Rather than simply reaching conclusions about America, Brooks softens his views by addressing both the European and American democratic systems.  Does anyone actually believe there are similarities between these “systems”?  America has been a representative democracy for almost 250 years; Europe still had crowned heads leading it into a bloody war less than 100 years ago.  The balkanized, multi-party, coalition-dependent parliamentary systems in most European countries bear little relation to our two-party system, where nearly every election has a clear winner and loser and a ruling majority results.  Until recently, America had stoutly resisted the European socio-economic model, with its early retirement ages and short work weeks and months of paid vacation.  And no one in their right mind would equate the European Union with our Congress.  The ponderous bureaucrats of the EU will be there forever, impossible to root out; in America, in contrast, voters can easily — as the last three election cycles have shown — toss out incumbents and install new representatives who purportedly will better reflect their views.

Still, Brooks reaches the right conclusion.  America is on the wrong track because people have stopped viewing government as a necessary evil and have come to view it instead as a kind of personal gravy train.  John Kennedy’s stirring statement in his inaugural address — “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” — has been turned completely on its head.  Many Americans now just want to get government benefits without paying taxes.  They want the government to provide them with jobs, and “loans” that will ultimately be forgiven, and “free” health care.  And our poll-driven “leaders” are perfectly happy to encourage this dependency on government and are too craven to act responsibly, whether it comes to the federal budget or eliminating programs that don’t work well — and in some cases don’t work at all.

Brooks recognizes this.  Why, then, does he create a false equivalence between America and Europe?  I think it’s because simply stating that America is on the wrong track, and our politicians have led us there, requires more guts than he possesses.  He doesn’t want to unnecessarily upset any of the powerful inside-the-beltway types that he hobnobs with, so he writes something that makes it seem as though democracies, generally, are doomed to fail through the sheer force of greedy human nature.  That conclusion makes the bitter pill a lot easier to swallow:  it’s no one’s fault, really.

I strongly disagree with that.  America has been, is, can be, and should be different from Europe.  Our failure is the failure of political leaders — Democrats and Republicans alike — who want to hold on to the reins of power and have pandered to the worst instincts of people and corporations and interest groups rather than saying “no” and even requiring sacrifice.

Europe is probably doomed; with America, though, there is still hope.  We just need some leaders who will fight to get us back on the right track, rather than throwing up their hands and concluding that we and Europe are on the road to hell together.  It would help, too, if we had journalists who were willing to state that conclusion, sharply and plainly, as journalists are supposed to do.  One of the reasons our politicians have gotten away with their behavior is that the news media has for the most part failed to call them out for their irresponsibility.

Of course, the Dispatch has every right to control its content and to decide whether, and if so where, to carry Doonesbury.  As the Dispatch‘s editor points out, some newspapers carry Doonesbury on the op-ed page precisely because it frequently includes political content; the Dispatch has chosen not to do so.  But Doonesbury is not the only comic strip that is addressing more adult themes.  Bloom County did so, Funky Winkerbean has done so, and so has For Better or For Worse — among many others.  The daily comics, like so many other aspects of our American culture, have become a lot more diverse, and a lot less predictable, over the past few decades.  That change has occurred because many comics artists chafed at the artificial constraints that tradition imposed on comics strips, and wanted to write and draw about topics that were more relevant to their lives.

The reality is that the comics pages found in most American newspapers are no longer just the home for the hilarious hijinks of Nancy and Sluggo and the Peanuts gang, or the soap opera stories of Mary Worth or Rex Morgan, M.D.  If you read the comics, you’ll find strips addressing American life from many different perspectives — sometimes humorous, sometimes pointed, sometime poignant — and often with a message.  I think that change has made the comics pages a much more interesting read than they used to be.

The Sun-Times concludes — accurately, in my view — that people don’t pay a lot of attention to newspaper endorsements anymore, that there are lots of other sources of information available to voters now, and that many people just view endorsements as a tangible sign of claimed bias.  The newspaper will continue to publish news articles about the races, as well as the candidates’ responses to questionnaires and video of the newspaper’s interviews of the candidates.

This development shouldn’t come as a surprise; the Sun-Times is just ahead of the curve.  Newspaper endorsements used to be crucial to election campaigns and were touted in campaign advertising and pamphlets.  But in the golden era of newspaper endorsements, there was no internet, there were no cable TV and political news channels filled with opinionated talking heads, and there weren’t thousands of bloggers and “fact-checkers” and political websites.  In the modern media world, newspaper endorsements have been lost in the din.  Indeed, the stodgy, sober, platform-based appraisals of the competing candidates that tend to characterize newspaper endorsements are at a decided disadvantage in an age when people seem to crave loud, shouting, over-the-top praise and denunciation.

I’d rather see print journalism stop endorsements altogether than try to compete in the shrillness department with the likes of MSNBC and Fox News commentators.

Because I don’t get the Dispatch anymore I was surprised when I picked up the firm’s copy recently. It seems so small, both in its dimensions and in its bulk.  The front section and the local news section have shrunk considerably.  It appears that the paper is more focused on sports coverage and content — like articles on food preparation, comics, how-to and popular culture features, and opinion columns — that have more staying power than a transitory news item that could become cold in the blink of an eye.  No doubt this is an economic response to shriveled subscriptions and dropping ad revenues as well as a reflection of what readership surveys are saying.  My guess is that the Dispatch is no different from every other daily newspaper in America in this regard.

The days of a thick newspaper landing on your doorstep with a satisfying thwack, and when a leisurely review of the newspaper would take a good chunk of Sunday morning, are long gone, never to return.  The only question is whether metropolitan daily newspapers, delivered in paper form, will survive in any form, or will soon go the way of the buggy whip.  Unfortunately, if I had to bet, I think the latter scenario is more likely.

I was struck by the explanation of the Reuters spokesman quoted in the linked article.  The spokesman is quoted as saying:  “Reuters has an obligation to its clients to publish news and information that could move financial markets, and this story had the potential to do that.”  My old professor at the Ohio State University School of Journalism, Marty Brian, must be rolling in her grave at that one!  Consider that the quote from the Reuters spokesman equates an admitted hoax with “news and information” and suggests that Reuters’ paramount obligation is to publish whatever comes its way, without doing anything to determine its veracity first.  That concept is antithetical to true professional journalism, which values accuracy above speed and insists upon sourcing and careful fact-checking — particularly of a story that reports that a vocal opponent of legislation has abruptly and inexplicably changed its position.  Doesn’t anyone at CNBC and Reuters have a reporter’s gut instinct, or at least a willingness to take a moment to check the Chamber of Commerce website to see if the press release even is posted there?

Normally I would decry the efforts of the hoaxers, but I have come to believe that they probably are performing a salutary function for the world at large.  Why attach credibility to what you read from the news media if they don’t even bother to check press releases before publishing them?

I like stories like this, where they report the facts that the reporter perceives and really leave it up to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about what it all means, as opposed to articles that rely heavily on armchair experts who presume to tell you what it all means. When I read this story, I draw the conclusion that we are making progress in Iraq, but still have a long way to go.