Something's missing

One Amendment More or Less

By Rick Horowitz

The tiny sign taped to the front door of the Anyville Trumpet attracted almost no attention at first. It was the Fourth of July, after all, and even a newspaper deserves a day off. With holiday festivities going on all over town, nobody gave it much thought.

When the sign was still there on the fifth of July, people started noticing.

"Closed," the sign said. It was an ordinary piece of office paper, and the single word was written in a careful hand. There was no signature.

The Anyville Trumpet had filled a solid red-brick building right there on Main Street longer than anyone could remember, although the motto that ran across the front page of every issue -- "Sounding Freedom's Call Since 1887" -- provided the necessary clues to its more observant readers. For them, and for the rest of Anyville, the appearance of the Trumpet every morning was a minor, if unremarked, miracle: like the sun coming up, but with a horoscope and comics.

The citizens of Anyville were accustomed to the Trumpet. So when the sign was still there after the holiday was over, people wondered what had happened. A sudden financial setback? These were tough times for newspapers. A major illness? The Trumpet had been in the same small family for nearly a century; one or two of them had been in poor health lately. Whatever it was, everyone agreed, it had to be something serious. It wasn't like the Trumpet to decide to skip an issue.

Assuming, of course, that it was the Trumpet's own decision. Just down the block at Happy Cups, the regulars weren't so sure. If it had been a financial setback, they certainly would have caught wind of it before it came to this. And a family illness? There surely would have been some mention of it on the sign, if only the name of the afflicted party and a plea for prayers.

But there was nothing but the single word, in handwriting no one could identify.

Had someone else decided to shut the Trumpet down?

The newspaper had ruffled some feathers recently; there was no denying that. That story about the mayor's brother-in-law and the paving contract -- what a fuss that was! They'd never seen the mayor turn so many shades of red in a single press conference. When he said that the Trumpet had a lot of nerve, putting things like that in the newspaper, and that the Trumpet would pay for what they did, everyone thought he was just spouting off. Could he have meant it? Could he have done it?

And what about the city councilman with the fancy new house and the fancy new car, and his wife being paid to do "consulting" for the group that wanted the casino license? Wasn't there something just a little bit fishy about that whole arrangement? The Trumpet must have thought so. By the third installment, the casino figured out it really didn't need a "consultant" after all. The first thing the councilman did was cancel his subscription. Was there a second thing?

But the biggest story of all was the expose on the police. The Trumpet's ace reporter spent weeks secretly trailing Anyville's police officers on their beats, and she found that they spent almost as much time napping as they did fighting crime. She even took pictures, which ran five days in a row on Page One.

"How dare they?" the police chief sputtered when the stories started appearing. The Trumpet was putting the lives of Anyville's brave patrolmen at risk, he said. The Trumpet was putting the lives of everyone in Anyville at risk. The reporter should be thrown in jail for creating a public hazard, he said -- and the editors, too! (In the meantime, he instructed his men to crack down on double-parking near the Trumpet.) Did the chief actually carry out his threat? Was the Trumpet's staff now locked away somewhere to protect public safety?

Truth be told, not everyone in Anyville would have been upset about it. Those two dozen picketers, for instance, who'd been marching in front of the newspaper office every day for the past three months. "The Trumpet? Dump It!!" they chanted. "No News Is Good News!!" "The Bill of Rights Is For Sissies!!"

Suddenly the protesters were nowhere to be seen. Had they known something was going to happen? Had they been part of making it happen?

So many questions -- and no place to turn for reliable answers. Just a single word written on an ordinary piece of paper.

"Closed."

Posted 7/5/06. Standing up for your right to know -- Rick Horowitz offers award-winning commentary right here!

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist, TV commentator, writing coach and public speaker.

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