Politicians want to snuff the light of information and cast you in darkness

Cancel newspapers, cancel democracy

Politicians who flourish in darkness are set on undermining a strong and independent network of community journalism by eliminating paid public notices in Iowa newspapers.

A Senate subcommittee on March 8 voted along party lines, with majority Republicans in support, to advance a bill that would allow public notices to be published on a website hosted by the secretary of state and forego posting them in community newspapers.

They tell the public that they want to save money. In private, a senator told one of our folks in the capitol that the backers want to “cancel newspapers.”

Indeed they will if this bill passes. My friends in the Iowa Newspaper Association believe that a third of our nearly 300 community newspapers will fold if paid legal notices — council minutes, school board claims, probate notices and the like — are eliminated.

One of them will be the Aurelia Star, which we operate. The loss of public notices will deal a huge body blow to the Cherokee Chronicle Times and the Storm Lake Times Pilot. We will have to find over $100,000 per year to make it up. Last year we showed a profit of $2,900 — Brother John is paid nothing and I am paid $900 per month. Maybe we’re bad managers, but we are still here against all odds and supporting 20 employees. But enough about us. Republicans said it’s not their job to make our payroll. (Although they shell out hundreds of millions in subsidies for Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Wells Fargo. BV County is spending millions to help launch a new soy crush facility near Lake Creek that is not locally owned.)

Okay, we’ll take our lumps, but what about the public? What about you?

This bill will put public notices online at a state website for a couple weeks. After that, forget about finding out how much a county supervisor got paid for hotel expenses. The state will charge to post the public notice. If you think about it, and really want to find out what happened at the Alta-Aurelia School Board meeting, you can start searching the Internet. Currently, you can browse the Times Pilot and see that your spinster aunt’s probate is on file. You can search our website for legal notices, and the Iowa Newspaper Association offers a statewide database of public notices from its members (at no charge). Nearly 80% of Iowans read public notices in community newspapers.

Without legal notices, you simply will not know what’s going on.

And where those newspapers are forced to close, no one will be there to tell you. The lights will be out. It is not hyperbole — even with paid public notices, a half-dozen Iowa county-seat newspapers closed during the pandemic, including the venerable Centerville Iowegian.

This is not just an Iowa thing. It’s a national push to blot out newspapers and create news deserts where no local source of factual information exists. That vacuum gets filled by social media and political sites posing as legitimate news sources. Where newspapers die, government spending and tax rates rise. So does crime and corruption according to research from the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina. 

The past few years have been extremely difficult for local journalism. President Trump attacked us as an “enemy of the people.” Scott County native and Arizona Republican darling Kari Lake wants to jail reporters. The Des Moines Police arrested a reporter for The Register for covering a protest. Now we have an Iowa senator saying they want to “cancel newspapers.” I guess running photos of the father-daughter dance and a story about the new rodeo queen are worth cancelling, in their view, along with our celebration of Sioux Central running a perfect regular season in boys’ basketball.

Also last week, a bill advanced to strip the state auditor of his auditing powers. The auditor would not be allowed to seek certain records unless the government unit under scrutiny agreed to it.

And then there is all the jibber-jabber about banning books in school and municipal libraries, and gagging teachers who think students should know about slavery.

We should be able to read Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn. Students should learn about Jim Crow laws and how Blacks were denied their franchise as human beings. And you have a right to know what’s going on in the city hall and courthouse, and you deserve to be told how your tax money is spent or misspent.

The community newspaper is your proxy. People call to ask why, after reading the list of claims, is the street department buying a new snow plow when they got one last year? They walk into the office with a clipping in the wallet they pull out of the front pocket of their bibs of a drainage notice that they think will flood out their low spots. They would not have known were it not for the legal notice. It’s not easy finding out this stuff now — the Iowa court system charges us a fee to look at criminal information online.

You will know even less when a third of Iowa’s newspapers sink.

That’s the way they want it. Keep people in the dark. Resist the audit that shines a light on tax increment financing or the Hawkeye athletic department, which may embarrass a lot of people. Cancel newspapers and live in blissful ignorance. That’s what’s going on. 

We’ll get by somehow. They can’t kill us yet. They think we’re cockroaches and we will prove it by refusing to be eradicated. Not as long as you demand that we walk together in the sunshine. Information builds community, secrecy and lies destroy great republics and eat at freedom. We have our opinions but we keep them on this page. We hew to the facts on the front page. Some people can’t handle the truth and are doing their level best to knock us out. We need your subscriptions. Please tell your friends and neighbors about us. Please donate to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. Never give up on democracy. We need each other.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Columnists

Laura Belin, Iowa Politics with Laura Belin, Windsor Heights

Doug Burns: The Iowa Mercury, Carroll

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Art Cullen, Art Cullen’s Notebook, Storm Lake

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Debra Engle: A Whole New World, Madison County

Julie Gammack: Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, Des Moines and Okoboji

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Robert Leonard: Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture, Bussey

Tar Macias, Hola Iowa, Iowa

Kurt Meyer, Showing Up

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Kyle Munson: Kyle’s Main Street, Iowa

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John Naughton, My Life, in Color, Des Moines

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Barry Piatt: Behind the Curtain, Washington, D.C.

Macey Spensley: The Midwest Creative

Mary Swander: Mary Swander’s Buggy Land, Kalona

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Cheryl Tevis, Unfinished Business, Boone County

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