Don't Knock The Rag

"MOM BOILED HER BABY AND ATE IT," read the full-page headline on the front of a recent Boston tabloid. Everyone who picked it up had the same reaction: they saw the lipstick-red banner head at the top, they read the teasers running down the left-hand column ("Toilet paper beauty linked to Teddy's past? page 3"), and they said this is it--the Boston Herald-American has sunk to an all-time low.

For many, it came as a surprise to discover that this particular issue was actually an MIT parody called the "Boston Reamer-American." Even tales of kitchen infanticide did not seem too far-fetched for the Herald's salacious front page.

The Herald has become one of the nation's easiest newspapers to rag on. A year ago, it switched to tabloid format, and it has now resolutely plunked down all its chips on violent crimes and eye-catching scandal. Today, Boston residents who want their news served up with an eye to long-term significance, not short-term sensation, know they are down to one choice And for them, the morning newsstand routine of reaching for the Globe now also includes time out to cluck at the Herald.

But scorers of Boston's tabloid should remember that no matter how titillating its fare, the city would be impoverished without it. In its enduring ability to support more than one daily newspaper, the Hub is a dinosaur among American cities and the day it loses that distinction will be a sad one.

Philadelphia joined the gaping majority earlier this year, when its Bulletin folded, leaving the Inquirer as the city's only publishing daily. In Washington, the demise of the Star made the Post the only paper on the stands--until a peculiar competitor arose in the form of the daily Times, bankrolled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

The current plight of journalism in the capital has been the subject of a great deal of woeful discourse, as many talented reporters have been reduced to signing on with a publisher who doubles as a brain-washer of impressionable youth.

But the Moonies have made the newspaper business in Washington immeasurably healthier than it is today in Philadelphia and would be in Boston if the Herald shut down. The loss a city suffers when it becomes a one-newspaper town cannot be expressed too often. Nothing improves an editor's diligence and a reporter's aggressiveness more than the eternal dread of being scooped. That fear abates, to be sure, when the competition is a scandal-monger or a cult mouthpiece. But if competition vanishes altogether, the surviving newspaper is left with all the incentive to excel of a student in a one-on-one course graded on a curve.

Boston, perhaps more than any other American metropolis, is a city whose politicians and bureaucrats are kept honest by the press--a city where investigative reporting has a tangible, healthy influence on day-to-day policy-making. Just by publishing daily, the Herald keeps the level of this influence high, and insures that Boston will not fall into the predicament A. J. Liebling articulated in 1961.

"There should be a great, free, living stream of information, and equal access to it for all," Liebling wrote. "Our present news situation, in the United States, is breaking down to something like the system of water distribution in a casaba, where peddlers wander about with goatskins of water on small donkeys, and the inhabitants send down an oil tin and a couple of pennies when they feel thirst."

With the Herald, Boston's stream of information takes some bizarre turns, but the paper deserves credit for keeping it flowing at all.