Free Dominion by Randy Alcorn Page B

sports that had changed so much as he had. While he still loved a good game, especially football, maybe he’d just outgrown his unbridled enthusiasm, maybe he was less naive about life. For years he’d wanted to make the jump to general columnist, to leave sports as a career behind him. He’d thought it would be impossible, given his conservative politics. But things had changed at the Trib. A year ago he’d been allowed to shift to one general column a week, keeping two sports columns. Just five months ago they’d moved him to two general and one sports.
Jake Woods had been the only non-liberal in-house columnist, coming down moderate or conservative on most issues. There’d been the predictable negative responses, but mainly positive ones to Jake. Many readers thought the Trib was becoming more balanced. Next thing he knew, Clarence stepped through the door Jake opened. In fact, Jake had lobbied to get Clarence in there.
As Jess Foley, managing editor, often reminded them, newspapers were fighting for survival all across the country. They’d once had a monopoly on the delivery of information; they’d been the gatekeepers and hadn’t had to listen to their critics. But with fewer people reading news and more looking to the network tabloid fare, the trashy pseudo-news, the Trib had been forced to make sure it did less to alienate its constituency. The radio talk show phenomenon at both the national and local levels had bypassed the gatekeepers of the media elite and brought conservatives out of the closet. Many of them dropped their subscriptions to the Trib. As Jake put it, “That drew the attention of management like getting hit with a two-by-four draws the attention of a mule.”
But what really paved the way for Clarence’s breakthrough to general columnist, he believed, was the nation’s slap in the face of the mainstream press in the fall of 1994. The vast majority of newspapers endorsed liberal candidates, but in all but a few cases the voters went against the papers. The American people didn’t trust the press, didn’t follow the press. And they didn’t just send a message to Washington, D.C. They sent a message to the entire newspaper industry. Including the Trib. That’s when Raylon Berkley and Jess Foley first talked to Clarence about the possibility of doing a general column. He now basked in the thrill he’d felt, this moment from the past a drug to kill the pain of the present.
Clarence opened mail and sorted through mounds of papers. It was good to be back at work, where a man could forget his problems, or at least paper them over with other ones.
“Clarence?”
“Yeah?” He looked over his right shoulder to see Tim Newcomb. Twelve years younger than Clarence, red headed and energetic, Newcomb had already proven himself in his first three years out of J-school. He was a solid reporter.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Newcomb said. “And your niece.”
“Thanks. My niece is going to be fine, though.”
“Really? So she’s out of danger now? That’s great.”
“Well, not out of danger. But she’s going to make it.”
“I’m really glad. It’s hard to get facts in a newsroom, you know. Somebody told me she was still in critical condition.”
Clarence didn’t want to discuss it.
“Anyway,” Newcomb said, “do you want an update on stories we’ve been covering while you were gone?”
“Sure, Tim. Pull up a chair.”
Actually, since Clarence was a columnist, he didn’t really need the update to do his job. But he welcomed it. He’d read the sports page every day the last week, but the real story was in the newsroom, where reporters and editors and columnists bantered about what should go in and what shouldn’t. Often the most interesting angles on the story never got reported, either for lack of attribution or in the interests of taste. Yes, taste was still an issue in journalism, even if the old standards of taste had gone out of style with bobby socks and saddle