On Labor Day, Thursday, September 6, Mexican trucks will begin rolling into the U.S. in a “pilot” program implementing the NAFTA. The Bush Administration has successfully avoided a court-ordered shut-down sought by the Teamsters Union, the Sierra Club, and Public Citizen.

U.S. truckers are the losers. The effect will likely be lost jobs as the cheaper Mexican transport displaces their American counterparts. Economists explain to us that this is the “free market” at work. The economists sit at desks and the truckers sit at the steering wheels of large snorting vehicles barreling down highways. The truckers must lose their jobs for a mythical “free market” but no job losses are anticipated for economists.

So we get the Mexican trucks, 100 companies launching loads from Mexico into the U.S. hauling Chinese goods. In return, U.S. trucks will presumably be launching into Mexico. We already have such a program with Canada. Truck transport on the North American continent will be changed.

What is going to happen to American truckers should give pause to all Americans. Our own government is taking actions detrimental to our fellow American citizens. It is the truckers today; who is it tomorrow? Last year, for example, we discovered editing jobs were being outsourced to India.

Newsrooms across America are being decimated for various reasons. Most of the decline in journalistic employment is being attributed to the technological advances in electronic media. That is how the editor in India got your job (that and the fact that he speaks English also).

When we were growing up in the Alpine of the 1950s, the local weekly newspaper was set up on a linotype machine in a process that wasn’t very different from the way newspaper printers worked in Colonial America of 200 years ago. The work was done by our neighbor J. W. Prestridge. The newspaper was locally owned, edited and printed and the revenues were local too.

We have been reminded of the history of American journalism lately by a 2006 book published by Public Affairs — Infamous Scribblers by Eric Burns.

At the time of the American Revolution fewer than 100 newspapers were published in America. About four million Americans lived in the British Colonies along the eastern seaboard. Most of the newspapers received a wide circulation but such circulation was necessarily limited in velocity by the condition of the seas and the muddiness of the Colonial roads.

There was no such thing as a “journalist” in Colonial America. Printers thrived, however, who both reported and printed what was published. A printer usually owned his own printing press. Often he was supported by politically active patrons. A printer took advertising. He sold and distributed the newspaper himself.

During the Colonial period no distinction existed between “news” and “editorial comment.” The author simply scribbled his ideas out and printed the result.

Benjamin Franklin wrote in the October 1, 1728 Pennsylvania Gazette that publishing a newspaper

“… is not so easy an Undertaking as many People imagine it to be. The Author of a Gazette (in the opinion of the Learned) ought to be qualified with an extensive Acquaintance with Languages, a great Easiness and Command of Writing and Relating Things clearly and intelligibly, and in a few words; he should be able to speak of War both by Land and Sea; be well acquainted with Geography, with the History of the Time, with the several Interests of Princes and States, the Secrets of Courts, and the Manners and Customs of all Nations. Men thus accomplish’d are very rare in this remote Part of the World; and it would be well if the writer of these Papers could make up among his Friends what is wanting in himself.”

President George Washington voluntarily retired to Mount Vernon in 1797. He was famously short-tempered with newspapers, furious with their scandalizing and inaccuracy. But we learn that in retirement Washington subscribed to and read ten newspapers. “On first retiring, he had canceled all his subscriptions; he wanted no more journalism in his abode or on his mind, no more challenges to his contentment or to his reputation (Burns, Infamous Scribblers, p. 410).”

Press, or journalism, and politics in America are closely intertwined activities. The rules for the one are interdependent with the rules for the other. Change the rules for politics and you change the way journalists report those politics.

The rules of journalism are changing. We are witnessing the rise of a new form of communication through the Internet. The available technology has stimulated many new forms of communication. The phenomenon of e-mail is an example.

And here in Alpine we are in the midst of a highly unusual struggle. The Attorney General of Texas and the local 83rd District Attorney are attempting to outlaw a new form of communication, e-mail, among local politicians. Outlawing it among politicians of course affects us all.

That is only one example. If an American trucker thinks he is challenged by new ways, he should talk to a journalist. •

(Also published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas September 6, 2007.)