The Dec. 19 Port Townsend Leader editorial claiming online news or news that is thinly covered is somehow suspect does a disservice to journalism. It invites censorship and betrays the establishment media’s greatest power: the power to ignore. News organizations make decisions every day about what they do not want people to know, and these decisions are often rooted in their underlying biases.

In truth, newspapers have a history of bestowing their highest award for made-up news. Washington Post writer Janet Cooke resigned after confessing that an 8-year-old heroin addict featured in her 1980 story that won a Pulitzer Prize did not exist.

New York Times writer Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer in 1932 for his flattering coverage of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, but historians fault him for trying to cover up the Soviet famine that killed millions of people. Duranty went so far as to attack journalists for reporting on the famine, offering a dark prelude to the Leader’s editorial warning, “If no one else is covering it, it’s probably suspect.”

America’s oldest news medium is the newspaper, but being venerable does not mean being valuable. Two Pew Research Center studies show that, among adults, newspapers are now the least used of all news media, with circulation and advertising revenues dropping precipitously. The reasons for this vary, but they ultimately boil down to credibility and whether newspapers adapt to an evolving business landscape.

The product of any news organization is not what they report. It is you and me, the audience they provide advertisers. Newspapers succeed not by denouncing emerging news platforms but by producing a product — an audience — worthy of investment by advertisers. The sooner newspapers understand this and adapt to the industry’s shifting environment, the sooner they can attend to their survival.

SCOTT HOGENSON
Port Ludlow