To Omaha Area Publishers
To Omaha Area Publishers
Cosmopolitan and Local Information is Crucial
I am sending this to Paul Goodsell, Chief Editor at the Omaha World-Herald, Cate Folsom, Editor of the Nebraska Examiner, and Matt Wynn, Editor of the Flatwater Press. I am also sharing this with Scott Voorhees and Ian Swanson at the KFAB radio station as their listeners use email and are influenced by social media.
I am an unrelenting and passionate defender of individual freedom and I can be partisan and even cruel about it. But I want to set this aside to talk about the current trends in media, particularly newspapers and their websites.
Right now, we are overwhelmed with information sources, yet at the same time, the technology at hand is filtering and blocking information for various reasons, even unintentionally due to word usage. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube use algorithms and screeners. The result can be catastrophic and result in blind spots. Merely changing a few words in a headline can result in the difference between 2 views and 200,000 views. At the same time, filters, blocking, muting, banning, and suspending all sorts of posts and stories result is a narrowing of public discussion as well as information.
I cannot use Facebook or Twitter. If I have an account there, it will be shadow banned, blocked, or suspended. Facebook has deleted numerous groups and users with little to no avenue of appeal. You may not think much of this as you probably just use Facebook for family, and want to catch up with a celebrity on Twitter, but these technologies are having a vast impact on readers and our community. At the same time, our local governments use these technologies to share information with the public. What is the real impact?
The result is abundantly clear. There are dueling dogmas and dueling narratives where any sense of nuisance and discussion becomes totally taboo. Explain to me how we went from “defund the police” to “only the police should have guns”. Explain to me how we went from mandating vaccines and masks to suddenly “my body, my choice.” The real world of various events and multiple viewpoints becomes lost. The concerns about supposed man-made climate change has become dogma, and puts Omaha at risk of brown-outs, disrupting local businesses as OPPD adopts such dogma. With such issues, it takes two journalists to cover the issue with one covering one side and the other covering the other side. This provides a bit of balance but it is seldom done.
Reading nonfiction books on the pressing issues of the day can help understand what is going on, but locally, understanding an issue takes a lot of work. I am still trying to understand why Douglas County is investing in license plate readers. This appears to be a totally useless and expensive technology to deploy (https://www.3newsnow.com/news/local-news/the-douglas-county-sheriffs-office-wants-to-install-license-plate-readers-how-would-it-work).
Many people are consciously aware there is a problem with journalism today. The World-Herald is happy to print stories of the far left, ignoring the fact, the majority of people in Douglas County are not registered Democrat. In fact, no party has a majority so the paper should have some reflection of this fact but it is stuck on dogmatic ideas. Nebraska Examine suffers similar problems.
Here is how bad it is. Trump was a Democrat and supported Bill Clinton during the 90s. He watched as Romney and Hillary exploited their political parties to be nominated. Ron Paul got sidelined as did Bernie Sanders. Do you really think the Sanders and Paul supporters disappeared? They did not disappear and instead gravitated to Trump. Oh, but to mention this is strictly taboo.
These people listened for four years of Democrats saying Russians elected Trump and have listened to nearly two years of how Trump was supposedly overthrowing the government. Yet every time Biden speaks or anyone looks at gasoline prices or their 401k plan, a lot of people wish they were part of the “insurrection” and would have brought artillery and tanks! There are many angry people who see nothing in the newspapers reflecting their own experiences.
“But Andrew, the election was a national issue, not a local issue.” Way off the mark. Secretary Bob Evnen’s numbers are in the tank as the results of the primary elections showed. He is not doing enough to boost transparency and if you think I am a nutcase, read my article at
But, there is no interest in this local information I provided. None. Dare I mention ballot drop boxes? These boxes should not exist anymore.
There is more. The Flatwater Press published this story (https://flatwaterfreepress.org/minds-polluted-film-claims-teachers-are-grooming-students-experts-say-its-filled-with-falsehoods/) I immediately took issue with the citation of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) which constantly defames conservative organizations and makes unverifiable claims of extremism, while at the same time, the organization scams lefties out of their money. The way SPLC throws their claims about, every Jew and Christian is a hater because of reading Ecclesiastes 3 (https://biblehub.com/niv/ecclesiastes/3.htm) Did you read it? Well too bad for you! You are now just as bad as a lynching crew of the Ku Klux Klan!
SPLC has gained recent notoriety for calling for the takedown of Confederate monuments. It was and is a stupid campaign. The monuments of Robert E. Lee were funded by both Black and White people, not just because Lee defended the South but because he single-handedly ended America’s deadliest war. The SPLC won’t tell you this, but I just did. SPLC is out to scam you for money. But even the World-Herald runs a leftist podcast called After the Monuments (https://omaha.com/opinion/columnists/charlottesville-five-years-later-part-2-after-the-monuments-podcast/article_3b91c30b-8901-5e30-8268-2339e56df1fc.html).
Right now, Omaha has a thriving digital economy and it is put at risk every time OPPD has outages in Douglas County. Cox not only provides cable television but the internet as well. The outages of Cox internet service needs to be made public just as OPPD does. However, OPPD is still worried about carbon which is nonsense. (https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/oppd-proposes-burning-coal-at-north-omaha-plant-for-three-more-years/ar-AAYPliv and https://www.oppdcommunityconnect.com/decarb) Far better to encourage people to use LED lights to cut down on energy usage instead of screwing around with the supply source and causing outages. But, no one seems to care.