Fish guts. What do I do with these fish guts? I don’t want to run them down the garbage disposal — I have a septic tank. So they have to go into the garbage, but oh woe is me. There isn’t any newspaper to wrap them in. What has happened to America? What has happened? No more newspaper to wrap fish guts in.
Ol’ English Fish and Chips, Inglewood California, 1974. Lunch time, an hour off. I worked at Inglewood Physical Therapy on Locust Street and would walk over for fast food — Ol’ English Fish and Chips, wonderful cod and french fries wrapped in fake newsprint. So good. So much better than some fast food burger. Gone now, but the memories aren’t.
Corvallis, late seventies. Walk over to the local market for a counter lunch, find a newspaper someone left waiting for me. Headlines that told what happened nationally and what the Beavers did. Good stuff, even if it was a week old.
Growing up, Mom and Dad always had the daily paper delivered. In Manhattan Beach it was the Daily Breeze and the Los Angeles Times. Wherever we lived, it was local and regional and national. That’s where we got the news — and it was the news. If you wanted an opinion, you went to the editorial page. There you read the partisan slant. If the publisher was conservative, that’s where the slant went. The front page was holy ground for the NEWS.
The best part was you didn’t throw it away that day. You saved them up for the school kid with the fundraising paper drive. What we didn’t realize at the time was that we had accidentally built an archive. You didn’t have to go to the library to look something up — you had a six month to one year record already sitting in your garage, in order, except for the few sheets that had wrapped the fish guts. And those were probably the classified ads anyway.
Try finding an article posted five minutes ago if you’re not subscribed to that thread. And even if you are, good luck.
What has really happened is we changed from printing and distributing the news — news that if found incorrect would have a redaction printed, visibly, permanently, for everyone to see — to online content that can be quietly edited into something else entirely, or simply deleted, with no trace and no accountability. Never before has the phrase Buyer Beware been so important. And most critically, we aren’t even paying for it. It’s being force fed to us, customized by an algorithm we can’t see, shaped by a bias we can’t find on any editorial page.
The newspapers had their editorial page and they had something else — Letters to the Editor. Online publications have those as well, technically. Try finding them though. Try submitting something. I have. But newspapers were more open and honest about it. If they made a mistake, they owned up to it. Sometimes on their own. Integrity was important. A reporter’s reputation was his livelihood. Nobody buys a Timex watch on an outboard motor’s prop from someone they didn’t trust. Who in mainstream media do you trust today?
The point I am really trying to make — even with the podcasters you trust, the Substack authors you trust, the elephantsinkroom.com you trust — we have a limited audience. We keep talking to the same people, over and over. The share button only shares to the same platform, the same followers, the same converted.
We hope you are spreading the word. Because what we say isn’t being left on the lunch counter anymore. It isn’t sitting in the news rack on the street corner. It isn’t landing on your doorstep to be read by whoever picks it up. If it were printed you could share it — hand it to someone, leave it somewhere, let it find a stranger. That would be better than forwarding it to someone who already agrees, or just deleting it.
Newspapers died an unwarranted death.
Oh, I would love a basket of Ol’ English Fish and Chips with a bottle of malt vinegar right now.
On a side note — some people wear baseball caps, cowboy hats, no hats at all. Last year I started wearing the classic newsboy cap. Go figure. Does look good with the grey and white hair though.
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