The irony was not lost on the inclusion of a particular quote in the recent story about the academic leaders’ critical letter to Smith College (“Smith castigated over 2018 incident,” March 25).
A visiting Smith professor was quoted in saying, of a recent “deeply flawed” New York Times article on the fallout of the incident, “It was his opinion, not his research… I don’t like mesearch substituting for research.” That take was rather comical to see in the middle of a saga that has been nothing but “mesearch” for the Gazette.
One might get the impression that the Gazette got rid of the position of editor altogether along with Brooke Hauser when they laid her off right after Christmas last year; the new editor has written many words about what a great job she intends to do, but from what I’ve seen from the entire Smith fiasco, it doesn’t appear that she’s even started editing anything yet.
The very first sentence of the article set the tone, with the attempted discrediting of the “Black leaders” by identifying many of them as “conservative.” I’m not so sure that the leaders would have been identified as “progressive” had their sentiment been more agreeable to the narrative that the Gazette is apparently trying to push.
Two days earlier in a story about the police review board in Northampton, the story neglected to identify many of the board members as “progressive,” which many of them are. I wonder why.
Last summer, the Gazette published a rather one-sided story about the Northampton School Committee’s resolution that called for banning of police resource officers in schools. The resolution was approved not long after cuts to the Police Department forced officer Josh Wallace, who had served as school resource officer, back to the beat. More than a year earlier, Commonwealth Magazine on March 26, 2019, (who actually bothered to reach out to Wallace in their story about hostility toward police in Northampton) quoted Wallace as saying:
“The majority of the community supports us, but they are afraid to do so publicly because the vocal minority that is anti-police is so vocal that they could affect their business or, if they don’t own a business, could affect their personal life …” he is quoted as saying.
I wholeheartedly agree with Wallace. There is a vocal minority, and they have the City Council, the mayor, and the local newspaper now by the scruffs of their necks. The front steps of City Hall wouldn’t look like Woodstock, and Pulaski Park wouldn’t currently be an open-air narcotics market by broad daylight, if they didn’t.
The publisher of the Gazette likely has some decisions to make, decisions that don’t simply entail giving the newsroom a haircut and running around with a hat asking for donations to keep the paper alive. A for-profit entity may “own” the paper today, but in a way, the community does.
The Gazette is one of the 10 oldest dailies in the country. Is this company going to run this paper into the ground while their young reporters try to drill their newfound religion of “wokeness” into our heads with subjective one-sided garbage, under no apparent editorial supervision?
Because there are more people who read this paper — and live in this community — than just young, angry radicals who live downtown, people who never even heard of Northampton until they found it online a few years ago and decided to move there.
There are a lot of regular, meat-and-potatoes people in our community. They buy newspapers, or at least many of them used to. The mayor may be a water boy for the “Woke Brigade,” but he’s gone soon enough. I suspect that if this newspaper continues down a similar path, it will be gone soon enough, as well.
Brian Cooper lives in Sunderland.