Pete Golis, Spokesperson

No one I know in my children's generation reads a newspaper or watches CBS News.
They get their news from the net and Jon Stewart. You can tell them than no one fact-checks the net, and they will tell you that no one fact-checks the newspapers. The days when newspapers were careful about what they printed are long gone. The NY Times took us into a war against Iraq while verifying nothing.

One thing young people don't like about a newspaper is that it is top-down in approach. Some wise man writes a column and tells you what to think. In turn you can write a letter-to-the editor that will probably be shortened, changed or (most likely) not published. Instead, trying to stir up readership, the paper will publish a letter from some nutter calling for the return of slavery.

Newspapers are not interactive.

Pete Golis, in many ways the political decider at the Press-Democrat in Santa Rosa, had a column in the Sunday paper (June 21, 2009) in which he mocked environmental activists for turning out in large numbers and changing the minds of the Board of Supervisors about a proposed new asphalt plant. They now seem likely to oppose the plant. Golis doesn't like that, of course. He's employed by a corporation and has devoted his working life to speaking out bravely on behalf of corporate interests. What is odd, in fact breathtaking, is that Golis goes on to chastise local people for caring about a new asphalt plant when they should care more about climate change, the current depression, health care and so on.

My guess is that local people do care about the asphalt plant, health care, climate change and the current depression. The local issue (asphalt plant) is the only one that local people can have much impact on. Look--polls show that the American people support a single payer system for health care, but that could not matter less. Our elected representatives, who will decide the matter, run for office with money from hugely profitable health care corporations. Most of the representatives could not care less what voters in Petaluma want. For heath care reform, we have to rely on a few progressives, Henry Waxman, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy. Individual American voters have little impact on the health care issue. But locals can, perhaps, stop a new asphalt plant from being built.

Of course Pete Golis and the man who cuts his check will be irrate.