Brasstown resident Phil Mattox had his heart in the right place last week when he encouraged us in a letter to the editor of The Cherokee Scout to support our local newspaper, but I am afraid he is suffering under an illusion.
The Cherokee Scout is a “local” newspaper in the way that the Murphy McDonald’s is a local restaurant. Yes, the paper has a local address, and a few locals work there, but they have essentially the same jobs as the local crew at McDonald’s.
As for The Scout doing, “an excellent job keeping our community well informed” — well, I beg to differ.
They aren’t microwaving frozen food from a nationwide corporate menu but they might as well be.
I still have no idea why our last sheriff abruptly resigned and what, exactly, the local district attorney had on him to force that resignation.
I had no real idea of the full extent of the mess at the Social Services Department a few years back until it was so far along that the state was bringing criminal charges and our property taxes were going up to help pay for lawsuits against the county brought on by the appalling mismanagement and lack of oversight by the Cherokee County Commission.
But the painstaking business of local government newspaper coverage in the sense of watching the actual sausage being made — that didn’t happen in our local newspaper. Not at all. Oh, there may well have been a general sense that some of the local county commissioners were yahoos, MAGA dunderheads or little better, but the newspaper generally treated them as serious adults without ever drilling down into the muck and mire beneath their surface.
We have scarcely been told, even after the facts rooted their way to the surface, that, no, they were’t serious adults at all. Fat lot of good that after-the-fact reporting did us.
At least we know there was a six-figure payout to the former county attorney by the outgoing commissioners — a sweetheart deal if ever there was one. But if any of our local reporters or editors asked the outgoing commissioners what in blazes they were thinking and how and why the sweetheart payout happened I’ve yet to read about it in our “excellent” local newspaper.
Not even a no comment from the county-commission jokesters — if they have ever been approached by a reporter at all.
Heck, isn’t that what reporters do?
Way back in 2013, The Philadelphia Daily News labeled Murphy as a place “Where American Journalism Went to Die” after the Scout’s publisher — the same David Brown that leads the Scout today — published a controversial apology to the local sheriff.
The incident — shameful to most journalists but apparently not to Mr. Brown — involved a dispute over public records, privacy rights, and a potential boycott. The sad episode led to intense national criticism of The Scout, including from the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review.
The Scout was, to be blunt, caught in a clear case of disgraceful journalism malpractice.
Bottom line: we haven’t had a local paper in years, and we aren’t apt to ever have one again. What we are almost certainly witnessing now, under Paxton, is the early stage of a corporate squeeze on profits that will have the paper operating on even more stretched resources and thin, inexperienced staff than in years past. The only good news in all this — and this is somewhat counterintuitive — is that The Scout is certain to get much, much worse than today’s already subpar newspaper.
It’s alread begun. Readers can see that with every week’s woeful new edition.
And, yes, that’s probably the good news, because soon The Cherokee Scout will be so bad, so terribly, terribly bad that we will hardly notice its absence when it inevitably arrives, and may even be glad to see its merciful demise at the hands of inept management and unbridled corporate greed and stupidity.
When that day comes, we won’t have lost much.