Perhaps you have never tried to photograph a pig. I have, so I can tell you that it’s not as easy as you may think if you’re unfamiliar with porcine deportment.
The pig, you see, is likely to turn away, leaving you only a nice visual angle on a future rump roast rather than the preferred view of the pig’s snout and cheeks. Should you ever find yourself in this predicament, you’ll be grateful that you listened today, because here’s how to photograph a pig who is offering you only a rear view: Get somebody to raise a ruckus near the pig’s head, which will prompt the pig to pivot back toward you, so that you can quickly snap your pig portrait. (And you’re welcome!)
I should explain that this is but one of the many handy lessons I learned as a newspaper reporting intern years ago, in this case on a day when I was dispatched to a rural Indiana county fair so that my little paper could spread the local fame of the youngsters who had raised the county’s 4-H grand champion and reserve champion pigs. I got the lambs and calves, too, though by then I had grasped the first lesson of farmland photojournalism – namely, if you want your livestock photo to make the front page, don’t settle for a butt shot. (Also, by the way, if you’re shooting the top rabbit, it must be in the kid’s arms. Cute, right?)
The little Corn Belt newspaper where I covered the county fair — and the Little League season, and the fire department pancake breakfast — is still being published, but it’s a weekly now, not a daily. Still, it’s in a lucky community, because thousands of newspapers have disappeared altogether in recent years – victims of the digital revolution and excessive debt by newspaper chains –and hundreds more have been diminished to so-called “ghost newspapers,” which offer little more than a local nameplate and a few relevant articles created in another newsroom miles away. One-third of the newspapers that were published in the U.S. in 2005 are now gone, and they’re closing at a rate of two per week.
Plus, Americans are paying less attention to the news now than they used to: Pew Research reports that the percentage of Americans who say they follow the news only “now and then” or “hardly ever” rose by almost two-thirds, to 28 percent, in just the last six years. So the share of our neighbors likely to know what’s going on beyond their own line of sight is smaller than it was in the more congenial era of the 20th century.
The Digital Age has not presented a successor to the community newspaper. There’s not enough ad revenue to support local news websites, generally, and the digital giants that gobble up that revenue don’t care about your local community.
Maybe you think I’m just nostalgic because I spent most of my career as a newspaper editor. But I’m talking about this today because I’m convinced that the decline of community journalism – the loss of those little papers, like where I started in Jasper County, Indiana – is both a cause and a reflection of the disintegration of America’s social fabric. And that, I’d argue, is why some of the outrageous behavior of political leaders draws little more than a shrug from otherwise decent people.
That is, the enfeeblement of local media is a key contributor to the decline of the American community – and that is part and parcel of the rise of incivility across the country. Donald Trump has amplified this incivility virus, to become both its avatar and the cause of its emergence as a crisis.
This is not about consorting with a porn star. No previous generation would have tolerated a presidential candidate who characterized both his political opponents and recent immigrants as “vermin” – as Trump did, using the same term Adolf Hitler used to denigrate Jews as not worthy of human consideration. Nor would any previous president have suggested, as Trump did, that a retired four-star general should be executed for seeming to have criticized him. And if he’s back in the White House and his political foes are gaining on him, Trump says, he’d just tell the Justice Department to indict them. That’d take care of that.
How can any patriotic American find such nastiness and antidemocratic behavior acceptable? Maybe they just don’t know about it – since, after all, Fox News and its right-wing imitators don’t air anything unfavorable to Trump. But in an earlier time, even people who didn’t seek out political news might have stumbled across it in their local newspaper — maybe as they were looking for the photos of their kid’s Little League team, like all those that I shot one summer at my little newspaper in Indiana.
That serendipitous mix of content gave community newspapers a presumption of credibility. The reporters and editors at a local publication featuring photos of Little League teams, and fire department pancake breakfasts and 4-H winners at county fairs seemed to most readers unlikely to be “enemies of the people,” as Donald Trump memorably describes journalists, in another echo of a tyrant – Joseph Stalin, in this case.
Our communities are poorer for the loss of these outlets, and our politics more brutal. The heyday of community newspapers is past, and with its passage we have lost a bit of the glue that has held our society together.
My lesson in how to photograph a champion pig, then, is probably of little use to you, or anyone else. Chalk it up as another change wrought by the Digital Age. We can only hope that a new era of civility may somehow emerge – though with polling suggesting that Donald Trump could be returned to the White House, what I’m imagining may only happen when pigs fly. And I don’t have any tips on how to get a good picture of that.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.