My View on Journalism if Your're Interested

What in God’s name has happened to American newspapering? The Washington Post recently printed pictures from its 25th Annual Travel Photo contest for readers. They also published a column titled “How To Spark Joy In Your Life” and a story about the rescue of an escaped water buffalo in rural Iowa (the story said, “Water buffaloes are unusual in the area” in what one assumes was a humorous aside).

My friends, the Washington Post is in Washington to uncover corruption, malfeasance, ineptitude, and outright dishonesty. That is why God put it there. It is not there to publish photographs of Zion National Park and tell me how to spark joy in my life or cover unusual wildlife in rural Iowa. I swear to God this is the truth. God Himself will spark joy in my life if He chooses to and He can care for rare wildlife too, and if you want to see pictures of national parks, look them up online, you’ll find canyons and geysers and rock formations like you wouldn’t believe.

A man is running for President who is crazy nuts and this is what the Washington Post should be reporting front-page every day with a big headline, Don’t Vote For This Man Or Anyone Who Says The Things He Says.

I guess newspapers feel they must compete with social media and other trash but I do not turn to TikTok or Instagram to learn about the government I pay my fair share of taxes to on an ongoing basis. I worked hard for that money and I don’t want it to all go to Kentucky just because Mitch McConnell says so. Or go to student loan relief just because somebody put a bug in Joe Biden’s ear. Most colleges are vastly overpriced for the value of the degree. We have state teachers colleges that decided long ago they were universities and the degree from one of them is just a high school graduation certificate with gold borders and a motto in Latin Nimium tu solvisti (You paid too much.). Nobody forgave my student loans when I was a student, back in the previous century. Of course tuition was extremely cheap, about $250 for an academic year and you got to be guided through Milton’s Paradise Lost and English composition and the U.S. Constitution and many other things and also attend free lectures by noted authorities and use the pool tables in the student union, all included in that one low price.

I took journalism courses at the University of Minnesota in which I was required to ask questions of strangers and write down what they told me and work it into a readable narrative with important stuff at the beginning and gradually trailing off into trivia. This education led me into a six-month internship at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a distinguished publication at the time, a mere shadow of its old self now, but never mind. I sat at the city desk, tuned to the heartbeat of a great city, thanks to my city editor, Mr. Walt Streightiff, who sat at his imperial desk in white shirt, armbands straining his sleeves so the cuffs wouldn’t be sullied by the fresh ink on the galley proofs. He wore a bow tie that he tied himself, it was not a clip-on. A clip-on would be good enough for Willmar or Faribault, not St. Paul where the great dome of the Capitol could be seen up Wabasha Street from the lunchroom where we reporters ate our midnight lunch.

The Capitol was the beat I craved but Irv Letofsky got that beat because he was suspicious of man’s wickedness. I was not; I was a Christian and assumed that others were too. Irv Letofsky, if he was a Christian, which I’m not positive he always was, he was a suspicious Christian. He did not trust public servants any farther than he could throw them and some of them were quite heavy. Irv knew in his hearrt that a politician fears nothing more than a heavy jail sentence. Ask Senator Menendez. Ask Donald J. Trump. Irv longed to send at least one city councilman to jail but he knew that Nate Bomberg would get to cover the trial so what’s the point? Meanwhile, I was stuck writing obits and interviewing minor celebrities such as Robert Frost’s daughter Leslie who is not a big name now nor was she then.

This is why I crave Trump’s defeat, so he can’t pardon himself. He must get down on his hands and knees and beg President Harris to do that. I would give anything to be there.

Garrison Keillor © 09.16.24