CREEDE HINSHAW: Not gonna fade away

David Smith, 73, owner of the Sinclair Group, an influential nationwide chain of local television stations, was recently quoted (Wall Street Journal Jan 20, 2024) as having said, “The print media is so left-wing as to be meaningless dribble, which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away.” The man who expects newspapers to disappear has just purchased the Baltimore Sun.

Mr. Smith’s shallow, cynical accusation proves that liberals have no monopoly on slanted bombast. I have no idea what might be the editorial slant of the Baltimore Sun, but I suspect this deeply conservative entrepreneur will strive mightily to move the paper farther to the right.

Mr. Smith, far from being prophetic, is one more in a long line of people who have made spectacularly erroneous predictions about the demise of print journalism.

Printing, print journalism and religion have been linked for centuries and will continue. Liberals, conservatives, and folk in between, though relying more heavily on electronic journalism, will not soon abandon the print medium. There are plenty of creative, committed, modern versions of people like John Calvin, Martin Luther, Erasmus, John Wesley, and Isaac Watts who are employing the power of the printed word.

Contrary to Mr. Smith’s sullen sneer, the printed word — real ink on real paper — will not fade away any time soon any more than Williama Tyndale’s opponents in the English Church failed to stop the printing of his translation of the Bible.

My life has been meaningfully, wonderfully shaped by print journalism from as long as I can recall. At our breakfast table in the 1950s I can remember my father propping the morning Indianapolis Star on an aluminum tripod designed specifically to allow a reader to turn the pages while eating breakfast. I was a paperboy for that same newspaper for four years in the ’60s. So, I admit to being ardent when it comes to print.

My life has been shaped by the printed religious word. Yes, electronic media now has the primary role. In my first church (late 1970s), I typed the church bulletin on a stencil, attached it to a mimeograph machine, and took 200 copies to the post office weekly for mailing. My own mailbox in those days was filled with dozens of church bulletins. Now, mailed church bulletins are almost extinct.

Huey Lewis and the News, referring to rock and roll, famously sang, “The old man may be barely breathing, but the heart of rock and roll is still beating.” This is true of print journalism in relationship to religion. Death is not immanent.

It is too easy to predict the death of print. Just this past week Sports Illustrated laid off dozens of employees. But electronic media is no cure-all, either. The Next Big Thing often evaporates not long after the trumpets sound. Print has weathered much; it’s here to stay.

As far as Smith’s charge that newsprint is “meaningless dribble,” perhaps he was inadvertently describing his own opinions.