leadership stops acting like entitled trust fund babies pulling fat paychecks for almost no work. When they stop selling their access and their souls. When they jettison the worthless sagging driftwood of aging blowhards drawing absurd salaries in exchange for twice weekly opinion writing which was once the pinnacle of their “profession”, but is now just another hopelessly expensive luxury in a vast sea of opinions which are all free, all available with a single click, all more authentic, always more frequent, almost always better written, and just plain more valuable.
It’s called a free market of ideas. What destroys the value of the product newspapers try to sell in this competitive marketplace is their own repulsive culture of self-entitlement, in all its sordid maniacal glory. If they lose that culture, and its endlessly varied putrid manifestations, newspapers will come back. And they’ll be better newspapers, led by a new generation of journalists who remember what it once meant to be one - thanks to the lessons learned from studying the spectacular descent into oblivion this current detritus of parasites currently travel.
Until then, seeing this generation of the news industry’s corrupt and fetid walking dead disappear in a prancing flourish of self-important panic should bring us all joy, should be cheered on, accelerated, and laughed at. Do enjoy it thoroughly, they deserve every ounce of disdainful mockery they have brought on themselves.
Because something better is on its way, and is probably already here. You can find it right on your laptop, right now, in a matter of seconds.
