Delivering the news

My first job was delivery boy for The Sunday Detroit Times. I had about 30 customers. Hardly any lived close to the next on my route through a major part of midtown Windsor. I had customers in the Black neighbourhood, the Italian neighbourhood, up the stairs and down the halls in big apartment buildings on Ouellette Ave. and Giles Blvd., and in stately homes on Victoria Ave.

The Sunday papers in Detroit were the major editions for the week. They each had a lot of big specialty sections, colour comics, a glossy magazine and lots of advertising. Delivering Sunday papers was heavy slogging. I’d start out with a bundle in my carrier and another bundle in the big canvas bag slung over my shoulder. I had to walk with my bike all but the last quarter of the route.

I had this job when Ike and Mamie were being followed by Jack and Jackie at the White House, and Pearson was sparing with Diefenbaker were to head the government in Canada. Cars had fins or were tapered like B-movie rocket ships. The Union Jack and Canadian Ensign hung in the hallway at Victoria Ave. Public School.

The colour comics section, some 12 or 16 pages, was on the outside of The Sunday Detroit Times, with Dick Tracy and Prince Valiant on the cover. I figured those comics were the main reason people wanted The Times rather than The Detroit News or The Detroit Free Press. I looked forward each week to Prince Valiant’s adventures. [http://comicskingdom.com/prince-valiant ] Very early Sunday morning, I'd read Prince Valiant, then set off so my customers could read him too.

I realize now that my customers had me delivering those huge newspapers because they wanted the news, the features and even the ads. In those days, I was too young to know the value of news and the essential role of good journalism in society.

The Detroit Times was the first paper I knew that went out of business. Many have followed. I worry that there are fewer jobs today for good journalists and that people have come to accept all kinds of information in the absence of good journalism.

In journalism school, they taught us our job was to be cynical, to look at it all as circumspect. We learned to ask questions and consider all points of view before we wrote our stories. We believed journalists provided information that was filtered through our shit detectors. Our checklist was who, what, where, when and why, and no story was complete unless we attributed our sources. We stuck to facts and kept our opinions out of the story.

And advertisers had no place in the newsroom. Mr. Bradley, my journalism instructor, had been a managing editor at The Toronto Star. He told us that the Eaton’s department store company, which bought tons of advertising in The Star, called an editor to say a member of the Eaton family was in court for a driving infraction, and that Eaton’s did not want to see a word about it in the paper. The story would have been missed otherwise, but a reporter was sent to the court house and the story appeared on the front page, for no other reason than to show advertisers that they could not influence the news.

Today, I fear that’s changed big time. The wealthy few in society own the networks and news syndicates that bring us our news. These same people own most large corporations. They control the discourse and focus the public perspective. They lure audiences with sensation and leave out the context and in-depth analysis. We should all be concerned about the credibility and agenda of the organizations that bring us the news, and the waning neutrality of the people who write and broadcast news reports, unless, of course, we are aspiring to be North Korea.