*Day 119: Florida Freedom Summer of 2024: Danger to Democracy: The First
Amendment Now Belongs to White Republican Corporations. * Publishers not
journalists control local news content.

My on-line Sunday edition of the Gannett Newspapers daily Sun frightened
me.  If you take the time to read this, you will be frightened too.
Attached are the articles and opinions which led to my fear.

The editorial page editor who earlier had been asked to do double duty in
the newsroom is leaving without a replacement in sight.  His predecessor,
who still writes a column, laments the end of journalism as he—and I knew
it—with a panoply of reporters to cover various aspects of local news.

News reports by three surviving Sun journalists yesterday would be failed
for a variety of reasons in most journalism news courses.  It would seem
assignment and copy editors are virtually non-existent to control direction
and outcome.

The first of the three ostensibly is an extensive report about a black
sheriff defying elected county officials by refusing to use money he has
been given for staff raises immediately.  Somewhere in the middle of the
account we learn he has been given the authority to take such action, and
by the time we readers are done we know that the public body has little
intention of doing anything about it.

The second written by a law school graduate concerns the refusal of an
unidentified judge to rule on a complaint filed in September to remove an
incumbent county commissioner from office,  because she seems to have a
primary residence outside of her designated district.

Coincidentally on the ballot but unmentioned is a referendum for eligible
county voters to determine if future county commission candidates should
run from single member districts rather than as candidates running at-large
as they do now.

The article includes mention of a prominent local Democrat, a former
State’s Attorney, as being the lawyer for the successful commissioner who
will be seeking re-election tomorrow.  The story reports she could be
challenged again, if she wins.  Her opponent is a extremist Tea Party
Republican and former Gainesville mayor who wasn’t re-elected.

The story contains no explanation of how or why the challenged Commisioner
prevailed but more significantly the reporter apparently does not
understand and certainly did not mention the significance of the anonymous
judge waiting until the last minute to rule, to avoid a timely appeal.
That would have been inevitable if the jurist had ruled on the
comparatively simple issue closer to the filing of the complaint rather
than on the nearly eve of election.

The third report describes how parents of school-bussed children are
frustrated because busses are not arriving for pick-ups on time.  By the
third paragraph certainly, readers learn that the real report concerns the
shortage of bus drivers as a result of a significant number of retirements
and resignations.  Employment is low, with demand locally generally in
excess of supply.  Though the drivers have been given a raise, it would
appear to be pocket change for experienced drivers likely to find higher
paid employment locally or elsewhere.   The report raised in me as I
believe it would in those parents of the temptation to hire anyone to be
bus drivers, regardless of qualifications.  I was in North Carolina where
such a result did happen, and the number of school bus accidents soared out
of control.

In the Issues section, the black retired columnist, a veteran Gannett
journalist, wrote about a non-profit project to assist ex-convicts find
jobs.  Shown as photographic examples are three black female ex-cons and
one white male.  Such a report might make sense at any other time than
before an election.  Help convicts, criminals, black women, now?  A
majority of white voters already taught to fear the reported rise in crime,
as false as that report is, will not hesitate to vote Republican.
Cynically, maybe the ex-cons should be trained and given jobs as bus
drivers.

The major “front page” feature boldly predicts a Republican rout in
Tuesday’s elections, based on a compilation of a hodgepodge of items
written by several reporters working together on a patchwork quilt of an
account.  The photo illustrations of four voters to illustrate the “voting
population”  are frightening in the physical ugliness of at least three.
These selections to my mind don’t come close to conjuring up your typical
voters.

What do these criticized news items suggest?  For business reasons,
surviving publishers have cut editorial staffs of existing newspapers to
the bone.  The Sun is owned by two boards of white business people, with
few having significant, if any, editorial experience.

Local news turns out to have been reported in the bygone 20th Century horse
& buggy days in the field, but now we’re into the streamlined vehicle era
in which any fool who owns a press can publish whatever they damn well
please.

The front page hodge-podge about a likely tremendous GOP victory certainly
will have some effect on Democratic voter turn-out.  Why bother to vote if
the candidates they support are sure to be defeated?  There was no benefit
except to Republicans in the publication of that report, which may or may
turn out not to be true.  Speculative journalism already was dominating Sun
reports.

As a former journalist/civil rights attorney writer, I have lived by words,
in newspapers, in courts.  From the U.S. Supreme Court on down, our
judicial system has shifted from being one of laws, to being one of
people—including corporations! Or as the cliché goes, being one of men.
Precedent is gone.  Any judge apparently can decide any case any which
way.   Hearings?  Trials in civil cases?  Forget about it.

What’s worse and less well known, judges often are so swamped that they let
clerks dispose of the “unimportant” matters, e.g., the disciplining of
attorneys in Florida.

But until yesterday, I did not really understand the extent of the disaster
created by bottom line thinking of publishers, who act as they though are
marketing widgets or some other irrelevant item.

Compounding the the night mare is the fact that shortage of editorial
personnel allows journalists to have more autonomy in their story selection
wiithin the constraints of assigned beats.

Courts generally are not covered at all any more.  For the Sun, higher
education has a specific reporter assigned, but both county and school
board news mostly go unreported.   City Hall may be overcovered, with two
of the remaining reporters generally poking their noses there, while the
County generally is ignored.

Gannett board members don’t have to exercise individual pressure to get
their views across.   Journalists under the constant fear of being laid off
or terminated know how to please them.

The election results tomorrow may be a Republican rout, but even if that
happens, it should not be what now seems to be the case.  That’s the
result  the wealthy and their management representatives desire, by having
repeated constantly how the GOP was ahead in the polls while a handful of
online leftist publications are playing the long shots in predicting more
Democratic success than otherwise expected if the turnout for that party is
greater than expected.

Next, a last minute report sent to me from an interested reader for the
first time points out that the new charismatic Afro-Cuban American
candidate Maxwell Frost still has to win his Congressional seat to be the
first GenZ member in the federal legislature.  For the first time his
conservative GOP opponent is not only mentioned but he is provided with an
extensive “objective” biography which makes him sound like a formidable
contender, although the item does suggest that the district is “deep blue.”

Finally we are informed just before the election, that Donald J. Trump has
picked November 14th to announce his candidacy.  Why is that important for
the public to know right before the election?  Why not wait for him to
announce?  Certainly it would seem Trump Republicans who otherwise might
not vote now will do so, now that they know he will be running again for
sure.

Yes, voter suppression is an issue now and will be worse in 2024,
especially if 2020 election deniers are elected in several states,

In the horse and buggy days of journalism, Loeb newspapers in New Hampshire
were singled out by the rest of the press for unreasonable slanting of the
news in favor of Republicans that publisher supported.. That was one state.

 In 2024, the influence of Gannett Newspapers, the largest publisher of
dailies in the nation as well as the national USA Today, and other
comparably owned corporate publishing chains, could affect the outcome by
slanting coverage in favor of Republicans from the outset.  That is what
has precipitated my fear, and should do the same for you.

In dictatorships, press support is obvious.  In democracies, it should be,
but….

Gabriel Hillel from Florida Freedom Summer of 2024

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