Care about rigorous public debate and the future of democracy? Sign the letter urging Forum Communications Co. to rescind its new opinion-page policy.
This post is primarily relevant to readers in the Dakotas and Minnesota. However, given the resurgence of fascism and totalitarian thought and action in the USA and around the world, what’s described herein could just as easily happen in your community.
There’s some seriously 1984ish thinking going on over at The Forum of Fargo (N.D.)-Moorhead (Minn.).
Forum Communications Co., the region’s largest media company, serves citizens in the Dakotas and Minnesota. On November 9, it announced that commentary on its editorial pages will henceforth be limited to local and regional topics. No more op-eds that grapple with federal or international issues, in other words.
Saying there’s been too much commentary on national and international issues lately, especially in the run-up to the recent election, and under the guise of a “course correction,” the Editorial Board wrote, “Our company’s mission is to connect and inform our local communities…. Our focus is local, and that goes for everything we do. Our immediate goal is to refocus, as best we can, our Opinion pages around the issues and topics most relevant to you here at home.”
Nonsense. It’s doubtful that commentary related to national and international issues during the most recent election cycle was significantly more voluminous than that in previous election cycles. Even if it was, that’s a sign of a healthy body politic, not a reason to limit dialogue in the future.
“The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.”
Society of Professional Journalists
The new policy appears, instead, to be a preclusive effort to quell discussion, not to mention criticism, of the new presidential administration and its forthcoming domestic and foreign policies.
As the old saying goes, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.”
In fact, this duck seems, smells and sounds like the insidious “newspeak” of George Orwell’s dystopian “1984.” As we all should know, newspeak is “a simplified, confusing, and ambiguous language used in the totalitarian state… to limit the range of human thought.”
In the case of The Forum’s explanation of its new policy, the duck sounds like 1984’s “doublespeak,” i.e., “…language used to deceive, usually through concealment or misrepresentation of truth.”
It calls to mind another euphemism with “local” as its root, one that right-wingers have thrown about with abandon over the past half century or so: “local control.”
The political right has repeatedly used calls for local control to denigrate, oppose and stigmatize federal policies that would benefit the greatest number of U.S. citizens rather than specialized, minority local interests.
Now, The Forum has taken it to the next level; the only difference is that no representative elected body has a say in the matter.
The fact is we live in a global community where decisions made in Washington, D.C., Moscow, Jerusalem, Tehran, Beijing or London can and often do impact all U.S. citizens quickly and substantially. To borrow the Editorial Board’s own words, these “issues and topics” are unquestionably “most relevant to (us) here at home.”
As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Agreed, but only so long as the newspaper in question is serving the public interest, which clearly is not happening here.
At best, Forum Communications is abdicating its responsibility to serve as a public forum for ideas and debate. At worst, it is suppressing public discourse, thereby hastening the USA’s devolution from a democratic republic to a totalitarian state.
When the news outlet citizens rely on for thought-provoking information and commentary censors the very people it is intended to serve, then we do, indeed, find ourselves in an oppressive, terrifying, 1984ish world.
Featured image by Brotin Baswas via pexels.com
IV Words is a reader-supported source
of independent analysis, opinions,
news, pointed protestations
and activism. Please help me
keep the lights on.
Buy IV Words a cup of coffee!
