Our weekly program, Making Democracy Work, is a collaboration between KSMU Radio and the League of Women Voters of Southwest Missouri. It's hosted and produced by volunteers from the LWV, and it airs each Monday morning at 9:45 on KSMU.
Michele Breshears: Our guest this morning is Amos Bridges, editor in chief of the Springfield News-Leader. Today, we'll explore the role newspapers play in democracy and public accountability, and how communities preserve and remember their shared history. Good morning, Amos.
Amos Bridges: Good morning.
Breshears: People often view newspapers as a source of information, but they also document a community's history and public life. To what extent do newspapers serve as a community's collective memory, and what role do they play in preserving democracy?
Bridges: This is a really compelling question. I agree, I do think that the newspaper can be serve as sort of the collective memory for the community In a way that is better than memory, certainly better than my memory, as I'm constantly reminded when I look through old stories in our archives and go back to check my memory against what we actually wrote at the time about a particular issue. And I think, you know, we preserve all sorts of things in the newspaper that at the time, we don't even necessarily know that we might need or be interested in later.
And that's one of the reasons that, you know, the News-Leader, we've partnered with the Springfield-Greene County Library District to preserve a lot of our archives. They have copies of most everything that we do in terms of the printed paper. And then they've also taken on all of our photo negatives and getting those digitized, and they share those from the darkroom section on their website. You know, it provides just a really fascinating glimpse into the community at different stages in its history. And, and it's one of those things that if history repeats itself, as it often does, you can go back and see how the community dealt with it before, what they were talking about and get some of that context in a way that I think is more accurate than our sometimes spotty memories.
Breshears: And you've spent years covering local government. How often does understanding what's happening today require an understanding of the decisions, debates, and events from five, 10 or even 20 years ago? I know you touched on that a bit.
Bridges: One good example of that would be the recent convention center vote here in the city. And it was really interesting after the first failed vote there, the different interpretations from folks who were sort of looking at that in isolation. As you know, the city just barely lost, you know, there. That question just barely failed. But if you looked at it in the context of other city votes about taxes over the last 10, 15 years, which is something that we did in the paper a few days later, it was a really significant shift from Springfield's typical support for taxes, even taxes that local taxpayers have to pay as opposed to a visitor tax.
And so, if you look at it from that angle, rather than losing by just a few percentage points they lost 25 percentage points compared to what they typically would see in an election like that. And so, that's the sort of thing that if you don't have that context, you don't see those additional nuances to things like that.
Breshears: I have one final question for you today. And that is this: In rural communities, what is lost when there is no local newspaper serving as both the public record and the keeper of the community's history?
Bridges: Well, I think you do — you lose some of that context. One thing that I've noticed over the last few years after being at the newspaper for 22 years, is that institutional memory often is not as long as we think it might be or hope it might be. The staff at a local government can turn over in 10 years, 15 years, and you may not have folks around who remember ‘here's how we dealt with that before.’ And I was struck by that even in Springfield where you have folks who tend to stay a little bit longer. But we had a conversation recently about, ‘why didn't the city handle this like they handled a similar issue 15 years ago?’
And then when we went and looked at the list of city department heads, there were only one or two people who had even been there when it had come up before. So, I think that having those newspaper archives or other media archives that you can go back to is really important. And of course, there have been studies that show over and over again the economic costs of not having a good newspaper. But I think socially and culturally you start to lose some of that community identity if it's not being preserved in that way.