While growing up in a working-class town in New Jersey, my family took the morning and evening newspapers, the latter of which I dutifully delivered to the houses in my tangled neighborhood and along the two main thoroughfares that tucked us all in.
When I’d get home from school, there’d be a mountain of bundled papers waiting for me on the curb. I’d sigh, roll ‘em up, wrap ‘em in a rubber band, pile ‘em in a Santa-like sack, hop on my bike, and sling ‘em in the vicinity of people’s porches. I had more than a few “uh-oh” moments when a paper would get away from me and head straight for a window, or a subscriber’s unsuspecting flower pot.
That’s what mass-communicating looked like back in the 1960s and 70s.
After some above-averagely rambunctious teenage years, and too many classrooms I could never settle into, I served in the U.S. Navy, and was honorably discharged to start living my dream: getting a byline in one of those newspapers I used to sling about. I went on to work at five dailies, one weekly, and two magazines during the greatest, luckiest, and most fulfilling career any man has ever had doing anything.
You know, my friends, I reckon the terrible decline in local newspapers has had a direct impact on the increasing ignorance, propaganda and misinformation in today’s America. You can draw a direct line from the end of our daily newspapers’ heyday, to the beginning of the fascism that is pouring over us like orange, contaminated syrup.
Gone are the days when eager journalists were everywhere that you couldn’t be reporting on what was happening in our communities, and calling power into account in our local courts, police stations, schools boards, sports venues, city halls, and state houses.
These days, most of our towns in this faltering country don’t have a daily newspaper, and there is no way they are any better for it. Too many public officials are now free to rob us blind in private.
Today we have the Internet, and I’ve consistently argued we haven’t come close to reckoning with the tidal wave of change it has wrought on society. Some of it has no doubt been good, but I’m confident as hell I could have lived very happily without it.
I am reminded of this every time I see an idiot crossing a busy street looking at God knows what on their stupid phone. Yet here I am typing to you in God knows where because of that Internet I am currently bellyaching about …
I’ll be honest with you: When I started writing urgently following one of the most tragic days in American history, Nov. 8, 2016, I had no plans for where any of it would end up. It was simply therapy, and a release of the madness crawling around inside my head, as I tried to make sense of a country and a people I all of a sudden didn’t recognize anymore.
Who could vote for such an obviously grotesque man to lead the United States of America?
I guess I had no idea how many people thought so damn little of their country.
For the first time in my life I was not professionally tied to any single publication, and free to write what I wanted. Words are all I have ever known since I was first published in 1983, so I started pouring my heart out on an Internet that I didn’t trust.
After all that writing, I had a book, three basketfuls worth of columns and a need for a respectable place to hang my jacket and my words. So three-plus years ago, I decided to make Substack home, and I am happy as hell I did.
As many of you are aware, Trump and his lying, subservient Republican Orcs are in a war against the truth, and trying to crush anybody who dares report it. On Sunday, CBS News once again fell at the orange fascist’s fat little feet and spiked a story that was set to run on the once-venerable 60 Minutes news program, about the “the brutal and tortuous conditions” of his detention camps .
This was only the latest surrender by our diminishing legacy media to the convicted felon who attacked us on January 6, 2021.
The media I gave my professional life to is under attack and dying right in front of our eyes, so it is surprising and gratifying as hell for an old, broken down journalist to help breathe life into something new.
Places like Substack are the present in a world where the future comes at us too fast, and we should all do our best to support the tremendous work being done by independent journalists to inform and call power into account.
As a reader first, and a writer second, I know that the written word has staying power, and I like it just fine on paper, or one of these screens.
I am a fiercely independent SOB, and a one-man gang. I don’t collaborate with anybody, because I can’t live with letting anybody down but myself. I spent decades living on somebody else’s deadline. Now I set my own clock. It’s incredible how freeing that is.
I don’t do podcasts, and you won’t see my pretty face streaming live, taped, on the cloud, on a mountain, or anyplace there is some camera.
I learned a long time ago I’m just not made for that.
I co-hosted a TV show in the 1990s, and absolutely hated it. The show came first, and any substance second. That’ll read a little haughty, but it was the truth. So I stayed with the written word, which might explain why money never stayed around me for long.
I have my sources, integrity, but mostly … you.
I was taught working at all those newspapers that readers are pure gold, and owed everything you got. You are the reason I am here, folks, and I hope like hell that comes through in my writing.
These are some tough, soul-sucking, lonely and scary times we are living in, and community has never been more important. Thanks to this Internet I don’t trust I am able to connect with people like you I do trust all over the world, and that’s pretty cool.
Your readership and camaraderie helps keep me sane and hopeful. Your paid support means everything, and helps to deal with the never-ending bills that only increase with age, because America has decided older people aren’t worth as much as they are owed.
As I put a holiday bow on this piece, it has occurred to me that I started my life slinging words at people’s doorsteps, and I’m now on my way to ending it by slinging words into a computer and along an invisible information highway.
Such discovery …
Such a wonderful life …
Happy holidays, good people. I have a journalist’s hunch that 2026 is going to be a great damn year. In fact, you have my word.
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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