Rant time: Newspapers

Up here in New Hampshire, one of the daily pleasures is reading the Manchester Union Leader, the only statewide newspaper.

That's a joke, of course. The Union Leader is known as one of the more reactionary rags in the country. For example, it requires every candidate seeking its endorsement for state-wide office to "take the pledge," meaning they have to agree to oppose any broad-based, state-wide tax - leaving New Hampshire as the only state in the union with no sales or income tax. But this also means it's a lousy place to live if you need help from the government or pay property taxes. Anybody crossing the Union Leader on this issue is almost sure to fail to win the election.

The former long-time publisher, the late William Loeb, was famous for reducing then-Democratic presidential hopeful Edmund Muskie to tears through the paper's attacks on Muskie's wife in 1968. Muskie shortly after that dropped out of the race, which may or may not have been a good thing for the country. But it showed just how mean-spirited and personal Loeb and his paper could be, and typified how it's always gotten under the skin of liberal politicians.

Thursday's paper featured the return of a columnist who had taken a two-year hiatus while serving as the state's Republican party chairman. The topic of his first column was no surprise: he bashed the state's two Democratic US House members for their spending of public dollars. The columnist gave them no chance to defend themselves or respond, and the column read like a cheap partisan attack.

One would think that people like me, who have viewed the Union Leader dimly for decades, would cheer the paper's sliding circulation and ad revenue. But I mean to say exactly the opposite.

The Union Leader has survived all these years because it reflects the views of a lot of people, and has been an important forum for political debates and information-sharing. New Hampshire would be poorer without the Union Leader.

A more unambiguous example of the value of newspapers and the potential public calamity that their folding could bring is the Boston Globe.

The owner of the Globe, the New York Times Company, was talking openly only a few weeks ago about folding the paper, whose annual losses reach into eight figures. But the unions made concessions, and the immediate danger seems to have passed. The value of the Globe was seldom more apparent than this week, when it was filled with stories about the confrontation between a white Cambridge police officer and famous African American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Globe has covered every conceivable angle to this story, from reporting the fact that the cop in question tried and failed to save Celtics star Reggie Lewis' life in the 1980s, to extensive coverage of President Obama's remarks, to a profile of Gates, to columns and editorials that highlight the huge divide on the racially-charged issue.

What other news organization could possibly have filled the Globe's role in this story. Certainly not "Metro," the give-away tabloid that subway riders read. Certainly not talk radio, with its usual shouting and posturing. Certainly no website, which can't afford to pay a stable of journalists who are key to reporting a story like this. The Globe has seriously pulled back on its coverage of the world and of the country, but still seems to have the horsepower to do a good job on a big local story, which newspapers generally view as their last redoubt.

There. That felt good. Almost forgot I had cancer there for a few minutes.