ALABAMA: 'Even liberal southern papers in the '60's
tired of Yankee superiority'
by Brandt Ayers, publisher, The Anniston Star

The question about media power concentrated in Manhattan was put during question time at my local parliament, the Courthouse BarberShop. The response was: "Huh? They don't bother me none."

In normal times, the national media mean very little to The Anniston Star and its readers.

What sparks debate in Prime Minister Jimmy Turner's parliament is: the squabbling city council. The first elected school board. And, finally getting a real department store with the doubling of Quintard Mall!

Local readers aren't casualties of the plague, which has swept all but about 300 local papers -- some run by vivid characters -- into a pureed and neutered mass. But New York isn't the only source of the infection. Most former family papers are now in a pot of homogenized, chain-owned mediocrity.

The New York media almost never affect us, but there was a time during the civil rights movement when southerners -- bigots and reformers alike -- felt blows of the media elite to their self-esteem.

It was as if the original sin of prejudice had just been discovered and isolated, like an exotic virus found only in subtropical climes. Every southerner was Bull Connor or Sheriff Jim Clark -- a mile wide, and all ugly.

What made the 1960s even harder for some folks here was the local paper lining up with the "liberal Yankee press."

But even we few liberal southern papers in the '60s, living at the cutting edge of change, tired of Yankee superiority: Boston and New York as centers for the export of moral concern.

We are nostalgic about the '60s because we will never know a time of greater moral clarity, but we cringe at every civil rights anniversary celebrated with lazy "roll the tape" journalism beamed from New York -- the burned bus, the fire hoses, yet again. Where is the fresh reporting, the context, the great writing that unlocks secrets of the human condition?

New York means little to a family paper. The relationship is between one family and an entire community. The emotional strings of such a relationship are tuned more like a cello or violin than, say, a Pete Sampras tennis racquet.

It is precisely that sensitivity that gives a family newspaper its unique personality. It may be less objective than a New York network, but it is more caring: scolding and loving; hurting, being hurt and loving.

Brandt Ayers has been a journalist since the early 1960s. He co-owns five papers and is also a syndicated columnist, commentator, and lecturer.