BRYAN PRESTON: Every City Needs a New York Post.
The other day I was researching for a piece or a show, haven’t decided which, about how the Democrats at the local level and now reaching all the way up, are abdicating the basics of governance. They literally no longer care about public safety, keeping the streets clean and free of garbage, or really any Government 101 duties. They just answer to radical activists and pretend their local homeowners and business leaders don’t exist. I went looking for the latest on New York City’s garbage collection issues. Mayor Bill de Blasio hasn’t just defunded the police and politicized the entire city government. He’s turned the streets over to the largest piles of garbage and the rats that live in them. This has been going on for a couple of years. He’d rather mouth off and run for president than do his actual job.
I ended up finding useful information in one place: the New York Post. Not the Times, the alleged paper of record. It’s too busy trying to destroy the nation to report on the destruction of its own city. Not the NY Daily News. Its local coverage is better than the Times but it’s still too often a mouthpiece for the Democrats.
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If I had a billion dollars or two and wanted to make a difference at the local level, I’d spin up versions of the Post in Austin, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, everywhere the captured papers bury serious stories and stifle discussion and debate. Outlets like this one need local reporters who know their cities and will honestly report on them and the consequences that flow from the policies that those who run these cities foist on them.
More importantly, the citizens of these imperiled and increasingly dangerous cities need them too.
As Kyle Smith wrote when veteran Post reporter Steve Dunleavy passed away in 2019 at age 81, “Then as now, you had to read The Post to figure out what was really going on in the city because the Times was slightly grossed out by how sordid it all was and tended to look the other way when things got ‘too tabloidy,’ meaning ‘too interesting.’ You could always go to the Times for a 3,000-word piece on ‘Whither the UN?’ But tabloid guys like Steve served up what was really happening in these parts, at 160 proof.”
H.L. Mencken wrote in the early 1940s that “it is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.” That line has been quoted by both the New York Times and the Washington Post, but curiously, Mencken’s advice goes unheeded by most newspapers once there is someone with a (D) after his name in the White House, the governor’s, or mayor’s mansion.