The resignations last week of four small-town journalists in Alaska made me proud and sad. Proud because these vulnerable, low-paid workers, at the paper where I started my own career decades ago, had the courage to stand up for press freedom—courage the rich and mighty have lacked. Sad because we really are losing—have nearly lost—an essential component of democracy, and this incident was a microcosm of that.
A young reporter at the weekly Homer News wrote about a vigil for Charlie Kirk, accurately referring to him as a Christian nationalist who defended racist views. A MAGA-aligned Alaska legislator complained to the paper’s corporate owner in Alabama, intimating an advertiser boycott (and using her official position). The company rewrote the article without even contacting the paper’s staff.
Four journalists resigned from three connected papers, for Homer, Kenai, and Juneau, leaving those newsrooms nearly empty. The facts were well covered in the New York Times.
These beloved small-town papers are now effectively dead. Their owner, Carpenter Media Group, which is backed by a Canadian private equity firm, bought them last year, adding to a collection of 250 small papers around the country. Carpenter’s pattern is to buy local papers and lay off staff, creating zombie news sites—newspapers in name only, with hardly any real journalism.
One of the new heroes, Jake Dye, told a local radio station, “I’m kind of glad that we were the ones walking away — not letting them be the ones to shut us down.”
CBS capitulated in the same fashion. Eager for federal approval of a merger, the owner installed the government’s preferred ideological supervisor over its legendary newsroom and cancelled comedian Stephen Colbert, among other inappropriate concessions.
There are many other specific examples, from the Pentagon, the Department of Education, the Federal Communications Commission, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the White House.
The great editor Marty Baron, who led three major papers to 17 Pulitzer Prizes, recently wrote powerfully this of this dark time in American journalism:
“In nations tilting toward authoritarianism, heads of state claim sole ownership of the truth. And they rig, suppress or erase data to advance their lies.
That is what is happening now in the United States. Facts are under attack while government demands that its fictions be unquestioningly repeated.
For decades, the United States was a bastion of free expression of all types, with constitutional protections seemingly secured. That is no longer the case.
We were a model for citizens in other nations who yearned for similar liberty. We no longer are.”
Patriots of all political perspectives should oppose this loss. Never before has our government used official power to institutionally control speech and the press—not in this broad-based way.
The solution is more free speech. That requires courage, as the Kenai Peninsula four amply showed. For writers, you know what to do. And there is something everyone else can do, too: Support the new, independent channels of traditional journalism that are harder for the government to control, many of which are local non-profits.
An example: In Alaska, some Carpenter veterans are already publishing The Juneau Independent online.
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