Warning: This blog may be as close to a political statement as I have made in my four years of writing at Aero-Cordero.com. You are welcome to click out if you don’t want to read it.
If you try to get information about how to contact a local newsroom of the Ruidoso News — the newspaper that my father owned in the town of Ruidoso for about 20 years — you’re out of luck. The newspaper that he fostered and grew into a significant contributor to growth, success and political integrity of the Village of Ruidoso from the early 1950s to the 1970s, doesn’t seem to care about news any more.
I tried last week to send the newspaper a story about the “Trout In the Classroom” project that I have been working on for several months at White Mountain Elementary in Ruidoso. (See previous blogs for more details). I had no success in finding a local number or even an office address for the Ruidoso News.
If you look up Ruidoso News online you can find a website and an 800 phone number. Both give you options on how get a new subscription, what to do if you’ve missed getting a paper or who to contact if you want to buy advertising. But nowhere is there a local phone number or information about contacting the organization about a local news item.
I mean, isn’t the purpose of a newspaper to gather and distribute news?
Frustrated, I called the Ruidoso of Chamber of Commerce to see if they had a local phone number for the Ruidoso News, now owned by the USA Today network.
“No, we don’t have one. I don’t think they even have an office here any more,” said the person at the Chamber of Commerce.
I called the 800 number for subscriptions and finally was able to speak to a human. I said I wasn’t interested in a subscription, but wanted to know how to get in touch with the newspaper’s editorial staff. After a long wait on hold, I was told “I don’t have a local number for the news operation. I think they’re changing the number.”
Again, a newspaper without the ability to gather news does not make sense to me.
Most people don’t have time to attend every meeting of city council, school board, county commission or other government agency activity. That’s the job of the press — to be there if we can’t. If there’s no one looking over the shoulders of the city council, school board, the county commission or a government agency, they can get away with things that are not in the best interest of the citizens. A report by a group trying to foster local news reporting says there are now more than 200 counties in the United States that do not have newspapers and more than 1,500 with only once source of news. And in my opinion, there are many, many more counties which have a poor excuse for a local newspaper.
Here’s a website by Northwestern University that you may want to look at which shows how dire the situation is:
https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2023/report
And here’s a map of local news outlets in New Mexico. The yellow shows counties with no local news outlet, the gray show counties which have only one local news outlet and the blue shows counties with two or more more local news outlets.
Some political figures these days have called the media “the enemy of the people.” All politicians, left or right, have probably criticized the media at one time or another as being biased against them. As a former journalist, I got heat from several political figures because I didn’t write a story the way they wanted me to — but I wrote the truth. I was once accused of “faulty reporting” because I did not report on one political figure lambasting another at a public hearing. I instead wrote about a report that was released at that same hearing praising advances in women’s sports programs at state universities.
Journalists for legitimate news outlets make mistakes (as I have done), but I truly believe they all do their best to bring the truth to the people.
The phrase “don’t shoot the messenger,” is something any journalist knows. It has been around forever, beginning as far back as the 3rd and 5th century in Chinese dynasties of those eras. As you know, the phrase relates to blaming bearer of bad (or accurate) news for things that have gone wrong. Even Shakespeare referred to the phrase in his plays “Henry the IV” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” The press is often that messenger who gets shot.
Our local daily newspaper, also a member of the USA today network, is a sad example of what it used to be. It appears that it makes most of its money from obituaries of local citizens, then fills much the rest of pages with newswire copy that is at least two days old.
We had a fatal shooting just two blocks from our house two weeks ago. We’ve never seen a story about that incident in the local paper. I think that would have been important for me to know about. My wife’s friend told her about two local high schools whose athletic teams had won state competitions recently. There was nothing about it in the local daily newspaper — again, something I think our community would have liked to know.
There is good news in that we have a strong local weekly newspaper, where we consistently learn more about what is going around Las Cruces than in the USA today publication. Additionally, a former journalist for the local daily has started an online newspaper which you can reach through Facebook.
The bottom line is that you must support good local journalism to keep everyone informed and to keep political figures and government agencies in line.
But the problem is this: Many people these days don’t support local journalism. Neither my son nor daughter subscribe to their local newspapers. I don’t criticize them — their peers don’t value local journalism either. I suspect many of you who read this don’t subscribe to a local newspaper or follow another local news outlet. If newspapers or other local outlets don’t have subscribers, they will fail and we will have no one to look out for our interests. The other problem is that many newspapers are now owned by large corporations, whose focus seems to be more on the bottom line than in actually serving the community with needed news.
These days, many people rely on the internet, television or radio for their news, often choosing to read, watch or listen only to sites or programs which support their point of view.
I’ve made it a point to listen to and read other clearly biased viewpoints on both sides of issues, both conservative and liberal. I want to know what people are thinking and I struggle to learn why they think the way they do. Hearing what they say — on both sides — is often deeply upsetting to me and I fear that bias has spread the seeds of doubt and conspiracy theories.
I’ll close my rant with this statement from Thomas Jefferson:
“If I had to choose between government and a free press, I would choose a free press.”
As my father is rolling over in his grave from the demise of his once great local newspaper, I hope you, my readers, will support good local journalism.
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