Do you remember standing in supermarket check-out lines and on the side just before the conveyor was a magazine rack with everything from Reader’s Digest and Time to the latest Hollywood scandal rags and, my personal favorite, always in black and white, the Weekly World News (WWN)?
You could always count on the WWN to have a picture of a UFO landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier on the cover and inside would be a recurring favorite, the Legendary Bat Boy, meeting H. Ross Perot or shaking hands with a still very-much-alive Elvis Presley.
It was an extraordinary newspaper/magazine (I never really figured out which) chock full of ‘you’ve got to be kidding’ reporting that would have put McGuffey Readers to shame and about the only thing in it that was legitimate, I suspect, were the little tiny ads mostly for products that were shipped to the recipient in plain brown wrappers (and the ads often highlighted that point).
Always on page three was the only person who ever got a byline, their star columnist, Ed Anger. His catchphrase when writing about things that angered him was “I’m pig-biting mad!” That was a visual I really could never quite see but knew when he used it he was really mad about something.
The Weekly World News was totally phony. We just didn’t call it that (which would’ve made Ed, well, you can already guess what it would have made him). Long before former President and future convicted felon Donald Trump called all reporting with which he disagreed ‘fake news,' the Weekly World News was all of that and more. And since he put the phrase in play, it’s been bandied about like a shuttlecock at a badminton tournament, with all sides taking turns using it.
I started thinking about Ed and the gang at WWN when re-reading a pair of articles I’ve been saving about how we here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs gather the information we need and use on a daily basis about our local community, our nation and the world at large.
The research isn’t fresh out of the oven, but still rings painfully true. From a Poynter article of two years ago, “US Ranks Last Among 46 Countries in Trust in Media,” and Gallup's “Media Confidence Ratings at Record Lows,” from this time a year ago, it seems many of us have decided to not trust the messenger or the message.
I don’t know about television, but local newspapers struggle to make ends meet even as advertising dollars disappear, and newsrooms shrink. Stop on any social media platform and look at readers’ comments on stories and soon, you, too, will be pig-biting mad, if not saddened to tears by people complaining they can’t read the posted article because they don’t have a subscription, ‘and I don’t see why I should have to pay;’ readers who have friends who gave them the ‘real story and it’s not like what’s in the newspaper,’ and those who just don’t like the story and pronounce it ‘fake news.’
When I first subscribed to The Bulletin the daily circulation was about 35,000. I don’t know what it is now, but I’ll bet that number is no longer valid. Leading me to wonder, if local newspapers are our windows to the world, what are we looking through right now, and what are we looking at? Leading me to ask: do you have a newspaper subscription? If yes, thank you. If not, why?
-bill kenny
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