Clarence Page

When I came to work at the Chicago Tribune as a newly graduated journalism major, I had something that sounded like a plan. I’ll spend two or three years here and, if things don’t work out, I’ll move on.

That was 50 years ago — and I’m still here.

Oh, yes, I spent about four years in local television news in the early 1980s, but soon realized, as an old broadcast saying goes, that I had a “great face for radio.”

I just want to take a moment to thank all of you readers for putting up with me all these years, even the haters.

I’m not kidding, haters, bless your hearts.

Like other commentators, I do hear from some readers who are less appreciative of my purported wisdom than others may be. But I also keep in mind the thoughtful notes I received from readers who, after the first time I called in sick, who said of my absence, “I almost never agree with you but I do hope you feel better soon.”

Now that I’m in the old timers club, I grumpily find myself expressing the sort of attitudes I used to mock with my fellow young reporters.

“The only constant in life is change.”

As an African American from the baby boomer generation, I’ve seen a lot of changes that I was eager to see. As a child in the 1950s and ‘60s, I was intrigued by the newsrooms I saw on shows such as “Adventures of Superman.”

Yet I also was annoyed by the absence of many women or people of color, which also was the norm in the real world, except in Black newspapers and other ethnic press.

Fortunately, diversity is increasingly the norm in today’s newsrooms, although technology has led to fewer newspapers, especially covering local news. But we do have more essayists posting online with vastly varying degrees of credibility. Some are excellent, but, consumers beware!

A 2018 study by three MIT scholars confirmed my worst fears: false news spreads more rapidly on Twitter than real news.

We should not be too surprised by that. Tabloids such as the National Enquirer always have competed well against the establishment press. They’re more entertaining, after all, even when they are less truthful.

But a healthy democracy cannot survive on fake news alone. Which brings me unavoidably to our current situation with former President Donald Trump. How has he been able to infect our brains, asks my colleague in punditry, David Brooks, including the brains of those of us who think we should know better?

And how does he keep reinfecting them even now — after his thuggish behavior at the debate with Joe Biden in 2020, after the Jan. 6 committee hearings revealed his attempts to overturn the election, and now, after his federal indictment reveals how flagrantly he put national security and the safety of Americans at risk?

But after years of his flamboyant violations of norms, I am less surprised by his antics than appalled by the support he immediately received from leading Republicans and, according to polls, most Republican voters.

Suddenly, the “party of law and order,” as we have known it since at least the 1960s, doesn’t trust our own government enough to believe a 37-count federal indictment for allegedly refusing to turn over classified documents should have a day in court?

Instead, we’re hearing “defund the FBI” calls from Trump and echoed by MAGA congressmen — a situation which, for those of us who covered the FBI’s pursuit of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, sounds like a world turned upside down.

“When you are finished changing, you are finished,” said Benjamin Franklin, according to my fast research assistant. (Thanks, Google!)

Routine helps us feel as though we have some measure of control in our lives. An excess of change can give many of us the unsettling feeling that we’re losing control, if we ever had any.

The best advice I can offer in the middle of such rapid and confusing change is the basic advice for approaching any free market transactions: “Caveat emptor.” That’s Latin for “Let the buyer beware.”

Today’s media environment puts more of an obligation on news consumers than ever before to check your sources with no less skepticism than you show toward the old-school mainstream media.

We owe at least that much attention to the search for truth, which never ends.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.