T

he Daily Iberian will spend time and money allowing the tyrants of the oil and gas industry to pretty much park themselves all over the paper as much as they like (Might as well just let Grow Louisiana have its own section at this point) and offer the bare minimum when it comes to reporting how the community feels about The Big Issues (the piece about Mike Francis visit here did very little to impress upon your readership just how dodgy and ill prepared the commissioner was for his own constituency).

I ask you, if you’re merely a handmaiden for people in positions of power, then what good are you? Every other form of media consumption serves to subtly and unsubtly propagandize the status quo in our American life. Our local paper should at the very least be reflective of the needs of the community, and that obviously will include going against the powers at be.

Let’s talk about how the PSC readily admits that Cleco is a monopoly and that it claims it is powerless to stop it despite being an office that wields almost cartoonish levels of power.

Let’s talk about how our city has money to spend on massive glamour projects for the petite bourgeoise owner class (those that can’t hack it in a major metro but get to use the airport as a personal playground) while also then cutting into our own tax revenues by allowing for special tax zones.

They claim it’s merely cutting into the federal governments pocket and we’ll still see local business flourish, but those same federal funds come right back to us when we have to repair the damage these industries cause due to climate change.

I’m not saying that all of the world’s ills are to blame on one local newspaper, but I am saying that in a world that is on the precipice of so much tumult, hardworking people need our journalists to raise the alarm about these real and important issues.