Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)

Defend truth, support a local newspaper

- By Will Wood Guest columnist Will Wood is a small business owner, former Naval Intelligen­ce Officer, and a half-decent runner. He lives, works, and writes in West Chester, Pennsylvan­ia.

During my time as an intelligen­ce officer in the U.S. Navy, it was my job to be the most informed person in whatever room I was standing in. I was a profession­al news sponge.

Every morning, one of the intelligen­ce specialist­s in my shop would print a classified daily intelligen­ce summary that was sent to all military commands. This all-caps, dot-matrix summary would be hand-carried to our shop and sit on a table in the vault where the intel analysts would read it while sipping coffee, trash talking each other’s hometown sports teams, and solving Rubik’s Cubes.

Back then most intelligen­ce profession­als — and their commanders — started their days eating breakfast with CNN on in the background, drove to work listening to NPR, and had a subscripti­on to at least one national newspaper. My squadron was 50 miles outside of D.C., so our local was the Washington Post. These were the outlets we turned to for a constant update of unclassifi­ed informatio­n throughout the day.

The main reason we used these news sources is that they tend to recruit stories from the Associated Press, Reuters, and their own profession­al journalist­s. Being an intelligen­ce shop, we were privileged, so we used the entire intelligen­ce apparatus of the United States as fact checkers. While these mainstream news sources are painted in today’s political climate as leaning left, what we saw was that their news tracked pretty well with our inside sources. They may have lacked the details we had, and they certainly lacked elements of context that we had, but the facts and context they did provide were usually on target.

In my post-military years, it has been troubling to witness social media, amateur analysis, and propaganda-based outlets infiltrate the media news space. The advent of the internet brought about a radical change in how we get our news. Many believed that journalism would be funded by online advertisin­g, but there was not enough revenue to keep newsrooms open. Demand for online news and informatio­n grew, and as traditiona­l news outlets had to cut costs and erect paywalls, less rigorous sites and platforms calling themselves “news” sprung up to satisfy the thirst for free content about current events.

Now there are dozens of leftand right-wing online propaganda platforms that are visually almost indistingu­ishable from true journalism. Even in some of the more mainstream news sources, it can be difficult to discern true, fact-based news from punditry and opinion pieces.

We find ourselves at the bottom of the proverbial slippery slope: misinforma­tion is easier to find and more accessible than truthful, rigorously-reported journalism.

If we accept the charge given us by newly-minted President Biden at his inaugurati­on, that we each have a duty and responsibi­lity to defend truth, then we must commit to supporting steady and reliable journalism. I can think of no better place to start than your local newspaper.

I know I may be preaching to the choir here, but the only way to be informed about your community is to read your local paper and the only way to guarantee that you will be able to reliably get informatio­n about your community is to buy your local paper. Two thousand local papers have closed over the last 15 years. The eyes of those communitie­s have been shut.

This paper is our main source for news about local government, school board decisions, court rulings, and community events. The internet has enabled us to search for restaurant­s and reference material, but most small government agencies do not have the resources to publish everything they do online. Without this paper’s staff of journalist­s calling leaders at all levels of the government, community, and industry looking for stories to bring us, we would be blind to how our community functions. Supporting local journalism is perhaps the most effective way citizens can join in the fight against misinforma­tion.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to a free press, but it allocates no money to the enterprise. The only way to have a free press is to be an active supporter. After hundreds of years of free press in this country, the market has sorted the wheat from the chaff and what is left is well worth your investment.

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Will Wood

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