Indeed, we could spend hours, days and weeks attempting to dissect what led to the announced May 3 demise of the long-running Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
But the simplest, and most accurate, assessment is that it was an ugly collision of long-evolving changes in market forces — clearly recognizable but slowly confronted by management — and organized labor forces so hellbent on being “right” that they so assiduously acted to kill their host.
Talk about being “dead right.”
Be all this as it may, no one should applaud the demise of yet another media outlet. The publication of less information will leave the public poorer and more at risk. For it eliminates yet another public watchdog, a critically important part of the process of vetting public policy, proposed and prosecuted.
Simply put, and to borrow a well-worn phrase, the public can’t be interested in what it can’t see. And if it can’t see it — because the press that represents it is truncated and/or eliminated – it will only enable the bad actors of public service to practice public self-service.
That’s hardly in the public weal.
We cannot pretend to know how all this will play out. But no matter if the P-G fails or somehow is saved, and in whatever form, it behooves other media outlets in Greater Pittsburgh – print, broadcast and web – to up their game and rededicate themselves to better covering the region’s public policy matters.
But no media are immune from the same kind of market and labor forces that appear to have doomed the P-G. And while freedom of the press, in all its forms, is guaranteed by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, it is not free. New and more reliable ways to cover its costs must be devised – and free of government subsidies to preserve its sacred independence.
As 20th-century pol Wendell Willkie once put it, “Freedom of the press is the staff of life for any vital democracy.” And in the starkest of terms, a diminished press is a concoction for tyranny.
Dare not any of us allow this precious freedom to die in the dark shadows of inaction where tyrants surely lurk.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
