In another one of those signs of the times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s signature steel-and-neon globe, set to receive landmark status, appears headed for the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI).
At the March 7 announcement about the globe’s fate, Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess, a former KJR reporter, said, “This is truly a great day for the citizens of Seattle. Today, we’re not only honoring the iconic globe but also decades of high-caliber journalism.”
Translation: The P-I’s high-caliber journalism has gone the way of the snows of yesteryear.
Founded in 1863, the P-I has been reduced from an award-winning daily newspaper that had employed the likes of Tom Robbins, Regina Hackett, Darrell Bob Houston, Rick Anderson, Robert Jamieson, Art Thiel and Emmett Watson, to an on-line newspaper with minimal reporting staff and an apparent identity problem. This city’s investigative, watchdog role of a daily newspaper has fallen to The Seattle Times, which is selling off its buildings to fight off the daily erosion of revenue.
There’s no great joy in saying this, no matter what one thinks of “Fairview Fanny.” As Walter Lippman wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means to detect lies.” The Times, under the circumstances, continues to do its best.
This country was founded on the printed word. As Neil Postman wrote in his classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a perspective from the 1980s, “A language-centered discourse, such as was characteristic of 18th- and 19th-century America, tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print.”
True, newspapers have always had their problems and prejudices, and equally true, the populist proliferation of blogs and digital communication has created a dimension where pro-democracy uprisings overseas are incubated and the crimes of despots daylighted. But that digital dimension brings its own set of problems: We, in this country, no longer seem to be able to agree on reality. There was a time when the reader, as citizen, gravitated to and evaluated the news as written; today, much of the news “product” is hyper-targeted to those who want the news skewed their way. The evolution from citizen to consumer appears nearly complete.
Maybe it’s fitting that the three City Council members who are pushing for the landmark status of the P-I globe (Burgess, Sally Clark and Jean Godden) are all former reporters who left the industry to pursue other work. And maybe it’s just as appropriate for the globe to wind up with MOHAI.
But we should remember for whom — and why — the P-I globe once turned.
[[In-content Ad]]