Long before Facebook, Twitter, cell phones and modern cancel culture, there existed a cancel culture not much different than today. Well, maybe not quite.
Santa Barbara has a colorful history filled with colorful characters, and none more so than the multitude of men (no women until the present co-publisher of the News-Press, Wendy McCaw) who took on the roles of recording that history through innumerable renditions of newspapers the city went through.
Cancel culture already started with the Santa Barbara Gazette in 1855. Publisher Rudolphus Hubbard questioned the planning of building a Catholic church, and prominent local families pushed the legislature to do away with the paper’s advertising. Sound familiar? The paper folded.
It wouldn’t be until 1868 the Santa Barbara Post was born, the precursor to the present-day News-Press. With the financial backing of the wealthy Col. W.W. Hollister, preacher Joseph A. Johnson traded the pulpit for the pen and produced a daily paper in 1872.
Today we have Soros-created district attorneys releasing killers on the streets, only to kill again, but back in the early days of the Santa Barbara Post, Rev. Johnson had written in the paper that District Attorney W.T. Wilson had played “footsie with seedy characters.” For his words, he was knocked down (literally) and horsewhipped by the aforementioned D.A. — and right on State Street!
Today when you give your opinion, you are scourged in a different way, on social media. Though death threats or beatings can also be part of the “I don’t like what you’re saying,” cancel mob.
Some editorials back in the day did in fact produce deadly results. A successor to the reverend, Editor Theodore M. Glancey wrote the truth, something dishonest people don’t like to hear. He wrote about a candidate for D.A. who would threaten and beat people who disagreed with him. (Again, sound familiar?) The candidate didn’t like facts being made public, so he met the editor in downtown Santa Barbara, pulled a gun and shot the publisher in the back as he was trying to run away.
Despite that the murder was undisputed, the district attorney candidate was acquitted. I didn’t realize Soros D.A’s and the O.J. jury has been around that long.
In a similar move, the mass media today manipulates election outcomes. News-Press Publisher Thomas M. Storke, the more familiar name to most locals as it relates to Santa Barbara’s history of newspapers, took a risk in 1932. He told the Santa Barbara Daily News that FDR got the Democratic nomination for president before a formal decision had even been made. I guess lucky for him it turned out to be the case.
Today when CNN blatantly attempts to call elections or makes false claims about polls, the network just ignores the fact it was wrong and moves on to another topic. CNN has no fear of retribution and has never called out for it. No apologies necessary.
Mass media today are one collective opinionated body saying and doing as they please and make things up as they go.
In this modern age, the news comes at us at a blinding pace and changes literally in seconds as you’re hearing it. There’s been a dynamic shift in how we get information.
I, for one, still love to read a newspaper. I don’t consider myself so much old-school. I simply enjoy the time sitting in my recliner or over breakfast reading the stories and holding something tangible. I find it therapeutic.
Unlike the early days of the News-Press, where differences were settled on the streets with a whipping or murder, the punishment today comes in the form of slow torture and personal defamation. Social media has become the sovereign ruler of what you hear and read. They are the leaders of “misinformation.”
We the people who only want to learn and know factually what’s going on in the country and around the world are spoon-fed what the new form of information delivery wants to put out there. (Again, think of Russia and China). Whereas in the “old” days if the people didn’t like a publication and failed to support it, the advertisers would pull the plug and the paper would either need to adjust accordingly or fold. Today, big tech has become too big. Even if they get caught with their pants down, they just pull ‘em back up and continue on their merry way of doing business as they please.
And a bit of irony, Donald Trump was kicked off Twitter, but Vladimir Putin is still on there. Whose side is the media really on?
Give me a good old newspaper anytime. And when I’m done reading it, if I have a bird, I can recycle. Save the planet and all that. Unlike big tech.
I wish there was a digital form I could use for a bird’s toilet.
Henry Schulte welcomes questions or comments at hschulteopinions@gmail.com.
