October 27, 2024

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

If a picture is worth at least a thousand words, then today in all humility, I intend my painting, “Light Floating From Table,” as such.

It is perhaps a surrealist view, an abstract look that is physical none the less.

It is a metaphor for the continuing loss of American newspapers, some more than a century old, as readership and advertising decline and as billionaires and hedge-hunters buy survivors for their assets and maybe for political influence.

Once, we all read newspapers on the kitchen table, and they informed us, entertained all ages, reported on local government and sports and offered opinion from both the newspaper’s thinkers and the readers.

With the loss of such valuable “light,” never replaced by the gossip, falsehoods and prejudice of some social media, democracy is threatened, a push into information darkness that should frighten us all.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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