Advocate helps start a newspaper
Ralph Nader is back in the news
Ralph Nader has always been a hero of mine.
Trained as a lawyer, he is famous as an activist, and perhaps remembered as a perennial U.S. presidential hopeful. Some say his candidacy in 2000 unintentionally helped George W. Bush beat Al Gore.
I interviewed him a long time ago, when I was a student journalist working for the campus newspaper, and he visited Western University on a speaking tour.
He was well known then as a consumer advocate, most famously for car safety, the result of a hugely influential 1965 book on the subject, focusing on Chevrolet’s Corvair, called “Unsafe at Any Speed.”
He changed the industry and the world.
Nader was known not to own a car or even drive, was said to live in a modest apartment despite being worth millions, and was renowned for living modestly. He has always favoured a rumpled look, unintentionally or otherwise, and there were stories about his reluctance to buy more than a few suits or couple of pairs of shoes.
Likewise, it is said he still uses a typewriter and owns no computer. Some of that might be lore, some of it embellished, and some simply misreported, but there was never any question that the guy was courageous and, well, different.
This week, at age 88, he’s helping finance the launch of a newspaper — a print newspaper in his Connecticut hometown.
While he might have been ahead of his time on car safety, social injustice, economic inequity, gender inequality, consumerism, corporate welfare, and other issues, I am guessing (against hope) that he might be behind the times with regard to his faith in ink on paper, let alone the news business.
Newspapers are closing across the continent, newsrooms are shrinking, and even digital agencies are facing challenges.
The result is that so-called news deserts are developing in communities everywhere.
Nader insists his is among them. That may be debatable, but he is correct that there are not enough journalists covering local politics, for example, and ensuring enough people make it to voting booths regularly.
There won’t be a journalist anywhere who doesn’t wish him the very best. We’ll all hope his newspaper can thrive (he’ll be looking for charitable status), get lots of subscribers and advertising and word of mouth, digitally let alone in print, and help change the world. But while habits may change slowly, the world is changing quickly.