The Words of Others Speak Volumes

Mr. Jim Sack, is well known in the circles of City politics, media and the community in general.

Below is a Facebook post from Mr. Sack who has graciously allowed the Maven to repost it here:

Fort Wayne is a media desert.

What's left of the once celebrated Journal-Gazette is a skeleton of a few brave writers bailing to save their sinking ship.

The TV stations hire young adults with little or no experience to deliver the news and information Jefferson once said was fundamental to an informed electorate and a healthy democracy.

The public radio station is rip and read journalism, drawing on the dwindling source of information in the Journal, supplementing it with short, superficial reports from around the state.

The commercial radio stations are owned by arch conservatives who think Trump is brilliant, and want you to think so, too.

A friend in Berlin, a brilliant man, help point all this out to me. He saw the FW story of the pretty young mechanic at a certain Honda dealerships who was fired for using her private time to supplement her income. Fort Wayne is a media desert where the news rooms are the vassals of the sales department. Mack Berry, a once splendid reporter, at a variety of stations, including WPTA, would testify that if you cross a sponsor, say a certain Honda dealership, regardless of the truth, you lose your job. He is not alone in the history of Fort Wayne news.

Sales is what the C-Suite at the JG and distant owners of our local TVs slums think about first. News is merely the bait in the water to get you to watch their cavalcade of used car hucksters, or the perky mattress hustlers, or some other tasteless loudmouth touting their flimsy wares. The stations are not here to examine critical matters before our community, just to sell you soap or cars or cardboard furniture, and to send the profits to the home office.

As for the JG, it is so close to death that the C-Suite fears angering anyone, thus informing anyone. The few real JG reporters and writers look increasingly like the last stand, abandoned by their management like a Spad tailspinning toward the trenches. But, at least those journalists try, and try valiantly, but the same can't be said of the TVs reporters who serve up thin gruel for news, nor for the radios who are in the active business of selling lies.

For Wayne is a media dessert where good reporters have gone to work in PR. It is a shame. We depend on the paper and the TVs to better understand what is happening, good and bad, in our community. They are failing us miserably.