Unconventional Wisdom

By Gordon Hopkins Conventional wisdom may be conventional, but it is often not very wise.Last night I headed to Wymore to cover a public meeting in which people complained taxes are too high and State Senator Myron Dorn agreed that taxes are too high and the Superintendent of Southern Schools agreed that taxes are too high. Since everyone was in agreement, it should have been a short meeting. Right? Well, it wasn’t. Nebraskans have more ways to say “My taxes are too high” than Eskimos have for the word, “snow,” so it lasted more than two hours.(I looked it up and it turns out the notion, which I’ve heard since I was a kid, that the Inuit people have 100 different words for “snow” is a myth. Sorry.) However, something else that was said at the meeting caught my attention. One speaker said she didn’t understand why public notices for school board meetings were being published in the Fairbury Journal-News.Rural Nebraska has a problem with what are called “news deserts,” places where there is not meaningful news coverage. When the Wymore Arbor State shuttered, FJN took over covering the southern Gage County area. So, I waited till after the meeting to introduce myself to her and explain that to her.I’ve done a lot of dumb things in my life. This was definitely one of them.I won’t rehash the full conversation because it will just upset me. I do, however, want to quote one bit of conventional wisdom she said to me, “Sorry, but we all know newspapers are dying.”Obviously, I hear this all the time. Let’s parse this statement. “Newspapers are dying” is actually meaningless. There is no such thing as “newspapers.” What she meant was the newspaper industry is dying. That is something that has been repeated over and over until it becomes what we call conventional wisdom, meaning we just sort of accept it as a fact that doesn’t have to be proven. As a journalist, I want proof. I often annoy people, in both my personal and professional capacities, when someone makes a claim and I ask, “What is your source? Where is your proof?” It annoys people because it is another way of asking, “Why do you think that way,” and they can’t always answer because the reason they think that way is conventional wisdom. That a number of newspapers have died over the years is undeniable, but does that mean the industry is dying? How many hospitals have closed their doors over the years, especially in rural areas? Those rural areas without healthcare are called “healthcare deserts.” (Sound familiar?) Yet, nobody ever says, “Healthcare is dying.” Instead, they usually ask what can be done to get healthcare to those areas? Nobody quite knows what to do but everyone agrees something has to be done. Certainly, no one thinks these areas can just do without. That is also conventional wisdom. Maybe we should think about newspapers in the same way. After all, newspapers are also necessary for the health of a nation.

Against The Clock

Fairbury Man Gets One Year for Probation Violation

Related Articles

Are Marshmallow Peeps the New Pumpkin Spice?

Again

Time Marches On (But I Don’t)

The Year of the Fire Horse