When the hammer falls

The lyrics keep riffing through my head . . . ,

Oh, every night and every day
A little piece of you is falling away
But lift your face the Western Way
Build your muscles as your body decays

That’s a stanza from Hammer to Fall, the energetic rock song written in 1984 by Brian May, guitarist for the British rock band Queen. You might have seen Oscar-winner Rami Malek, as lead Queen singer Freddie Mercury, singing it in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.

It is a song about life and death, with May once explaining that "the Hammer coming down is only a symbol of the Grim Reaper doing his job."

It is a song easily identifiable today with the once unimaginable death and destruction wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. More than one million people around the world are infected with the virus. More than 70,000 have died, with thousands more deaths predicted.

The economic toll of the pandemic is being compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Businesses are shuttered, unemployment is soaring, stock markets have been hammered.

All this happening to keep people distant from each other to lessen the spread of the virus.

With so much human suffering and grief it seems almost unconscionable to dwell on the problems of business and industry. However, I can’t avoid thinking and writing about the pandemic’s effects on one industry in particular – the newspaper industry.

The newspaper industry as we have known it will not survive this pandemic. It has been in a weakened state – basically bedridden for several years – and advertising revenue lost during the near global lockdown will cause it to draw its final breaths.

Some daily newspapers have cut publication days. Some have closed their doors and others certainly will follow. Whatever has been cut or lost will not return.

There is nothing that can be done to save the overall newspaper industry as we have known it – news printed on paper and delivered by hand. Some printed newspapers will survive, others will carry on strictly as digital products or others might appear in formats yet to be invented.

 What must not be allowed to die is the professional, disciplined journalism cultivated by newspapers.

Journalism is the oxygen-rich breath in the lungs of democracy. When deprived of it, those lungs collapse and the democracy dies.

There are those who would applaud the death of journalism. That would suit their autocratic interests, allowing them to spread unchallenged their misinformation and hyper prejudiced claptrap.

We live in a dark age of information manipulation in which information critical to our lives is twisted like pretzels. Waves of words wash over us daily, increasing the need for more, not fewer, professional journalists who produce balanced news that is fact- checked, edited and put into context.

Good journalism is about reporting truth in the public interest. Good journalism’s only allegiances are to facts and the public interest.

Corporations and governments cannot keep journalism from dying. Only the citizenry, which journalism was born to serve, can save it.

A problem with that is that much of our citizenry is not well informed about journalism.  Most people do not understand its workings and complexities, let alone its value to society.

They must become better informed if journalism is to survive to continue shining light into unseen areas and to observe and report the actions of those making decisions that affect us all.

The key to having the general public better informed about the value of journalism is held by society’s influencers. The civic leaders, business leaders and religious leaders; the people whose words and actions are watched and followed by the public.

It is the influencers who need make the importance of journalism, and the need to sustain it, an important topic of conversation.

We just can’t stand by and let journalism die. If we do, we are accepting the final stanza of the Queen song:

What the hell we fighting for
Just surrender and it won't hurt at all
You've just got time to say your prayers
While you're waiting for the Hammer to Fall.

I refuse to accept that. I will not surrender. No one should.

Lungs need oxygen and democracy needs good journalism. That’s a message important to pass along.