School Scope: On The Importance of The Wave, Local News, Socialism, Capitalism and More

My column in The Wave this past Friday - August 10, 2018

School Scope: On The Importance of The Wave, Local News, Socialism, Capitalism and More

By Norm Scott

The gutting of the Daily News has raised the issue of the assault on print publications, exacerbated by the Trump tariff on Canadian paper (not an accident) which has raised costs and other assaults on weakening the press with constant attacks financially on their ability to cover news and also attacks on the integrity of the press. Now I too have always been skeptical of the way some of the press covers the news. I assume all coverage has some bias and try to read a balanced variety so I can make my own decisions. But if you watch Fox or read the right wing press it is clear we are living in different universes.

The Daily News story has been viewed as the coming end of local coverage. We are left with the Post which is Fix news and the Times which doesn’t devote major resources to local coverage. Recently we have also heard of smaller local papers under attack. In Maryland a guy with a grudge shot up a local paper’s newsroom, killing five people. In California we hear of a local paper that was bought by its former editor and his wife, both avid Trump and right wing supporters. Fears in that community are that they will be getting a barrage of biased coverage.

Even more local papers have been bought up by chains. Most people who can afford to own a newspaper are generally wealthier than the population in general and thus tend to be more conservative, so coverage of the left and liberal causes, despite the right wing’s branding of the press as biased left, does not get covered adequately.

Independent papers like The Wave are increasingly important to communities like Rockaway and I give them credit for heroically trying to cover the Rockaways as extensively as possible with very limited resources. And for being willing to give people like me the opportunity to offer alternative views from the left. Here’s hoping that our local independent newspaper can maintain its ability to offer us this service that is disappearing from so many places in this nation and around the world.

As I’ve been trying to point out, there are many brands of liberals, Democrats and socialists. Remember, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery and the Dixiecrats ruled the party even in the Franklin Roosevelt years, only going Republican when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act in the mid 1960s. There are also many brands of socialists. We think of socialists as communists – the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and even Venezuela. Given that we are seeing mainstream articles and columns even in the NY Times about capitalism and socialism, I will continues to explore these issues in portions of my upcoming summer columns, in addition to resuming education coverage in the fall.

So in this spirit, let me give you a homework assignment for next week: Is a Democratic Socialist Really a Socialist?

Norm does his homework every day at ednotesonline.com