by Kevin Burton
I love Bonnie Raitt more this week than I did before, and that’s saying something.
Raitt announced Monday that proceeds from her Sept. 23 concert in Carmel By The Sea, California, will go to support investigative journalism and protect a free press.
“Special guest Roy Rogers will support the show,” according to her website. “Proceeds will be donated to non-profit organizations dedicated to investigative journalism and protecting a free press.”
“With our democracy at a crossroads, never have investigative journalism and protection of a free press been more essential to holding the powerful to account and keeping the public informed and engaged,” Raitt said.
A ticket pre-sale for her fan club members sold out in two days. Tickets go on sale to the general public today at noon Pacific Time. Prices start at $100. For tickets, go to the website of the site of the concert, the Sunset Cultural Center, www.sunsetcenter.org.
I was a fulltime journalist when a co-worker gave me a tape (yes, he said tape) of “Nick of Time,” Raitt’s 1989 release, her first on Capitol Records. Raitt has been a favorite of mine ever since. The album went to number one and made Rolling Stone magazine’s list of 500 best albums of all time. But none of the songs made the top 40 (“Have A Heart” peaked at number 49).
Her next album, “Luck of the Draw” spawned the number 5 hit “Something to Talk About,” “I Can’t Make You Love Me” (number 18) and “Not the Only One” (number 34).
Her career in music has soared from that point on, including the 2022 release of “Just Like That.”
“The song won Best American Roots Song and Song of the Year at the 65th annual Grammy Awards,” reads the song’s Wikipedia Page, “with the latter award regarded as an upset over several higher-charting songs.”
The journalism industry in the years of Raitt’s success, by contrast, by all accounts, has tanked, is tanking, crumbling. This well-chronicled decline in the press’s ability to ferret out and disseminate the truth has dark implications for a world power in sunset.
“For a few hours last Tuesday, the entire news business seemed to be collapsing all at once,” wrote Paul Farhi in a Jan. 30 article in the Atlantic Monthly. “Journalists at Time magazine and National Geographic announced that they had been laid off, By far the grimmest news was from the Los Angeles Times, the biggest newspaper west of Washington, D.C. After weeks of rumors, the paper announced that it was cutting 115 people, more than 20 percent of its newsroom.”
“The decline of the legacy news media has been playing out for decades, exacerbated most recently by the advent of the internet and the explosion of digital platforms, especially the ad-revenue-gobbling tech giants Google and Meta, Farhi wrote. “Even when the ad-supported model of journalism still worked, the history of American media was punctuated by periods of dramatic expansion and contraction, often coinciding with the arrival of new technologies. The latest round of cuts, however, represents a grim new milestone.”
It was a sobering milestone for the big boys, the major dailies and national news magazines. But it’s truly grim in small-town USA.
“By far the greatest damage to the news ecosystem over the past 20 years has been at the local level. Nearly all of the 2,900 newspapers that have closed or merged since 2005 have been small weeklies, according to researchers at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University,” Farhi writes. “This has left broad swaths of the country lacking professional reporting of any kind. The death rate among daily papers has been less extreme, if only because many continue to exist in greatly diminished form.”
The Medill study Farhi mentions estimates that one third of newspapers that were publishing in 2005 will be out of business by the end of this year.
“As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked,” observed PEN America in a 2019 white paper. “With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.”
On the Kansas Press Association’s website I read statements such as “What we do still matters.” You never would have seen that years ago. Of course it mattered, of course it still matters.
Also on the KPA website, another sign of the times, this post from Tim Stauffer, Managing Editor of the Iola Register. It is a PBS-style plea for help:
“‘The Register needs your help.’ That was our message to about 100 subscribers, whom we wrote earlier this month,” Stauffer wrote.
“And it’s true. This year has been awful.”
“We’ve lost three of our biggest five advertisers, and we’re kicking ourselves for
not reducing staff earlier.”
“So we printed a list of subscribers and went through it, selecting our strongest supporters. We debated whether we should address all subscribers; we didn’t, mostly for reasons of feasibility. We also wanted to make the request as personal as possible.”
“So far, we’ve received about $10,000 in donations. We move 100 percent of it, every single penny, to our payroll account.”
“I hated having to do this,” Stauffer wrote. “I’m not proud of sharing this or asking our subscribers for help. I worry some will think we’re incompetent, or crybabies, or undeserving.”
“We take pride in our work at the Register, and much of it comes from the independence of being a family-owned newspaper. So many generations, so many papers published, and here we are.”
“It stings.”
I don’t know how much Raitt’s gesture will help. I hope she and her team will select the right non-profit agencies to support, to bolster a free press. The venue for the concert seats only 700.
What I really hope is that other musicians will join her in supporting democracy and the public’s right to know.
How delighted I would be to be proven wrong about my conclusion that the United States is circling the drain. Here’s to Bonnie Raitt for doing what she can to help.
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