A Loss of Trust

Since July 2006, when the News Press Mess began with the departure of several editors and columnists, an exodus that has taken about 40 newsroom employees, including reporters, editors, and columnists, we who live in Santa Barbara have been without a reliable daily news source. There are several good blogs, web sites, a fledgling daily (m-f) and a couple of weekly papers. Still, nothing like once was.
Now the NP still gets published, but it has little local news, and what's there is automatically suspect. When it recently ran an unsigned article essentially accusing former editor Jerry Roberts of downloading child -porn it had hit a new low. I did see, but haven't read the whole thing, a "clarification" published today. But a clarification isn't a retraction.
Well, in today's LA Times, which I've turned to for my news, Lou Cannon, a respected newsman and Reagan biographer, as well as a Santa Barbara resident, pens an op-ed piece looking into this travesty (actually we could cal it a "travisty" after the poisoned pen editorial page editor of the NP, as many have).
Cannon rehearses the events that have transpired since that day in July till now, shares the story of the News Press's greatest moment -- it's Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for an editorial exposing and decrying the foul work of the John Birch Society. That paper is gone. So small has the reporting staff gotten that city hall hardly gets covered.
Cannon writes in conclusion:

But what has been truly lost in Santa Barbara during the last 10 months cannot be quantified. For decades after Storke stood up against the John Birch Society, the Santa Barbara News-Press under different owners provided a forum for diverse points of view and earned the community's trust. That trust is now gone, and with it one of the most vital aspects of life in Santa Barbara. It's a sad story.

I agree, it is a sad story of a paper that went from being a trusted organ of communication within the community to poor shadow of itself, one that no-one dare trust.

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