Reporting the news in times of trouble
During these sad pandemic days, Americans are reading and watching more news, though their long-standing opinion of newspapers and TV news has not changed. According to the latest Gallup poll, 36 percent are favorably disposed toward the media while 48 percent are not.
What continues to drive this negative assessment is the abysmal attitude of Republicans and conservatives in general toward news outlets.
The Gallup poll of late March found that attitudes are “strongly shaped by partisan affiliation.” Democrats generally trust the media, Republicans generally do not.
Skepticism toward media has a distinct history. At the Republican national convention of 1964, reporters and anchors were booed by delegates loyal to the eventual nominee for president Barry Goldwater.
At the 1968 Democratic convention, media coverage angered the young protesters who swarmed the streets in opposition to the Vietnam War.
During the great bituminous coal strikes of 1922 and 1933, union officials pointed accusing fingers at local newspapers for what they considered unbalanced reporting and distortion of facts.
At one point in 1933, a United Mine Workers district leader advised miners to ignore coverage of the strike by the Uniontown and Connellsville newspapers. Listen only to the union, he said.
The papers were under the thumb of the coal companies, it was claimed.
Distrust of news organizations goes way back. Exactly 159 years ago – on April 12, 1861 — the Civil War commenced with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.
Edward G. Roddy, the editor of the Uniontown Genius of Liberty newspaper, editorialized, “Amidst the civilizations of the 19th century, we are on the brink of ruin, despotism and destruction.”
Actually, it was Roddy himself who seemed most on the verge of ruin. In the wake of the Union fort’s capitulation to Rebel forces, a deafening patriotic chorus swelled across the North.
In Uniontown, boys and men crowded the sidewalks and streets, moving in and out of bars, and generally throwing themselves into spasms of celebration now that war had come.
On nearly every street corner, songs mingled with angry epithets directed at editor Roddy and his newspaper.
With the start of hostilities, few citizens had patience with either. Roddy and the Genius of Liberty were anti-Republican and anti-Lincoln and, thus, opposed to bringing the renegade states to heel.
When Roddy, on the morrow of Fort Sumter, failed to raise the flag of the country over the newspaper office, it was like a dam bursting.
Talk ran wild: Was Roddy a secessionist, a traitor?
Three days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Roddy received two threatening messages. One denounced the paper and called for retribution of an unspecified nature.
The other was more explicit, demanding that Roddy unfurl the Stars and Stripes atop the Genius of Liberty office before midnight. If not, the note declared, the office would be “gutted.”
Roddy sensed in all of this a plot to discredit him and silence the newspaper – the campaign originating, he wrote, “among Republicans of standing and influence, not drunken rowdies.”
In fact, Roddy faced dire times. The town was rife with talk of Genius subscribers rejecting the paper to the extent that Roddy would be “starved” out of business.
Leading the charge was former congressman Andrew Stewart. “Please send your bill and discontinue my paper,” Stewart informed Roddy. “I can patronize no paper that sympathizes with secession and rebellion.”
There was worse. Three “valiant Republicans,” as Roddy sarcastically called them, threatened – after first cancelling their subscriptions – to see Roddy crucified.
“To the credit of the town,” Roddy wrote several weeks later, “the threats were never carried out.” Even so, he continued, “we were prepared for the worst.”
Tensions between the editor and townspeople gradually eased. The Genius survived; its opposition to Lincoln was unremitting.
What the recent Gallup poll concerning the media didn’t ask was this: what do Americans think of public subsidies to help small and medium size news outlets survive the pandemic storm? Sen. Bob Casey and 18 of his colleagues recently advanced the idea. The loss of advertising revenue due to virus mitigation, they said, poses a direct threat to many local newspapers and radio and TV stations.
No word yet from legislative leaders. It’s not altogether hard to imagine what Donald Trump’s attitude might be. No president has been as openly hostile to the press as Trump is.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.