A Star is dead:
McCarthy, Abigail
A STAR IS DEAD CONTENT, COMPLEXITY, CONNECTION WHETHER WE ARE aware of it or not, each one of us has been dealt a blow by the death of the Washington Star - announced by its last owner, Time,...
...For one hundred and twenty-eight years the Star was that kind of paper for Washington...
...They are how we see ourselves...
...In the Star's final week 618,000 Washingtonians regularly read the Post with their morning coffee...
...It was still there when Washington became the capital of the free Western world after World War II...
...History shows that many an early newspaper was supported by businessmen and local organizations intent on building community...
...They are a check on each other...
...To non-writers this may seem much ado about little...
...It has been known for a decade at least as one of the world's "great" newspapers, like Le Monde of Paris, the Times of London, and the New York Times, a paper quoted where leaders meet, whose owners and editors rub elbows with the world's decision-makers, and by whose grace and favor politicians, artists, writers, scientists, thinkers, exist or do not exist for their respective constituencies...
...But it would be hard to prove that the new and growing Post of the time did a better job of either thing...
...Ultimately behind every publication there is the single consciousness of the person most responsible for it, and the collective consciousness of the editors and publishers in tune with that consciousness...
...If failed to recognize the blackening of Washington, the city," said another...
...It could be good if it resulted in a strong single paper with the strengths of both the Star and the Post...
...One of the obvious answers is that the Star was home base to influential columnists of varying views like Mary McGrory, Carl Rowan, and James Kilpatrick...
...Because of the Star politicians and bureaucrats alike were exposed to two editorial points of view...
...at the Star, even through three changes of ownership, the basis has been a family feeling and an esprit de corps...
...It was there when Lincoln walked from his boarding house to his own inauguration...
...Possibly...
...It kept going, for example, two social columns which kept us abreast- as if by right-of the doings of our well-to-do and prominent neighbors, and a gossip column which was like the amused and absorbed clucking which goes on everywhere about the peccadilloes of the people next door...
...By all accounts the basis of motivation at the Post is competition...
...Why then is the Star so widely mourned...
...Aren't we, after all, almost at the end of the newspaper age...
...More than that, since the filming of All the President's Men, the Post has become fixed in the national popular consciousness as the model of what a newspaper is and does and how it works...
...It was the Washington outlet for others like James Reston and William Buckley...
...The Post will certainly pick up some of the Star's best people...
...Its book review section under Jonathan Yardley frequently provided a second opinion on books of special import to people in government...
...That is the unacknowledged point in the current discussion...
...That these were read regularly by the nation's policymakers-or, at the very least, by their aides-meant that they were exposed to a breadth and depth of discussion far richer than if they had only the opinions of the Post's Joseph Kraft, Evans and Novak, David Broder, William Raspberry, and George Will to consider in common...
...Before they go the way of the railroads perhaps we should give some thought as to whether we want them to go, and what we want of them if they stay...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...
...Admittedly the Star was probably unknown to many of those who will be affected by its passing...
...They provided the history of day to day...
...They were the means by which the community knew itself as community...
...The inherent limitations of a single and particular vision of life and a particular view of that which is significant and meaningful run through a newspaper and all its departments...
...Perhaps from that time on its mirroring of Washington to itself was too partial.' 'The Star didn't follow the people to the suburbs," said one analyst...
...only 323,000 were reading the Star later in the day...
...Washington, like many other cities, will be a one-newspaper city, but the silencing of dialogue in the nation's capital will have serious consequences for the country...
...They were a faithful record of tne instruments by which people forged community-churches, schools, organizations, social groups, comings and goings...
...The Washington Post is, by general agreement, the Washington paper...
...But a newspaper is more than news...
...To the end the Star remained what a newspaper had once been-a reflection of the world to its community, a reflection of the community to itself...
...A STAR IS DEAD CONTENT, COMPLEXITY, CONNECTION WHETHER WE ARE aware of it or not, each one of us has been dealt a blow by the death of the Washington Star - announced by its last owner, Time, Inc., on July 23rd...
...The Star failed for various reasons: because it was an afternoon paper in a time when afternoon papers are unnecessary and difficult to distribute, because its original and successive owners did not comprehend change, but mostly because it did not attract advertising-or, to put it bluntly, because the businessmen and women did not see fit to give it a share of their advertising and, thus, allow it to earn its way...
...Newspapers can integrate or divide...
...That which was the Star will be gone...
...But monopoly has its built-in difficulties...
...But this need not be disaster," protested a friend of mine...
...Also of late years the Star has provided a lively forum in its "op-ed" pages and Sunday opinion section for occasional contributors whose views would not otherwise reach the nation's leaders...
...And why will its demise make such a difference...
...The passing of the Star makes it clear that we do not have much time to think...
...In a time in which most newspapers, trying to be relevant, have changed their erstwhile social sections into sections called ' 'Style'' or' 'Living'' and filled them with quasi-case histories and portraits of celebrities and officials in which the subjects are skewered to the page like so many dragonflies and grasshoppers, the Star never quite abandoned the older format...
...Throughout the history of American cities and towns, the newspapers were more than a source of news...
...Oddly enough, its religious section was more national in its scope and interests than the Post's (although the Post's Marjorie Hyer is one of the best writers in the field...
...It never quite separated the readers into the viewers and the viewed...
...In effort to save the paper Star writers went willingly without raises and even accepted the proposal made at one time that they should work five days for four days pay...
...No matter who goes from the Star to the Post, the Post can only be the Post...
...Different ways of working, too, have different end results...
...Don't most of us get our news from television and radio...
Vol. 108 • August 1981 • No. 15
