Today in bad news...

This is the digital front page of the Oregonian newspaper's online service "Oregonlive" on December 5, 2023:

Note that the headline story, is a murder/suicide in Vancouver, Washington.

"Below the fold" are three more crime stories; two weapons crimes and a kidnapping, Under the "Latest" banner on the left? two sports pieces, two letters to the editor, a medical story about hot flashes, Miss Manners, a business piece on airline mergers, and the "top 25 Wikipedia pages of 2023."

Here's the front page from the on-line version of one of Portland's two weeklies, the Portland Mercury, on the same day.

Headline story?

The recently-ended teacher's strike and the funding problems it exposed.

Perhaps just as infuriating as the political situation in the 2023 United States is the condition of the public press, and this is a perfect little snapshot of why our First Amendment heroes are such an ungodly shitshow.

The teacher's strike was the ultimate "local news" story; a critical event that stemmed from even more critical public policy failures, and which in turn exposed even more problems and failures running from the individual schools through the city all the way to the statehouse in Salem.

If you get your news from Oregon's only daily public newspaper you have no idea that happened, or how it happened, or why. You'd have no real idea of the political and fiscal issues behind it, or exposed by it. 

You'd sure as fuck know about some rando who killed himself and his family, though, wouldn'tcha?

Blow this up to NBC and CNN and the NY Times and the Washington Post?

And there you have it; one, perhaps THE, massive factor in how fucked we are, from our Gilded Age economy to the fact that an unhinged orange moron is within a whisper of the highest elected office in the nation.

A true democratic republic requires that active, informed participation of the bulk of its citizens. It's not enough for them to just vote; they need to know and understand what their votes are doing, and how.

That's why the "free press" is the first amendment, not the tenth. Because without knowledge and understanding those votes are anything from useless to actively harmful, the sort of votes that brought the original Nazis a plurality in the Reichstag of 1933.

But it's not enough to be "free" if all that means is "free to print idiotic "human interest" and fire-and-murder stories". That kind of "free" just makes you stupider; less knowledgeable and informed only about trivia that makes you more frightened and more angry.

No wonder the average person thinks that crime is out of control, that the economy is awful, that things were "better" under Daddy Trump. Small wonder nobody is willing to do anything to repeal the idiotic "kicker" tax giveaway to help solve our public school problems.

Who's going to help them learn that?

I'm a monstrously literate guy with a passion for history and politics and an obsessive fascination with tracking down sources. I'm probably something like 0.0001% of the US public.

The rest of the country has to depend on the people like who run the Oregonlive website for their knowledge and understanding, and what they get is fucking murderous randos on Page One.

No wonder WASSSSSSSSSSF.