At 4 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28, an event occurred that was little noted by anyone in Hopkinsville. It passed by us like a faint summer breeze in the dark, barely rustling the tree leaves. It came and went without fanfare, but it broke my heart. What so affected me and made so little impact on my fellow citizens? The last delivery of a physical newspaper by a carrier to my front door ended an era going back over a century.
The announcement came in a letter from the Louisville Courier-Journal a month earlier. The newspaper was discontinuing delivery services in Christian County, as it had done some 20 years earlier in the Jackson Purchase.
With the Kentucky New Era available only by mail delivery, Aug. 28 would see the end of a proud tradition of American journalism in Hopkinsville. Of course, I could continue my subscription on the internet with my other electronic newspapers, which I did. But truth be told, I will miss getting ink on my hands as I read the paper, and the morning ritual of retrieving the paper from the front porch.
I have seen this coming for years, but it is still shocking to me. Fifty-seven years ago, when I was 12 years old, I became a New Era paper boy. My route included 70 homes, and 69 of those homes took the paper. There were whispers about the one dissenting family. Probably half of those 69 subscribers also took the Courier-Journal. On Aug. 28, our house was the only one to receive the Courier for blocks around.
You might well ask, “So what?” with scarcely a concern.
I would answer that as a nation, Americans can no longer agree on the facts. We have always argued over policy and how best to solve our problems, but without any agreement on the facts there is no basis for compromises or solutions.
Americans live in their own information silos in which algorithms feed them a steady diet of news that fits with their individual confirmation bias. How else do you explain otherwise rational Americans believing in Jewish space lasers starting western wildfires, Italian satellites changing the 2020 election results, Hollywood elites kidnapping children and harvesting adrenochrome from their blood, and the Jan. 6 rioters were tourists visiting the Capitol?
Without a trusted source of information, our institutions are in danger. I fear the heavy thud of that last Sunday paper hitting my porch was in fact a harbinger of the fall of democracy.
Tom Glover is a former public defender and served as the Western Regional manager for the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy in Hopkinsville. He is a retired faculty member of Murray State University, where he taught political science, and he currently studies at Hopkinsville Community College as a Donovan Scholar.
