By: Forrest R. Church, Publisher
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
I will be honest — I am worn out. For weeks now, the television, the radio, the billboards, the newspaper ads and the mailbox have been hammering me with the same thing. Flyers two deep. Three deep. Four deep. Sometimes ten deep. (Half-kidding, of course, but I may have started a recycling pile just for politics.)
And every one of them ended the same way. A voice says, “I approve this message.”
Approve it? Somebody sat in a room, read a flyer that treated a neighbor like a public enemy, and said, “Perfect. Send it.” The nastiness did not pick a team. It went after candidates on the left and the right, and some of it was so ugly I would not read it out loud at a church potluck.
Well, I do not approve that message. And for the record, neither does OUR newspaper. We do not take sides. We do not endorse candidates. Not going to happen. We cover Williams and Fulton County left, right or center, imperfections and all.
Let me be perfectly clear. I defend the campaigns’ right to say it. Freedom of speech is the backbone of this country and of my profession. I just wish somebody would defend my right to a quiet mailbox or to have a football game on without neighbors calling one another everything but Hitler.
Case in point. We go through the mail at home every day, and three days after Election Day, three more glossy political flyers showed up. Three. The polls had closed and almost all election results were determined. I suppose they are trying to win over the recycling bin or the Postal Service responsible for delivery was delayed.
Some of my colleagues at other newspapers love to jump into the mix. Even some who told us they were neutral have retired and now blast away on social media, showing their biases. So how do we stay out of the mud? Frankly, it is not rocket science. We go to the meeting, we write down what happened, and we print it. You are intelligent grown-ups. You can figure out what to think about it without me holding your hand. And if a campaign wants to make its pitch, it can buy an ad like everybody else. Frankly, does a flyer or a Facebook post change anyone’s mind? I doubt it. Did some AI-designed image downgrading a political opponent change your vote because of a social media post? Again, I doubt it.
Staying out of it is not free. I took plenty of flak in the weeks leading up to the election, I always do (kill the messenger, version 2026). Two weeks out, I cut off letters to the editor. Not to silence anybody’s voice — a letter that lands right before the vote leaves inadequate time to respond, so I do not allow a last-minute punch on an opponent without adequate time for a response. Our policy is always to cut letters off two weeks ahead out of fairness.
I hear it over school levies, too. Why will the newspaper not take a position? I see both sides. I have children in school, I want the best for them, and I believe schools are a great investment in our community. I also understand the elderly neighbor living on a fixed income who has not had a kid in school in 50 years and the tax bill is more than they can handle with $4 gas prices. So both sides share their perspectives in our pages, and I stay out of it. I could very easily take a side. I choose not to.
Say a reader named Karen tells me (I will not use the name from a nasty email response I received), “Forrest, a newspaper that will not pick a side is ducking. Grow a spine.” Karen, that is a fair shot.
But here’s the reality: you have never had more people telling you what to think. Look at your mailbox. Has it made any of us wiser? Kinder? I didn’t think so. What is hard to find anymore is one place where the neighbor with the red sign and the neighbor with the blue sign can read the same page and both trust it. I will take that over my opinion on a candidate any day. (Believe me, the balding guy in the mirror has plenty of opinions. They just do not belong on the front page.)
Everybody is talking about how big the blue wave was. It was a shellacking, but not the biggest. Bill Clinton’s party lost 54 House seats in 1994, George W. Bush’s gained 8 in 2002 and then lost 30 in 2006, Barack Obama’s lost 63 in 2010, Donald Trump’s lost 41 in his first midterm in 2018, and Joe Biden’s lost 9 in 2022. President Trump’s party went into this election holding 218 House seats. As of this writing, the net loss is tracking at 42 to 47 seats, with The Associated Press count showing it has won 169 so far. Another 11 seats are not yet counted for either party. History nearly always swings this way in a midterm, toward the party out of power: the president’s party has lost House seats in 20 of the 23 midterms going back to 1934. The pendulum swings to one extreme, and then swings to the other. That does not scare me. What worries me is who is pushing it.
I believe most of America lives in the middle, not on these extreme ends on both sides of the aisle. But the extremists in both parties are gaining control. A strong opinion does not make somebody an extremist (I have plenty of those, ask my wife). An extremist, to me, is somebody who looks at the other half of the country and sees an enemy instead of a neighbor, and who is elected solely off the mindset of “revenge.”
And the keyboard warriors are not helping. They talk crap online, unfriend and block their own neighbors, then stand right next to those same neighbors at a high school football game and act perfectly civilized. It is a weird culture we live in.
I think the football game version is the real us. I bet most of us know somebody with a yard sign we would never put in our own yard — and we would still lend that person a ladder in a heartbeat. That is the real Northwest Ohio.
So here is what I am asking. Next time a flyer shows up telling you who to hate, toss it in the recycling (mine is full, use your own). Then write a letter to the editor. Tell your neighbors what you are FOR. And sign your name to it — no hiding behind a smartphone like the keyboard warriors with fake names on all these community Facebook groups.
My end of the deal? If it fits the word limit and does not threaten anybody, we print it. Left, right or center. Right next to the letter from the neighbor who thinks you are dead wrong.
I remain optimistic that great days are ahead for our community newspaper, our small Northwest Ohio towns and our country — because the pendulum swings but it never breaks, and the people holding onto it are still neighbors who can sit down at the same table.
-I’m Forrest Church, and I approve this message.
(Paid for by the committee hoping to return decency to our great country who paid nothing for my opinions)