When the winds drift eastward, I like to sit on windowsills at Revive Café, my Owl’s Eye ever alert. What luck to find a cheerful cooking class going on in one room, while energetic Athenians talked away over coffee nearby. One particular discussion will remain with me.

One fellow said, “The power of local reporting? My Spanish professor fled Argentina when the newspaper has father wrote for, “La Opinion,” fell afoul of their former military dictatorship. Dictators know the power of the press. They abducted people from La Opinion to get the paper back in line.”

We Athenians, through our own paper’s last 150 years, have lived through a whirlwind of changes. Our paper grew with the country, and with the ethical norms of journalism which developed along with it. Think back. “Yellow Journalism,” which employed lies, distortions, gaudy pictures, violence, and sex, is largely a legacy of the Spanish-American War. Publisher William Randolph Hearst said to his artist at that battle front in Cuba, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” Newspapers in those days were highly partisan. They mixed news with opinion, causing people to believe whatever the shocking, suggestive headline, the tainted essay, or the blood-drenched picture would allow. One shocking artist’s picture from back then showed a naked American woman being ‘inspected’ by leering Spanish officials. A lie, but a good way to start war venom flowing.

Local reporting today depends on trust. Papers today are expected to be transparent. They’re expected to tell the whole story, not selected cuts which reek of Yellow Journalism.

Local reporting is not where you go for your international affairs and war coverage. But local people and events are impacted by, and impact, such things. Look around at the people we elect to local offices. They may appear in later life in the Halls of the US Congress. Should we not keep a watchful eye on what they do now? Some should never leave for higher office, if a free and honest press discovers something damaging about them today. Awards for journalism were given out recently to revelations by one local paper that scams and schemes of roadside ticketing bankrolled an entire town’s officials and staff. Truth needs to be shared. Of course, as Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And he said that before the internet!

Another, infinitely valuable aspect of local reporting is what the News-Courier doesn’t have. We don’t have to check in with the government for permission to run a story. That’s independence. A free press is why our Radio Free Europe came about after World War II. Millions of people in Soviet Eastern Europe were being lied to constantly, professionally, and endlessly. Stalin then, and Putin’s current censors now even tell the people what to call their war in Ukraine. They comply or head to jail. America’s press in the last 150 years has largely learned instead to encourage balanced, uncensored news, and responsible broad discussion.

Balanced reporting doesn’t mean neutrality regarding the truth. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and his Big Lie about a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany was long a success. Why? Because average, good people couldn’t imagine someone lying constantly, despite contradictory, accessible, unqualified truth. That truth was in the newspapers and fair courts. That’s why every dictator wants to control the press, and put their party hacks on courts. A free local press must adhere to honest reporting, to call out lies. A free press gives an honest man a chance to see through lies, big or little. A free press values protecting our system of government over party, race, or financial privilege.

Local papers must correct errors as soon as they are discovered. And that includes the paper itself. If you misprint mom’s name in an obituary, calls aplenty can descend. If a city councilman says something at odds with his previous statements, that’s where good investigative reporting can help clarify.

An investigative report is not like a heat seeking missile sent to eliminate a threat. Rather, it delves deeply into a subject, discovering the facts and reporting them. Imagine the power of that. Today, American journalists sit in Russian jails accused of “espionage” because they attempted to get a full background story, not just some handout from a Russian government toady. When you read factually correct stories, know that often the writer is subject to harassment, jail, and often worse. Not here.

Here a respected professional journalist must adhere to the truth, or correct error once discovered. Best to adhere to a conversation I sat in on in the former East Germany at the end of the Cold War. (One of my first Owlish experiences.) A Christian surgeon and his childhood friend, a Communist party member, met weekly for coffee near their East German train station. After only weeks of a free press since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Communist said, “You know my friend, a lot has changed here. I now know you were right, and I was wrong.”

Calm, moderately presented, honest reporting in a humane, respectful press won the day.