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 20^th 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 14^th 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