Guest Post: Mail Tribune Disappointment

These are tough times for local newspapers, the Medford Mail Tribune included. I want them to succeed as a vital, engaged local newspaper.

Their Sunday Editorial was another self inflicted wound.

Some problems cannot be disguised or ignored. The paper is getting thinner. There is scant coverage of county or city business. Display ads are few and far between. Classified ads have largely moved to Craigslist. 

We hear of staff changes, with key employees leaving. They have an upside-down subscription policy built around promotions for new subscribers with the highest prices for their best, longest, least troublesome, and most valuable customers.

There are bright spots: they still distribute lots of advertising inserts and they have large paid ads in the form of legal notices and obituaries. They are still in business. They have stories about the County Fair, about local sports, and today a very useful one about the hemp industry. They still do some good, and I am grateful.

On Sunday the publisher authored an editorial describing Democrats as the imminent pathway to tyranny, wealth confiscation, and mass murder, a short step from Hitler and Stalin. Possibly it was printed by accident. After all, the publisher's own name was misspelled in the byline, and mistakes happen. Possibly it was a marketing experiment in expanding the paper's appeal to a new audience, the Newsmax.com crowd, the people who find Sean Hannity too liberal. Or, possibly, it is an accurate reflection of the carefully considered thoughts of the publisher, and he is genuinely concerned that Democrats will create a totalitarian state and that Social Security is a leading indicator of that dystopia. Even that editorial provided a service to readers, letting readers know that some people actually believe that.

Ethan Gans-Morse

To his credit, the publisher invited comments. 

Ethan Gans-Morse wrote one. It is too long and well sourced for a letter to the editor. He is a music composer and arts administrator based in southern Oregon, expressing his own personal views. 

I have one disagreement with Gans-Morse's Guest Post. He concludes with a bold print statement that publisher Steve Saslow has "a responsibility" to use his money and power for the betterment of the community. I disagree. I think Saslow has an opportunity to do that, but, as the editorial title observes, in a capitalist economy, money gives power, and he does not owe the public anything. It is his newspaper. It is a free country. He can do anything he wants with it. Hire people, fire people. Print useful news, print nonsense. His newspaper, his call. This is capitalism, this is America.

Guest Post by Ethan Gans-Morse

An Open Letter to Mr. Steven Saslow and the Medford Mail Tribune

Dear Mr. Saslow,

Sunday editorial

I’m writing in response to your editorial on July 7th, 2019, entitled “Controlling money controls power,” in which you paint an alarmist picture of “socialist” Democratic candidates. You conclude with an invitation: “I’m open to hearing from you if you see any of these ideas as doable.”

As a lifelong southern Oregonian who does indeed see the idea of single-payer healthcare as “doable,” I will take your offer in good faith and present my response below.

You begin your editorial by presenting candidates Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris as “useful fools,” a sort of gateway drug to “true socialists and communists… Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Nicolas Maduro, Nicolae Ceausescu … even Adolf Hitler (national socialism)… You wouldn’t think of letting any of them control your family’s health care, safety or freedom.” But Sanders has referred to the Nordic European countries as his model for Democratic Socialism for decades, a distinction that has been pointed out again and again and again, while Kamala Harris has rejected the label of Democratic Socialism entirely.

To say that a vote for Sanders or Harris is a vote for Stalinism is not a helpful contribution to our discourse. It’s a willful misreading of the candidates’ stated positions. However, there are relevant questions to be explored here:

·        Are the Scandinavian countries actually socialist?

·        Does their prosperity come from their generous social welfare programs or from their more regulated form of capitalism?

·        Are Bernie Sander’s proposals actually derived from the Nordic Model he seeks to emulate in the first place?

These are the kinds of questions that foster meaningful debate, and about which Rogue Valley residents can have reasonable disagreements.

Still worse, your off-hand equation of “democratic socialism” with “national socialism [Nazism]” demonstrates an unwillingness to educate your readers with simple historical facts. Much has been written by historians about how the Nazi Party were fascists, not socialists, and about the difference between Nazism and socialism. For the sake of brevity here, please consider that Hitler’s rise to power and incitement of World War II were based on his positioning of communists as the primary enemy of the German state. From the 1934 Night of Long Knives — when Hitler had the socialist “Strasser” wing of the Nazi party murdered — to his spreading the propaganda of “Jewish Bolshevism” — in which Jews were conflated with communists, blamed for the Russian Revolution, and painted as the architects of a Marxist conspiracy to undermine German supremacy — Hitler used fear of socialism as the ultimate bogeyman to whip up hatred for Jews and other marginalized populations. To state the obvious, Hitler obsessively sought to invade the Soviet Union. If he was a communist all along, why was Hitler allied with anti-communist forces in Spain and Italy? Wouldn’t the Soviets have been a more natural ally? For that matter, if Nazism were a leftist ideology, why would American neo-Nazis have organized the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017?

As the owner of multiple news outlets, your role should be to correct these kinds of misconceptions, not to spread and inflame them.

Next, you go after social security, food stamps (SNAP), and universal healthcare as specters of communism that threaten to rob our children of their financial future. But here again, instead of providing facts, data, or constructive proposals, you opt for vapid scare tactics, such as “How will our children feel when there is no money left to fund their social security checks?” But experts on both the right and the left have put forward proposals that would make social security solvent. The challenge here is arguably political will more than the looming takeover of socialism. Wouldn’t that be a more productive way to frame the problem?

Regarding your claim that “Food stamps [SNAP] saw a huge spike… during the Barack Obama presidency,” the enrollment and benefit levels of these programs actually grew less than under George W. Bush when measured from first month to last month of each president’s term. Yet again, this sort of scaremongering is not a productive contribution to our region’s discourse.

And now let’s turn to the big one: universal health care. Austria and Italy could hardly be described as “leftist” or “socialist,” given their recent embrace of far-right political parties, yet both provide single-payer coverage to nearly all of their citizens. Italy even covers tourists and undocumented immigrants. Austria and Italy rank 9th and 2nd in the world, respectively, for health care (the United States ranks 37th). Like Spain, England, and many other wealthy nations, they do indeed also offer the option of seeking out privatized care, an option that Kamala Harris also supports (admittedly, her answer to this question has been confusing, to say the least.) Even Bernie Sanders isn’t calling for the abolition of private insurance. If, as you imply, universal health care is the first step on the path to communist dictatorship, how have so many European countries managed to move to the right without first dismantling their own universal health care systems?

Finally, you ask, “[if] community colleges, city and even state colleges were practically free or at least affordable 40 years ago… Why not dial back the tuition to those institutions, and, in a very capitalist way, force private universities to get more competitive with their credit-pricing models?” But what mechanism are you proposing to use to “dial back” their tuition? There are many reasons why tuition has gone up in the past 40 years. Forcing public colleges to lower their tuitions would require a massive allocation of tax money into the public education system. This is precisely what Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democrats are proposing. How is your proposal more capitalistic than theirs? And how are Trump’s policies of picking winners and losers through tariffs and corporate welfare more capitalistic than the other Democrats’ policies that you decry?

In an interview you gave in June of 2017, you stated your goals for the new direction you wanted to take the Tribune:

“We’re not left, we’re not right, we are a variety of different things to mirror the growth that is in this area. Whatever we do, we want to cover thoroughly and credibly.”

The problem is that your editorial falls short of your 2017 vision because it lacks thoroughness and credibility.

By all means, present a wide spectrum of political views, including those which are critical of universal health care, free college, reparations, etc. Indeed, these policies are being hotly debated right now even within the Democratic Party. But you have a responsibility to use your editorial authority for the betterment of the community. If, instead of framing a constructive conversation about important issues affecting southern Oregonians, your editorial distorts historical and political facts, then it risks becoming propaganda and inflaming hostility within our community.

Rogue Valley residents are enriched when their local paper provides a forum for robust, well-reasoned, and well-informed debate. Please consider using your editorial authority more responsibly in the future so that our local newspaper can live up to its potential for serving and educating our community.