Newspaper careers crumble, but public needs news

It has been 10 years since I was employed by a newspaper (this once weekly writing gig does not qualify as “employed”). But I cannot help but listen to the crumbling of the industry where I spent 33 years of my life.

The latest crash I heard came in the form of a blog post by David Menconi announcing his layoff from the Raleigh News & Observer. In that post, Menconi, who had covered the music scene for the N&O for 28 years, cited the largest percentage destruction of a newsroom I had ever heard about, an 84 percent cut in newsroom staff: “More than a decade of layoffs, buyouts and attrition whittled our once-mighty newsroom staff of 250 down to around 40 survivors.”

It’s more common to read of newsroom cuts of 25 or 50 percent as newspapers slash costs to compensate for drastically reduced advertising revenue. Newspaper advertising revenue had been declining nationwide for 20 years, but the 2008 Great Recession, combined with the whiplash-inducing switch from print to digital advertising (Google and other online amalgamaters are making billions while newspapers, which do most of the reporting work, are laying off the reporters who expose the news).

Nearly all of the newspaper employees I worked with or knew through conferences, training meetings and associations are no longer in the business. Print-only news reporters are dinosaurs as remaining newspapers try to shift their focus to online readers and the almighty millennials. A recent column in the N&O (which we’ve subscribed to for nearly 40 years) infuriated my wife, as she read between the lines that the newspaper doesn’t care about any readers over age 40 or anyone who prefers a print publication to digital. The columnist seemed to be saying, “You old folks are going to die soon, anyway, so we don’t care about you.”

I worry about my former colleagues and peers who gave their lives to reporting the news in print and now are cut loose to drown in the sea of online advertising and video news, but I also worry about what this means to American democracy. The framers of the Constitution established freedom of the press as a fundamental right for one simple reason: Voters who don’t read the news can’t make wise decisions on election day. Without thorough reporting by professional journalists, the public cannot keep watch on government officials and government activities. Democracy is based on an informed electorate. As the Washington Post’s new slogan puts it, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

On a trip to Wilmington last weekend, I picked up a copy of the Wilmington StarNews. Among the other news in the Saturday edition was a report on the retirement of Si Cantwell, an editor and reporter with the StarNews for nearly 40 years. In his final column, he reminisced about his life in the newspaper business, then made this plea to readers: “I don’t worry about print readership diminishing. I worry about apathy. I worry about citizenry no longer interested in keeping tabs on elected officials, who don’t care about school redistricting or tax rates or film incentives. We still care about those things at the StarNews, along with restaurant openings and local sports scores, and I believe we provide the best coverage of that.”

I never crossed paths with Cantwell during my newspaper career, but we are singing from the same hymnal.

Robert Caro's biography of LBJ: Four volumes and counting

Robert Caro wrote what is, to me, the best biography ever published. And he’s still writing it. His multi-volume history of Lyndon Johnson consumes four thick books and counting.

The entire project is “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” with the individual volumes titled “The Path to Power” (1982), “Means of Ascent,” (1990) “Master of the Senate,” (2002) and “The Passage of Power” (2012). The first volume, which I found the most compelling, begins with Johnson’s grandparents, who were pioneers in the Texas Hill Country in the mid-1800s as settlers discovered that what looked like lush, fertile land was only a couple of inches of topsoil that could not sustain agriculture. The book continues through the years when young Lyndon Johnson was determined to be somebody, to make his mark in a way that his poor father and grandfather had not. 

“The Passage of Power” ends in 1964. Lyndon Johnson is in the White House following the Kennedy Assassination, and he has coaxed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, perhaps the most significant legislation of the generation, into law.

Caro initially said he would write a conventional, one-volume biography, like his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses. But he kept finding more and more facts about Johnson, so he wrote a second volume and a third and a fourth. The fifth volume is not finished yet, and there is no guarantee that it will be the final one.

Reading these books taught me more about Lyndon Johnson than I ever wanted to know. He was conniving, egotistical, stubborn, cruel and abusive at times, and focused on being the Great Man he had wanted to be since childhood. He cheated on his faithful, adoring wife, destroyed the lives of young men who worked on his staff in Congress and succeeded in part by callously using people who trusted him.

He was also probably the most effective legislator in American history. He could be persuasive, even charming, and if that didn’t work, he could be threatening, vindictive and backstabbing to get his way. His success in getting passage of civil rights bills is extraordinary. You can love him or hate him for that and for his “Great Society” programs, but you have to admit he changed this country.

The minute detail in these books is astonishing. Caro describes long-ago events in great detail. He uncovers episodes that had never been made public, including a hard-to-believe years-long affair between Johnson and a glamorous, wealthy member of Washington’s social elite.

            Caro wrote a long article for The New Yorker (Jan. 28, 2019, edition) that explains how he got so deep into the life of LBJ. He began his research in 1976 and has worked continuously on his expanded biography since then.

            The New Yorker article makes a good textbook for young historians or news reporters learning how to research and interview. Caro digs deep into files stashed away in libraries and archives to find facts he was looking for or facts he’d never considered. No mention is too insignificant for him to not follow up. Any name he sees is followed up with an interview or several interviews of the same person, peeling away the lies and the cover-ups until he gets to the bottom of the matter. I recommend the article to anyone doing historical research.

            Although I tend to be a slow, plodding, easily distracted reader, I dove into each of Caro’s LBJ volumes  (which average close to 1,000 pages) with excitement and eagerness. I’m looking forward to the fifth installment, but Caro is 84 and admits that his ambitions for this biography might exceed his mortality. I’m counting on that final volume.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

This post originally appeared in The Wilson Times.

Book describes civil rights struggle in South

“In Darkest South Carolina” by Brian Hicks tells the story of J. Waties Waring, a federal district judge in Charleston, S.C., and his largely overlooked efforts to have school segregation outlawed as unconstitutional. Waring’s story, and Charleston’s story, is also the story of the nation, particularly the South, during the Jim Crow era.

            I had never heard of Waring, except to see a historic marker about him on Meeting Street in Charleston, but the gift of this book filled me in. Although the Confederacy lost the Civil War, its culture and its societal rules lived on for a century. The removal of federal troops from the South in 1876 and the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which instituted the “separate but equal” standard in public accommodations, gave racist elements in the population the green light to subjugate African-Americans throughout the nation, but especially in the South.

            Waring, a child of the South who was accustomed to seeing black servitude and oppression as the natural order of things, gradually came to recognize the injustice of that society. As a federal judge, Waring saw his position as an opportunity, even a duty, to bring justice to black South Carolinians.

            In an age when the Democratic Party ruled South Carolina and most other Southern states, a vestige of white citizens’ animus against Republicans rooted in Civil War and Reconstruction resentments, black citizens were barred from voting in the Democratic Primary. Claiming they were a club and had the right to choose their members, Democrats used the “white primary” to disenfranchise blacks. The Supreme Court ruled Georgia’s white primary unconstitutional in 1946. A year later, Judge Waring affirmed that the precedent would apply in a South Carolina case as well. At the same time, he ruled in another case that South Carolina school districts could not pay white teachers more than it paid black teachers. That ruling did not challenge “separate but equal,” but it did require schools to truly be equal in pay, curriculum, facilities, buses, etc.

            Waring became an ally of future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in his quest to win equal rights for America’s black population. Marshall argued several cases before Waring, and the two became close friends. It was only a matter of timing that a Topeka, Kansas, case arrived at the Supreme Court before South Carolina cases in which Waring had ruled that segregated schools denied black students an equal education, even if facilities, teacher pay and curriculum were equal. The Warren Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and set the nation on a path toward racial equality using the reasoning Waring employed in South Carolina.

            Waring’s support for civil rights angered his former friends and most whites throughout the state. Harassing phone calls and violent attacks got so bad that federal marshals had to be assigned to protect Waring and his family. Politicians such as Strom Thurmond railed against the judge in their campaign speeches, vowing to run him out of South Carolina.

            Charleston Post & Courier columnist Hicks used the newspaper’s archives to document Waring’s historic impact and courage, even though the newspaper was not a supporter of Waring, who was vilified in newspaper editorials.

            Hicks’ book is a good companion to Taylor Branch’s “Eyes on the Prize” history of the civil rights movement and its leaders. While Branch’s book concentrates on the legendary leaders of the 1950s-60s, Hicks pinpoints one brave judge and his efforts to bring racial justice to South Carolina and the nation.

            To Southerners of my generation and older, much of this story will be familiar and painful. Those who claim that race relations “are worse than ever’ have forgotten just how bad things were 70 years ago. Books like this one set the story straight.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor at The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

Will yesterday's history in photos be preserved?

When my wife and her sister cleaned out their old family home last year, my wife inherited hundreds of photographs dating back to long before the house was constructed in 1968. The photos included professional portraits by a renowned photographer and snapshots taken by my father-in-law and others. Some were loose in file folders and boxes; others were taped or pasted into crumbling photo albums and scrapbooks. She recognized some of the people in the photos, but not others.

She has spent much of her time for the past six months sorting through the photos and deciding what to do with them. She bought a desktop scanner and has scanned several hundred photos. Some photos were badly faded but could be enhanced with the scanning software so that the improved images were worth keeping. The pictures ranged in age from more than 100 years to about 50 years.

The scrapbooks also included pictures from her dad’s World War II Navy service, along with some souvenir menus, programs and orders that he had saved. For the first time, my wife got to see photos of the LST her dad commanded in the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. Photos show him as a thin, handsome young man in his early 20s bearing the responsibility of keeping his ship’s crew safe while defeating the America’s enemies.

Because both of her parents grew up in Goldsboro, my wife eventually made a connection with Marty Tschetter, the reference and local history librarian at the Wayne County Public Library. Tschetter had obtained copies of many of the photos by A.O. Clement, a prominent Goldsboro photographer who just happened to be my wife’s mother’s step-grandfather. My wife was able to identify some of the unidentified people in the library’s collection of Clement photos.

 The library’s collection of old photos preserves a visual history of eastern North Carolina for future generations. And my wife has been able to share her scanned family images with her sisters, cousins and nephews.

 Younger generations seldom seem to take an interest in genealogy, family history and old photos. I can recall laughing at the “old cars” in the snapshots in my parents’ photo albums. My father-in-law, who died in 2010, said he wished he had paid attention to his grandmother’s tales about life during the Civil War (her family home was occupied by Union soldiers). With few exceptions, our children show little interest in the photos my wife has so painstakingly sorted and scanned. She is glad the Goldsboro library wanted her old scrapbooks of people she couldn’t identify because she didn’t want to throw them in the trash.

Squirreled away in our home are thousands of print photos, slides and, more recently, digital images of my wife and me, our children and grandchildren. Will these be saved and preserved or will they add to the landfill refuse?

 Inspired by my wife’s discoveries and her hard work at the computer desk, I have made an appointment with two of my first cousins to try to scan and preserve all the Tarleton family photographs that we can find. All of us are into our seventh decade of life, so there is some urgency to do it now or never. We’ve already missed our parents’ generation. I hope I can stir some interest among the folks back in Anson County, where most of the family resided.

           

This post originally appeared in The Wilson Times Feb. 16, 2019.

Yearbook photos can become embarrassments

The college yearbooks that got Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam in hot water could snare thousands of other men (and, perhaps, women). Looking back at these 30-year-old or older yearbooks shows attitudes and culture have changed. What once was just silly fun is now viewed as reprehensible and unpardonable.

Northam's medical school yearbook included a page dedicated to him that shows someone dressed in a Ku Klux Klan-style white hood and another man wearing blackface makeup and tattered clothing. In 1984, when the yearbook was published, people must have just laughed it off. Northam is not laughing now; he is under intense pressure to resign as governor.

I could not recall seeing any yearbook pictures from my college years (more than a decade earlier than Northam's) that were so obviously racist. Perhaps slave/master costumes became fashionable sometime later. I did look through a couple of my old college yearbooks to see what shenanigans the fraternities were up to nearly 50 years ago. 

The 1968 and 1970 Yackety Yack yearbooks of UNC-Chapel Hill exhibited no shameful racial attitudes in their posed fraternity photos but did show plenty of lack of poor taste.

Beta Theta Pi had its members pose all over a railroad trestle wearing a variety of costumes. Three carried rifles or shotguns. Some wore military clothes or caps. One man wore bib overalls and held a gun to his head. Like racist attitudes, joking about suicide is no longer excusable.

Chi Phi posed its brothers as a chain gang in 1968. Most of them wore work clothes (or less) and stood in a roadside ditch that was under construction. Two brothers were dressed as prison guards and brandished a rifle and a shotgun.

Kappa Zeta won the humor prize (maybe) with the suit-and-tie frat boys lined up in single file behind one brother seated on a toilet in the middle of a field while two others stood beside the seated brother holding his coat and toilet paper. The last guy in line is bending over, one hand over his eyes to see how long the line is.

Lambda Chi Alpha held a mock burial with most members in formal wear while one brother lay in front of them, covered by a Confederate battle flag and holding a flower. No one was in blackface or Klan outfits.

Phi Delta Theta got a jump on colleges' worries about binge drinking. The Phi Delts posed outside an ABC store brandishing large boxes of booze, one rifle, a bow-and-arrow and other silly things. 

Pi Delta Phi's photo portrays a lynching, but it's not a racial lynching. The photo shows one brother on a horse with a noose around his neck while several in the crowd brandish rifles and three brothers are high in the tree holding the rope. A woman off to the side appears to be pregnant, so I guess this is supposed to represent a shotgun wedding. Offensive but not reprehensible, I guess.

Delta Delta Delta, a sorority, displayed the only Confederate symbols other than Lambda Chi's burial pall. The Tri-Delt members posed at the edge of a small pond and carried a variety of gear — fishing nets, a teddy bear, a dart board and a fishing pole. Two of the sisters held small Confederate battle flags. If there was a commentary or message to this, I can't discern it.

The 1970 Yackety Yack showed two fraternities posing as they hold a number in front of each brother. I didn't get it at first but then realized that draft numbers were assigned in 1969. They were all showing their draft numbers. Beta Theta Pi displayed their numbers without commentary, but Tau Epsilon Phi made the message clearer. The TEPs were all lined up with their numbers, waiting to get their heads chopped off by the executioner at the end of the line.

Northam has tried to wriggle out of the embarrassing spot he put himself in 35 years ago, but he may be forced out of politics by a foolish judgment from long ago. Most people are outraged or at least cringe at pictures like the ones from Northam's yearbook, but blackface has not always been so unacceptable. "Holiday Inn," one of the most memorable and beloved of Christmas movies (1942), includes a scene where Bing Crosby daubs on blackface makeup to do a Lincoln's birthday tribute in which blackfaced actors sing the praises of "Abraham." I still watch this movie, which is much better than the follow-up, "White Christmas," but I can no longer watch the blackface scene. I skip that cringe-worthy scene each time.

Whether you want to go into politics or not, it would be wise to think carefully about what a future generation will think of your humor and not just what the current audience thinks.

Space race: Is there anyone out there?

            I grew up in what was called “The Space Age,” which superseded “The Jet Age.” Living in a rural area with very little light pollution, I was able to marvel at the stars and planets, identify the constellations, and dream of discoveries of worlds beyond Earth. “The Space Race” was under way, pitting the United States, bastion of democracy and godliness, against the Soviet Union, that oppressively communist and atheistic regime that wanted to destroy America.

We had to win the Space Race, and I dreamed of being part of it. Twice I asked for a celestial telescope for Christmas. I still have the second of those telescopes, which allowed me to see the craters on the moon, count the moons of Jupiter, see the red dust of Mars, and ponder the rings of Saturn. I stayed up late in 1969 to watch “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Reports of UFOs — Unidentified Flying Objects — intrigued me, and I became convinced that the reports of other-worldly spacecraft were factual, indicating that beings from other planets were observing or perhaps trying to communicate with us.

As my career interests shifted from astronomy to writing, I grew less convinced about the reports of UFOs and less interested in astronomy (which, I had discovered, entailed a lot of mathematics).

So much has changed since the days when my elementary school gathered the entire student body to watch the launch of a Mercury astronaut. The simple mention of NASA no longer makes hearts flutter with excitement. We’ve been to the moon and might get no farther. Unmanned probes have explored Mars, but the obstacles to putting astronauts on Mars remain daunting. Planetary probes and fly-bys are interesting, but wouldn’t a cure for cancer be better?

The latest intriguing object in space is an anomalous visitor to our solar system that does not behave like any planet, asteroid or comet ever detected. Some scientists believe the object, which flew past Earth recently, might be an exploratory probe from a distant civilization, which might be checking out the civilization on Earth. This theory is being taken seriously by scientists.

Residents of Earth have been searching for signals from distant civilizations for generations. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) program has listened and watched for signals from other planets. Some of the biggest names in astrophysics, such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, have supported SETI. Simple odds seem to favor the existence of intelligent life somewhere out there.

“If you roll the dice so many times, and there are tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way, it is quite likely we are not alone,” Isaac Chotiner wrote in The New Yorker.

The odds certainly favor some form of life on distant worlds, but the chemical combinations to sustain life don’t seem to be common. The odds of basic life forms evolving into intelligent life capable of creating an interstellar probe seem prohibitively greater. Life on Earth defied extraordinary odds over billions of years. Suppose it’s a miracle and not an accident.

Even if we accept that SETI is scientifically valuable, the incomprehensible distances of interstellar and intergalactic space makes meaningful contact with extraterrestrial life impossible. A two-way conversation between Earth and another planet would be an intergenerational task. The closest stars with planets are dozens to hundreds of light years away. We would be waiting hundreds of years for a reply to our greeting, and that assumes that language barriers could be overcome. Einstein established that nothing can travel faster than light, so the “warp speed” dreamed up by “Star Trek” writers defies the laws of physics

Among the billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy or the trillions in the thousands of other galaxies known to us, there might be intelligent life, but communicating with that civilization, much less visiting it, appears impossible.

Be awed at the vast heavens, the unfathomable distances, the varieties of objects and the enigmas of how it all came to be, but don’t count on spending your vacation on some distant world hundreds of light years away.

             

This article first appeared in The Wilson Times Feb. 2, 2019.

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