by Hamilton E. Davis
My tiny corps of brilliant readers may have noticed over the last couple of years a recurrent theme in this space: the proposition that the collapse of the American newspaper has been a major factor in the degradation of our political life and its attendant cultural and social damage. I believe that Donald Trump could not have survived the scrutiny he would have received by the press in the 1960s to 1990s era; I also believe that the Republican Party would still be worthy of respect by the center and the left, not to mention the intellectually honest remnant of the right.
The shadows are lengthening now on the generations of Americans who grew up in the last half of the 20th Century, in an environment illuminated by serious, professional press coverage. In every region of the country, indeed most states, residents could pick up on their doorsteps every day, and often twice a day, newspapers that provided information they needed to order their political and social lives. Those papers were indeed a miracle; they weren’t perfect, but they were a thousand times better than the smoking relics in the rubblefield that exists today.
I grew up in that era and found my life’s work there. The core of my experience was the 10 years I spent at the Providence Journal in the 1960s and early 1970s, writing about government and politics, first in Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts, then in Washington. One of my best friends and valued colleagues there was a guy named Fraser Smith, a superb writer and reporter, who had one of the great gifts of the journalism trade—compression. I taught writing and public policy for a time to graduate students at UVM, and I always had them read a story of Smith’s about a working class bar in a rundown section of Providence, 800 words that limned a time and a culture, with more sheer hitting power than you could find in a backpack full of sociology texts.
That story was written sometime in the late 1960s, and at that time you could find comparable work in dozens of American newspapers, whose names ring like tocsins now that they are mostly smouldering hulks—the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, the Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Constitution, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Milwaukee Journal, the Minneapolis Tribune, the Chicago Tribune and Daily News, the Arkansas Gazette…
Fraser Smith is retired now, but he has written a memoir that provides a glimpse of the newspaper world of that era, a shaft of light that illuminates a world that is gone forever. The title is The Daily Miracle: A Memoir of Newspapering, and the author’s full name is C. Fraser Smith. It recounts his life in the trade, first with the Jersey Journal, then The Providence Journal, and, finally, The Baltimore Sun.
Much of this inevitably covers a work-a-day world, but Smith’s book captures, better than I have ever read, the ethos of journalism in those days: an absolutely fierce determination to get it right, and get to the bedrock truth at whatever effort it took. Smith gets at that in the final sentence of his Introduction: “The world needed to know what we knew.”
So, I am commending this book to my tiny corps. Because Smith speaks for me, too. The reason I do the work I do is because I believe people today often have no other way to learn the truth about the issues I focus on.
If my readers are interested, they can find copies of Smith’s memoir at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier.