Commentary: Decline of newspapers could give rise to ignorance
One of the best movies out now is “Spotlight,” about a team of investigative journalists who uncover decades of child abuse by the Catholic clergy. More than 10 years ago, four journalists at the Boston Globe were given time to get to the core of the decades-old scandal.
That was then ...
With a lack of readership and falling advertising income being the main issues for newspapers today, I start to worry. Will newspapers continue to have teams dedicated to investigative reporting? Will ink-and-paper newspapers go out of business?
Newspapers have taken hits because readers have easy access to online news. The younger generations are used to getting their news in bites and bits on their smartphones or tablets. .
We get music on iPods and on SiriusXM radio in our cars. No need for AM or FM radio, with even five-minute breaks for news and traffic. We don’t need traffic information. Our GPSes magically advise us of alternate routes due to traffic ahead.
Worse, some rely solely upon cable news stations for their input of national and world information.
We are probably the least well-informed generation since, well, the days of the Pony Express.
Things change, I know. Things end. I suppose some people lamented the demise of the Pony Express.
Even though 76, I think of myself as “modern” and “open-minded” and “liberal,” on the one hand.
But on the other hand — my dominant right hand — I am strongly resistant to change.
Before I had a chance to try a restaurant, which had replaced a long-standing favorite, it was already out of business.
The last time I went to my Hallmark store in Fashion Island to order my Christmas cards, which I had done for 10 years, it was gone. Poof! I had come to know the whole family! Goodbye, Nancy and Don and Ariel! And better luck with whatever business you tackled next.
Meanwhile, there’s barely a familiar store in sight.
My son Mark found a Pickwick bookmark in an old book he was taking to the library for resale. I almost cried when he showed it to me.
But who else laments the demise of Pickwick Bookstore? Bullock’s or Bullock’s Wilshire? Broadway, May Co.? Probably no one.
Most people just shrug and adapt. Life goes on. That’s a good thing.
Changes in education, that’s a bad thing. When Lee started at UCLA in 1942, it cost him $29 a semester, and that included his student card, which got him into the football games.
In 1945, my mother agreed that my father could be transferred to California because of its great schools. (When we moved to Los Angeles, my father read both the daily Times and the evening Herald-Express.)
With current teacher layoffs in California, my son Tim, with degrees in mathematics and chemistry and a master’s in education, can only substitute-teach. Of the tenured teachers in his county in Northern California, not one has a math or chemistry degree. If the district put him on full-time, it would have to pay him more, and he would also qualify for health care and a pension — too costly for the state.
Go to www.usnews.com. An article based on information from the National Center for Education Statistics, says that, nationwide, an appallingly low percentage of science, math, and history teachers in our high schools have degrees in their fields.
Meanwhile the cost of higher education goes higher, and graduates leave college with heavy debts.
What a world. What a quickly changing, irreversible world.
Wait! This is a job for Superman!
Save the Daily Planet, Superman!
Turn the world back to the way it was, before all the changes for the worse in Metropolis!
(But can you spare computers and the Internet? And microwaves?)
Corona del Mar resident LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN is the author of “A Widow’s Business.”