By Elizabeth Prata
For seven years our neighbor friend across the street would pop in for a visit. He was a contractor in our medium sized town. He'd usually stop in after a zoning meeting where his requests for zoning were denied. Furious, he'd stop in to our house on his way home and vent. He was a genial fella, a great raconteur, and other times he told great stories. After he departed my husband and I would turn to each other and wonder why these zoning meetings so angered him. He'd talk of corruption, of favors for friends, manipulation of the rules for those who were 'in', oppression for those on the 'outs.' Could it be real? Nah, he was probably exaggerating.
Our local paper was mailed free to all residents. We'd pick it up and read the hokey editorials, glance through photos of high school football triumphs, social news, church doings, and occasional town council news. Cute, we thought. A cute paper.
Then it happened. In 1999 we had our own zoning issue. We began to see the problem our friend was telling us about regarding the officials. They didn't go by the rules, even when the rules were clear. Like, if the rules said the sky must be blue, they'd say, let's make the sky yellow. Our appropriate and within-the-rules zoning request was summarily denied. Wut? We appealed, and in a turn of events the local power holders weren't used to, we 'outsiders' won. We were satisfied that though the rules initially didn't work, eventually they did. Civil society is orderly and pure, we thought.
We thought that was the end of things, But it wasn't.
We had little knowledge of the fury of local power holders when things didn't go their way. We took the brunt of it in their 'cute little paper' and the gossipy little foxes nibbling away at the vine of our reputation. And we had little understanding of how the 'cute little newspaper' was a crucial arm of the power brokers. At that time there was no internet and hard copy newspapers on newsprint were the main way people got their news, aside from the testosterone zones of the town's local general store, the diner counter gossip group, and the town dump. If there was one newspaper in town, that was all the local citizen had to go on, trusting that what they read was an accurate picture of our civic life.
Because, you see, the newspaper is the visible manifestation of the abstract concepts and philosophies the town or country holds dear. The inner workings of how our country operates are rarely seen by the average citizen. Oh, they CAN attend local charter meetings, council meetings, ordinance meetings, etc where the framework of democracy is hammered out, where the guardrails of public action guide officials to act on behalf of the citizens who trust them to do so.
But most people don't attend these meetings. Citizens just go to work, come home, eat dinner, play ball on weekends and repeat, leaving the civic work to the volunteers interested in such public service, trusting that these folks are actually serving the greater good, and not their own agendas. Most times the most participation a citizen will do is vote. But that is the most important participation, isn't it? Hence the need for untarnished information.
And the inner-inner workings of such mechanisms, the discussions between town planners, town managers, zoning officers, in their offices behind closed doors, aren't public. The average citizen who shows up to pay their taxes or get a new car license plate or apply for a dog tag or a fishing license see the folks behind the glass window and assume all is going well.
If there isn't a vigilant citizenry and/or a viable press, it isn't going well. [My contribution to a vibrant public life was to start a newspaper and present unbiased news ethically. And I did.]
There is a three-legged stool: citizens, government/officials, news media. One engages in participation. One performs the representation. One presents the information. We all know what happens to a three-legged stool when a leg is missing. We need all 3 for a thriving democracy.
Freedom of Access to government and to accurate news about the government might seem a minor thing individually, but cumulatively, each citizen is a soldier in the army of national civic participation. Each person who walks up to the town office seeking information about their government but is denied becomes a wounded soldier of the living Constitution. Every time a citizen who brings the gift of himself to a meeting with intent to participate but is squashed, it injures the process our Founders fought to give us. Every time a seeking citizen reads a deliberately lying headline a part of our representative democracy dies.
Public service is best conducted when the people can be heard, where fairness should rein, and where the bonds of civic discourse across the great divide between government and citizenry should be shrinking, not growing. Public service is where the news seeks to connect the citizenry with their representative officials earnestly and in honesty.
July 13 we saw in no uncertain terms the inexhaustible abyss of corruption of the American legacy media. It is sad to say, it's not only failing to inform, it is endeavoring with all alacrity to MISinform. I trust it not a whit.
We Christians can rest in the truth of the Bible. We are as fully informed of who God is as he wants us to be, and that is sufficient. We know what He does and promised to do, and that is sufficient. But we are citizens of this world, making decisions about our leaders. Be diligent, seek truth about them from credible sources, and make your decisions accordingly, not violating your Christian conscience.
All this has shown one other important thing as well: when we get to heaven we never have to wonder what is the truth again. We never have to wonder if there is an evil motive, a hidden agenda, or a secret sin. What a day that will be.
Elizabeth Prata was the Editor of The Monument Newspaper, award-winning Newspaper of record for Gray and New Gloucester. She served two terms on the Maine Senate's Committee to Study Compliance with Maine's Freedom of Access Laws, was trained by Bloomberg News, and was a member of the New England Press Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.
I was a member of the Society for Professional Journalists, The New England Press Association, and was an accepted applicant to the Bloomberg Training Program, held prior to the opening of the National SPJ Convention in New York City in 2004.
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