Newspaper Failings Here and Beyond

After receiving an offer from your paper to renew my subscription, I decided to put in writing my dissatisfaction with your newspaper and American media in general. (I haven’t written before, because I figured I represent a small percentage of your market research statistics and you probably have written me off.)

I told your circulation department that I was canceling because your new improved paper with an abundance of local Ventura news no longer offered me the Metro section.

I loved that section. You wrote up what was happening in the inner city in human terms. You wrote not only what the justice system was doing, but how crime and the court’s decisions are affecting the perpetrator (sometimes falsely accused) and his family. You wrote of an area gutted of industry, and how people are dealing with life problems of homelessness, the City Council, schools, new immigrants, the police or lack of police protection, and each other.

I live in an area that is fighting growth and trying to keep big city problems away from us. I have the local papers to keep me informed on Ventura’s problems. I subscribed to you to get the cosmopolitan news. In not covering the inner city and getting that word out to us, you have in effect isolated or abandoned that area from the support of public understanding.

I think there is a larger issue here. We are seeing the collapse of our inner cities from coast to coast. We see multinational corporations continually seeking cheap labor markets the world over. We see the United States government fighting against economic, land and political reforms in Central America.

Why? Are the inner cities the harbingers of the new order that Reaganomics is bringing to all of us?

Why isn’t your paper digging out the facts and educating us to the issues? When will your paper do some investigative reporting and tell us the real story of the Panama Invasion? Why is it a crime for slum children to sell cocaine and not a crime for Exxon to sell shiploads of chemicals to Colombia for the manufacture of cocaine? Come on; let’s hear the rest of the story of the connections of multinational corporations, the government, the military, the drug war, banks and our slums’ underground economy. Possibly, American newspapers would not lack subscribers if you would find and print the news.

MARGARET H. WILSON

Ventura