If the Daily Item and its fellow Essex Media Group publications end up in the newspaper graveyard where thousands of other local papers have been buried in the last several years, I guess in some small part we will have Dilbert to blame.
Adams, in case you are not familiar with his work, draws and writes the Dilbert comic strip syndicated in the Item and other newspapers. Dilbert’s strip published in the paper’s June 29 edition prompted subscriber Michael J. Dollard to cancel his subscription, “Due to the views of Scott Adams/Dilbert supporting the big lie and voter fraud (i) am cancelling my subscription.”
It is my fervent hope within the space of today’s column to convince Mr. Dollard — whose patronage we have appreciated and hate to lose — to reconsider his decision.
The strip that offended Mr. Dollard featured three panels with Adams’ character, “The Boss,” saying, “According to our internal polling, the public doesn’t trust us to make electronic voting machines.”
He goes on to say in the second panel, “We plan to fix that by rigging voting machines to elect politicians who will tell people there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Why don’t people trust us?” asks his listener.
“I was wondering the same thing,” The Boss replies.
(Adams continued his theme in Thursday’s cartoon and took an amusing swipe at my business with one of the strip’s characters saying, “We need to quickly bribe a reporter.”)
It probably doesn’t matter one iota to Mr. Dollard that Dilbert, according to Andrews McMeel Syndication, appears in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries in 25 languages.
I confess to never reading the strip — I’m more of a Family Circle, Rose is Rose, Arlo and Janis guy — but I know that politics on the “funnies” page has the capability of angering people.
I read Wednesday’s Dilbert strip and summed it up as a comment on the absurdity of politicians and politics in general. Mr. Dollard appears to have taken his analysis one or more steps further and viewed Adams’ work through the lens of personal affrontry.
Scott Adams probably won’t lose any sleep over an Item reader canceling a subscription. But newspapers are a business and if you work for one and you lose a customer, you try to win them back.
Chances are Mr. Dollard isn’t interested in a free Item subscription. But we want and need to count him among our readers. Newspapers are and always have been the forum for every viewpoint to be expressed.
Sure, liberals say Fox News is in Trump’s pocket and conservatives like to take broad swipes at the media outlets Trump hates. But newspapers, especially local ones, welcome and publish all viewpoints.
If you don’t believe me, just talk to the readers (or former ones who canceled their subscriptions) who hate when we publish Rick Eramian’s letters.
The Internet is the biggest stage for opinions humanity has ever enjoyed. Its news value is proven: One only has to look at the roles online news played in the 2010 popular uprising in Iran and the effort to keep news flowing to Russians in spite of Putin’s media crackdowns.
But the biggest Internet megaphones are owned by the world’s wealthiest people, while papers like the Item, and hundreds of others in the U.S., remain locally owned even as big firms gobble up and shut down newspapers.
Here at 85 Exchange St., we value our readership above all else and we know on any given day we inspire, anger, disappoint, and energize our readers. That’s what we’re in business to do.
I hope Michael Dollard changes his mind and writes me a letter explaining why Scott Adams ticked him off on Wednesday. I guarantee we will publish it.
