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| Decomposition at The Camera |
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| our local paper is no longer even local |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, January 14, 1998. It is, really, disconcerting to see that the new owners of the Daily Camera, which is to say the same people who own and run the Rocky Mountain News, have inflicted their attitudes so quickly and annoyingly on Boulder’s largest newspaper. I mention this because this week a newspaper in Boulder featured as its primary editorial a puff piece about the Denver Broncos, a move so repulsive and so badly done that only a genuine idiot - which is to say, a Denver radio sports show host - could have approved. It is here that the line is crossed, and Boulder does not have a paper anymore, and if this sort of thing continues, admits it has officially become a merely a metro suburb. Understand, now, that it was hard to credit the Daily Camera with exact representation of the populace to which it has traditionally pandered. Recall the episode of a few years back where an aging editor hired a Sports Illustrated writer to do a column about Boulder. The writer’s insight was supposedly based upon the fact he lived in Boulder, and wrote for a national magazine, and was sort of famous. The Camera announced his imminent arrival as if Dave Barry had moved to Martin Acres and was going to do a specific weekly column about us. Marvelous, wonderful us. In the event, the writer was revealed to be clueless about the city, and not given to spending much time writing for such a small audience. Within a month or two, the editor and writer had parted on bad terms and we had an episode fully in keeping with that of Buddy Boulder, a character who - if you recall- needs no further puffing as an illustrative example. If you don’t recall, you are fortunate. The editorial about the Broncos was as icky a case of Rotary-Kiwanis-Realtor boosterism as anything to be read in a Denver paper. It found the team to be motivated, driven, destined. It did not find the team to be racially divided, elitist, owned. It somehow ignored the fact that nobody profits from extended seasonal play of professional sports teams more than the local media, a conflict of interest that never receives the attention it should from our heroic graduates of journalism school. It posed as an objective source of information rather than its status as a ramora on the superficial fame of temporarily local athletes. It was simply nauseating. And, I believe, somewhat unprecedented. I can recall numerous editorials about the local college teams and rah-rah pieces about the attainments of Boulder athletes, all of which are irritating in their way, but I do not recall such a blind step into the pretend world of professional sports, where baseball players hit homers for the dying, football players suit up for games despite the recent death of a parent because “Dad would have wanted it” rather than that penalty clause in the contract, and America all of a sudden embraces Canadian hockey, only coincidentally because it is still primarily a white sport, like auto racing and Bridge. In this pretend world, newspapers would have us believe that a local business represents the community to the national gaze, although rarely do the players, owners, or the money supporting either emerge locally. Hitherto, Boulder’s papers had offered up congratulatory paragraphs to the teams that won championships. This was different. It had the clear stigmata of condescension, talking down to the masses writhing in orange and blue. It was boilerplate balderdash, fully capable of being offered with changed names in any city. It is to be noticed only for this reason. Few Boulderites ever took the Daily Camera seriously, any more than a king really values his jesters. For years, the local kiss of death has been to receive the Camera’s endorsement on political issues, and only when the Camera notices a trend can its tombstone be predated to the previous month. But it tried. This silliness was written by someone with no great regard or respect for its readers. When you see editorials like that, the green white flesh of decomposition can be noticed on the term local newspaper. I note its passing, and despite my ongoing war against the stupidity, connivance, and cowardice that characterized the Daily Camera in the last two decades, I am saddened. |
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