Commentary

I purchased my first newspaper at the behest of my father at the age of 6. The newspaper was the New York Daily News, known as the paper of the working man. At the time, the early 1950s, there was an astonishing array of newspapers covering the entire range of political sentiment, including foreign language publications that served ethnic and immigrant communities. Record-breaking union bargaining agreements in the 1960s led to the demise of a number of daily newspapers. It was the beginning of a trend that continues today. Two significant changes have been the loss of afternoon newspapers (no one at home to read them) and two-newspaper cities. For those readers who wish to condemn unions for destroying daily journalism, readers should know that the average pay for an entry-level newspaper reporter and editor in 1953 was around $60 a week in major cities and less elsewhere.

First, let me say this. I LOVE SOCIAL MEDIA. Here’s a few reasons why: 1) anyone with a smartphone can find their niche and create a name for themselves. 2) There is a new and catchy trend every week (most of them I can’t keep up with but I still love them). 3) Validation. I love to see people — especially underdogs — climb their way to the top and grow their audiences. 4) The money. There is money to be made through social media. A lot of it. But living in the age of social media might be hurting us more than it is helping us. And what I came to recently discover may have confirmed that.

Thanks to President Biden’s leadership, the selection of a location for the new FBI headquarters is again moving forward after plans were stalled in 2017 under President Donald Trump. However, I am deeply concerned with recent developments in the site-selection process that undermine the Biden administration’s commitment to advancing equity. The process for selecting a new FBI headquarters dates back to 2012, with 35 sites under initial consideration now down to three finalists. Prince George’s County has two of the three sites under consideration, in Greenbelt and Landover; the third site is in Virginia, in Springfield. Throughout the past decade, the General Services Administration (GSA) has said it would focus on access to transit, cost and environmental impact when selecting a new site.

Every week, two newspapers in this country go out of business, according to a report issued in June by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Twenty-five hundred newspapers have closed since 2005 and many more are expected to stop operating by 2025, the report concluded. Since 2004, the number of newspaper newsroom employees in this country has fallen from 71,640 to 30,820, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this year. These declines have caused a rise in “news deserts,” which are rural and urban communities with limited access to credible news and information that can influence how their residents live their lives.

I thought I’d been everywhere in Baltimore, thought I’d seen everything from every possible vantage, until the other day. While standing on Oliver Street, on the far east side of the city, I looked to my left. A half-mile to the west, where the street rises, was a magnificent bell tower I had never noticed before, almost shocking in its singularity against the gray sky. It looked to be more than 100 feet tall, but taller still because of its location.

The day after the 2016 election, I arrived on campus with students lined up outside my office. A few were slumped in chairs, devastated that Hillary Clinton had lost. Others were jubilant, wearing red hats in victory because Donald Trump had won. How do I effectively teach them both? How do I provide a classroom space that can accommodate both groups and shape these fierce, impressionable hearts at the same time?

I open the envelope from the city of Baltimore with the usual dispassion that accompanies bills. But this time it is a jury duty summons with pages of instructions and warnings. I panic. I consider myself an abolitionist, focused on ending the punitive status quo that relies upon policing, prisons and jails. My academic work surrounds the use of the United States criminal courts to shape and perpetuate racial, ethnic, economic, ableist and sexuality-based oppressions. I have been in jails and prisons as a public health worker. They are unimaginably awful, and I am haunted by them.

In October, the Food and Drug Administration postponed an advisory committee meeting to hear and review testimony as it considers allowing birth control pills to be sold over the counter. This delay is deeply frustrating. Every day we wait is a day longer that barriers to contraception remain in place. While over-the-counter birth control pills would be a first in the United States, we would be following the pathway of more than 100 other countries.