The owners of our daily paper care more about their own tax rates than they care about our lives -- and they're using their reporters as human shields. Let's fight back.
I don't wish to boycott businesses in Riverpark Square, etc., because it will hurt the people who work there, just like the reporters at the paper. However, I like the idea of hitting the outlets by getting ahold of their advertisers and expressing dismay and unwillingness to purchase things that are advertised on those outlets. That covers TV ads, etc. It's more work for us, but it can hopefully put pressure on them to pressure Cowles and skip over their own staff impact. Any ideas, folks?
I have an image that popped into my head during the health care debate in 2009/10; it keeps returning when I think about the almost impossible heavy lifting we must do to orchestrate social and economic change.
I remembered a cartoon I had watched as a kid. A hapless peasant presents himself before a castle door that stretches to the clouds. He knocks. From high above a peephole opens and a head pops out. “Yes?,” asks the head. “I want to see the king,” the peasant demands. “Go away,” replies the head, which disappears, and the peephole snaps shut. In true cartoon form the peasant eventually outsmarts the gatekeepers and gains access.
In my image I am the peasant knocking on the door of the health care industry, they laugh in my face, and slam the door. I return with 10 of my friends: same result. I persist with a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands, several million, finally presentIng a sufficient obstacle, and get a seat at the table. I truly believe we cannot get a seat at the table unless we pose a serious, credible existential threat to power. Denying economic nourishment is one such threat.
Economic boycotts are tricky. I have a list of businesses, or types of businesses I do my best to avoid, for various reasons. I am just one individual, but what if several thousand of us gang up on a business we decide has offended us; does our boycott impact the ability of a low skilled minimum wage worker to earn a living just because we don’t want our dollars to end up in the hands of a wealthy person/corporation we deem unworthy?
By asking us to maintain a subscription to the Spokesman, and instead seek to punish other Cowles enterprises, are you asking me to place greater value on the journalist over the kid working the register in the mall? The Spokesman, through Cowles, is the guilty party here.
Personally, I stopped reading the Spokesman in 2018 after they (he) chose McMorris-Rodgers over Lisa Brown: un-effing-acceptable. My wife carries a subscription, so it still digitally makes its way into our house, and I do take a peek once or twice per month. But, Mr Cowles’ news paper will never again get my time and attention
Luke- Short of cancelling our subscriptions, I appreciate that you offer ways that we can impact the Cowles media monopoly. In these days of rage and outrage, the personal default can be a depressing paralysis. That said, as you astutely observe, the first to be impacted will "America's New Class," workers who are "expendable" (Atlantic Monthly). Perhaps paradox can more virulently destabilize civilizations than a virus?
Journalists are indispensable to a healthy democracy in "normal" times; during this pandemic they are "essential workers." Ominously Orwellian that Trump appropriates Stalinist agitprop referring to the fourth estate as "enemies of the people." To parse Sinclair Lewis, not only can it happen here but it is happening here.
I concur generally with Jess Walter's and your assessments of the rationalizations employed by Cowles to justify the endorsement of Trump. To add, I speculate that there may be substantive fear on the part of the publisher that a more rational endorsement of Biden might incite some on the paramilitary right to engage in intimidation or worse against the S-R similar to the Nazis tactics used against the Weimar press in 1920's/early 1930's Germany. This is not to excuse or to provide a rationalization for the Trump endorsement but to be reminded that the fear of such reprisals, whether real or hyperbole, permeate the present U.S. body politic.
And (apologies for the cliche), that is why more than ever we need now to speak and act as an antidote to this pervasive ignorance and fear. Thank you for providing this venue.
Don’t unsubscribe based sheerly on principle but consider the economic impact on the journalists underneath the empire... but voting based sheerly on the economy and it’s effects on your own pocketbook is unimaginable and loathsome. Did I get that right?
I've seen nothing but violence and ineptitude from the left while the President has kept us out of wars with Iran and North Korea and is pushing China back from taking over Taiwan. Of course I'm voting for Trump.
I don't wish to boycott businesses in Riverpark Square, etc., because it will hurt the people who work there, just like the reporters at the paper. However, I like the idea of hitting the outlets by getting ahold of their advertisers and expressing dismay and unwillingness to purchase things that are advertised on those outlets. That covers TV ads, etc. It's more work for us, but it can hopefully put pressure on them to pressure Cowles and skip over their own staff impact. Any ideas, folks?
I have an image that popped into my head during the health care debate in 2009/10; it keeps returning when I think about the almost impossible heavy lifting we must do to orchestrate social and economic change.
I remembered a cartoon I had watched as a kid. A hapless peasant presents himself before a castle door that stretches to the clouds. He knocks. From high above a peephole opens and a head pops out. “Yes?,” asks the head. “I want to see the king,” the peasant demands. “Go away,” replies the head, which disappears, and the peephole snaps shut. In true cartoon form the peasant eventually outsmarts the gatekeepers and gains access.
In my image I am the peasant knocking on the door of the health care industry, they laugh in my face, and slam the door. I return with 10 of my friends: same result. I persist with a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousands, several million, finally presentIng a sufficient obstacle, and get a seat at the table. I truly believe we cannot get a seat at the table unless we pose a serious, credible existential threat to power. Denying economic nourishment is one such threat.
Economic boycotts are tricky. I have a list of businesses, or types of businesses I do my best to avoid, for various reasons. I am just one individual, but what if several thousand of us gang up on a business we decide has offended us; does our boycott impact the ability of a low skilled minimum wage worker to earn a living just because we don’t want our dollars to end up in the hands of a wealthy person/corporation we deem unworthy?
By asking us to maintain a subscription to the Spokesman, and instead seek to punish other Cowles enterprises, are you asking me to place greater value on the journalist over the kid working the register in the mall? The Spokesman, through Cowles, is the guilty party here.
Personally, I stopped reading the Spokesman in 2018 after they (he) chose McMorris-Rodgers over Lisa Brown: un-effing-acceptable. My wife carries a subscription, so it still digitally makes its way into our house, and I do take a peek once or twice per month. But, Mr Cowles’ news paper will never again get my time and attention
Luke- Short of cancelling our subscriptions, I appreciate that you offer ways that we can impact the Cowles media monopoly. In these days of rage and outrage, the personal default can be a depressing paralysis. That said, as you astutely observe, the first to be impacted will "America's New Class," workers who are "expendable" (Atlantic Monthly). Perhaps paradox can more virulently destabilize civilizations than a virus?
Journalists are indispensable to a healthy democracy in "normal" times; during this pandemic they are "essential workers." Ominously Orwellian that Trump appropriates Stalinist agitprop referring to the fourth estate as "enemies of the people." To parse Sinclair Lewis, not only can it happen here but it is happening here.
I concur generally with Jess Walter's and your assessments of the rationalizations employed by Cowles to justify the endorsement of Trump. To add, I speculate that there may be substantive fear on the part of the publisher that a more rational endorsement of Biden might incite some on the paramilitary right to engage in intimidation or worse against the S-R similar to the Nazis tactics used against the Weimar press in 1920's/early 1930's Germany. This is not to excuse or to provide a rationalization for the Trump endorsement but to be reminded that the fear of such reprisals, whether real or hyperbole, permeate the present U.S. body politic.
And (apologies for the cliche), that is why more than ever we need now to speak and act as an antidote to this pervasive ignorance and fear. Thank you for providing this venue.
John Hagney
Don’t unsubscribe based sheerly on principle but consider the economic impact on the journalists underneath the empire... but voting based sheerly on the economy and it’s effects on your own pocketbook is unimaginable and loathsome. Did I get that right?
I've seen nothing but violence and ineptitude from the left while the President has kept us out of wars with Iran and North Korea and is pushing China back from taking over Taiwan. Of course I'm voting for Trump.