March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Consider this. Violence is rampant throughout the country. Drug abuse is epidemic. Increasing numbers of ordinary, law-abiding sensible men and women are carrying handguns whenever they leave their homes. Pregnancy among unmarried, unprepared teen-agers is a national characteristic.

Homeless families walk and sleep and live in our streets. Our education system, our roads and bridges, our railroads, our cities, are coming apart. Our environment is at grave risk, potentially threatening everyone. We are so deeply in debt that the figure has lost meaning. Where once we were at the top of every “good” list in the world — literacy, mortality rate, health care delivery, income, quality of life — now we trail behind countries our kids do not know how to locate on a map.

For years, we attended to these conditions by rushing out to the mall to buy something new and shiny to distract ourselves, confident that at worst, all this was just a lot of exaggeration by nervous nellies, and at best would go away of its own accord. And now, most discomforting of all, we have a president who insists we fact these issues head on and address them, even fix them.

In the midst of this, the Bangor Daily News devotes the top spot of the front page of Dec. 23 to a story about alleged sexual misconduct by Bill Clinton while he was still in Arkansas, before any of us knew him or cared about him. Now that’s quality journalism — a story that contributes nothing to any of these problems, well, except perhaps one. Maybe giving people what they want to hear rather than what they need to know will help save the few remaining independent newspapers. So what if they have to become tabloids in the process (next time, run some sleazy photos, too). The National Enquirer may not be the greatest, but it’s better than no newspaper, right? Christopher K. Wensleydale Franklin


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