#MELODY ASSISTANT REWIRE FREE#
They know nothing about journalism and care less, for they’re ruthless Wall Street profiteers out to grab big bucks fast by slashing the journalistic and production staffs of each paper, voiding all employee benefits (from pensions to free coffee in the breakroom), shriveling the paper’s size and news content, selling the presses and other assets, tripling the price of their inferior product - then declaring bankruptcy, shutting down the paper, and auctioning off the bones before moving on to plunder another town’s paper.īy 2014, America’s two largest media chains were not venerable publishers who believe that a newspaper’s mission includes a commitment to truth and a civic responsibility, but GateHouse and Digital First, whose managers believe that good journalism is measured by the personal profit they can squeeze from it. The buyers are hedge-fund scavengers with names like Digital First and GateHouse. Not the families and companies that built and nurtured true journalism, but the new breed of fast-buck hucksters who’ve scooped up hundreds of America’s newspapers from the bargain bins of media sell-offs. Rather, the demise of the real news reporting by our city and regional papers is a product of their profiteering owners. It was, of course, a retort to Donald Trump’s ignorant campaign to demonize the news media as “the enemy of the people.” But when it comes to America’s once-proud newspapers, their worst enemy is not Trump - nor is it the rising cost of newsprint or the “free” digital news on websites. It’s one more example of this dangerous time for America’s decreasingly free press that, ironically, Jim lays out in this very column.”Ī two-panel cartoon I recently saw showed a character with a sign saying: “First they came for the reporters.” In the next panel, his sign says: “We don’t know what happened after that.” “While Creators’ reluctance to anger these powerful interests is somewhat understandable, the implications are frightening. “The big, hedge-fund owned newspaper chains that Hightower calls out in his column are big customers of theirs, and as such, they don’t want to risk offending them,” says Hightower assistant Melody Byrd (Corporate Crime Reporter, 11/29/18). Texas populist Jim Hightower’s columns have been distributed by Creators Syndicate for a decade - but the agency said they had to take a pass on this one.
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