Contrary to The Post's inaction, democracy does indeed die in darkness
These are the days, in the lead-up to the election, that try what's left of our souls
In the spring of 1984, I joined the venerable and motley news crew at the Lake Oswego Review in western Oregon, pictured above. While I was on staff, we covered everything from the shutdown of a nearby paper mill after a workers’ strike to the wedding of Bruce Springsteen to Julianne Phillips. Today, eight days before an election that could change, well, EVERYTHING, I think it appropriate to trot out a snippet from my journalist novel, Sunshine Girl, forthcoming 4/22/25 from Heliotrope Press. In light of The Washington Post’s refusal to publicly get behind a candidate (the newspaper’s staff had an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris ready to go before Bezos killed it), I offer you my character Martin Donovan’s fictitious musings on the importance of courageous journalists and publishers. May we surmount the Post’s dereliction of duty and turn back the “enemy of the people” bleatings of the unserious man who would be king.
An observation by the early twentieth-century journalist A.J. Liebling had always stuck with Martin: “There’s nothing crummier than a one-paper town.” Martin felt this down to his socks because he regularly imagined it might happen—newsroom staffs dwindling, finances tanking, entire newspaper companies shutting down, citizens losing fact-based printed records of their communities. It was, to him, an unfathomable thing, a prescient fear.
The son of a wealthy Manhattan businessman, Liebling was a Dartmouth dropout and Columbia University journalism school student who sailed across the ocean after graduation to study French and, upon his return to the US, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935. By reputation he was an egocentric, bombastic man who earned the right to his opinions during World War II when—as a young reporter doing his newsgathering in battlefield trenches across Europe—he made his professional mark.
Martin supposed he might die young, like Liebling did at fifty-nine and change, but he hoped to do it quietly, without much fanfare. He had no real illusions otherwise, orange juice and towels and extra pillows notwithstanding. It turned out that Liebling’s musings accurately foreshadowed the demise of the American newspaper, as tragic a tale as was ever told. Someone, Martin couldn’t recall who, remarked that on his deathbed Liebling confessed his myopia, his short-sightedness, all the ways he had focused on things he considered, at the time, to be all-encompassing but that turned out in the end not to be important in the least—things like overwork and the push to get ahead and the sumptuous buffets that were undoubtedly part of his undoing. Before he drew his last breath, Martin intended to think about three people: his daughter, his father, and Mina, each of them having taught him, in their own way, about love. Thank God the columnist Colin Donovan was already gone when the Oregon Journal went out of business in 1982, a victim of greed and overreach by wretched, hoary men who knew not what they did. Had he thought he could save the Journal, Colin would have thrown himself on top of the offset press and refused to yield until the great grasping cylinders swallowed him whole and turned his bones to dust, happy to go out that way, a martyr for a noble cause.