I have an old friend who lives and works in Las Vegas. He’s in showbusiness and is pretty well known, and from time to time when I’m in Vegas we connect for dinner at the hotel where he performs. He regularly does something at those dinners that both impresses and scares me. He tells the waiter to “bring me something I haven’t had before.” Impressive, in that it shows an openness to new taste experiences. I’m a coward because, with some long-term tummy troubles (too technical?), I have to be careful to stick to safe foods for me. 

I was reminded of this when I read a story on Colorado Politics discussing an effort by the company that owns the Denver Post to buy Gannett, the largest US newspaper chain. The company making the bid, it seems, is a hedge-fund-backed entity that buys up newspapers, cuts costs (fires people, cuts benefits, etc.) in an effort to make the paper more profitable. Readers smarter than me about the stock market (which would be just about all of you) may be able to tease out the subtle details of this transaction, but the purchaser seems to want to suck up Gannett’s empire, including the USA Today paper, and others such as the Arizona Republic, the Naples Daily News and more.

So what, you may ask?

Well, that brings me back to dinner in Vegas. The thing that is impressive about my friend’s admonition to the waiter is that my buddy will often experience something new and different, outside of his culinary comfort zone. Sure, sometimes he’ll end up eating something, well, awful, but he also will have his gastronomic horizons expanded. 

And so too is it with the news. 

If you were a newspaper reader back, say, in New York City during the early days of the Republic, you’d have your pick of a number of different newspapers. There were roughly 120 papers in the State of New York, with about 20 of those in NYC itself. Thus, you could read a wide range of opinions and ideas, if you desired. You could also only read the papers whose editorial views you agreed with, but that was a choice. Today’s consumer of news has far fewer options to obtain a diverse set of views, and that situation is getting worse, not better.

Thus, when the company that owns the Denver Post also seeks to own, say, a dozen more major papers, TV and radio stations, and alike, you can see that there is at least a danger that some dissenting views and ideas may be silenced. You may recall the story from last spring, wherein media giant Sinclair forced dozens of local anchorpeople at Sinclair’s various TV stations around the country to all read the same slanted “editorial” that slammed the media and warned of fake news, all in support, it would seem, of Mr. Trump and his agenda. Now let’s be clear, I’m quite sure that it isn’t illegal for a large company to force its employees to do something. But I hope you are at least a little troubled when that forced conformity is not about a brand of dish soap, but rather is about the vitally important role of a free and fair press in our society.

As someone seen as being on the liberal end of things (and that really depends on whom I’m standing next to – I’m liberal on some issues and more conservative on others.), I am particularly horrified by this effort by Sinclair to reshape national news media into more of a Fox News/state-television organization. But if the pressure was coming the other way, I would also worry. The job of the press is to inform, and without an open and fair press, you run a terrible risk of allowing a tiny number of national “deciders,” be they hedge-fund operators, political elites, to decide what you should know, and when you should know it.

You’ve likely heard the saying – with which I agree, by the way – that capitalism is the worst possible system, except for all the others. There are great things about a capitalistic society, truly, but there is also a danger if we slip too much toward a plutocracy. One of these dangers is that wealth can bring great power, and that without proper safeguards, that power can be dangerous. 

Beware the media entity that tells you it’s ok for a tiny group of companies to control all the news. Without protection, you may one day find yourself seated at a metaphoric newspaper table, only to be told there is but one entrée to consume, and that one may not go down easily.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs