MURDERING JOURNALISTS
If there was ever any doubt
that there is a war on journalists, the mass shooting at the Annapolis Gazette
newspaper last week should dispel that. This incident was unusual from other
attacks only in that it resulted from a long-time feud with the paper’s
coverage of this individual. However, it can’t be discounted that, in this day
and age of our president encouraging violence and incarceration of journalists
he doesn’t like, that the shooter mistakenly felt justified in his ruthless
killing of five innocent people. Maryland has strict gun control so we’re
looking at something else here, way more disturbing. The exits were blocked and
the attack fairly well planned in advance. In days to come, we will learn more.
The Gazette showed its commitment to freedom of the press by publishing the
very next day. A blank editorial page with “we have no words” hit home more
than any opinion piece.
The Annapolis Gazette is a
newspaper quite like our own St Augustine Record. People up there call it the
“crab wrapper” as we call ours the “(pick your marine life) wrapper”. It’s full
of local reporting, about some of which you couldn’t care less, but some of
your neighbors do. Most importantly, it’s also replete with local, on the
ground reporting of politics, candidates and issues that would never see the
light of day in the Baltimore Sun nor the Washington Post, the two major papers
covering that same area. Imagine how much we in Saint Augustine would lose if
discussion of our city or county commission meetings were just an afterthought
in the Times Union. Imagine how less informed we would be about local issues
like growth, education, infrastructure, crime if we were relegated to a section
in the Times Union, or worse, a weekly paper.
We don’t always agree with
the Record and that’s a good thing. We think we should get more coverage all
the time despite the new limited resources and hard decisions the publisher and
editor have to make every day. That’s normal. We’ve always considered the paper
fair in recent years and are sad to see the longer in-depth articles we’d
gotten used to in recent years have to go by the wayside. Investigative
reporting by Jared Keever, Jake Martin and others took the Saint Augustine
Record to new heights and it’s missed now under the new ownership.
We can help fix that.
Indivisible St Johns is in the middle of a matched grant fundraising project.
We need money to operate like everyone else. BUT, after seeing what happened
last week in Annapolis, we think the need for good, in depth local reporting is
more critical than ever. We would rather see everyone in the district have
access to good local reporting so they can make informed decisions, especially
in this election year. So, if you can’t afford to donate to both, we beg you to
subscribe to the Saint Augustine Record, either paper or digitally. Indivisible
won’t disappear from lack of funding but our local free press will and we think
that’s a bigger loss than any of us can afford. Subscribe now.
“You don’t know
what you’ve got til it’s gone.”
The Capital Gazette fights back:
No comments:
Post a Comment