The Bradenton Herald is not perfect. But it’s much better than the alternative | Letter to the editor

To begin, I need to say I rarely, if ever agree with your editorial content. That being said, I come from a long line of newspaper pressmen and linotype operators. I had people, long passed, who worked for the NY Times, the NY Post, the Long Island Press and Sarasota Herald-Tribune. I was working part-time for the NYT when the pressman union steward took pressmen from the building for a three-hour meeting in protest of printing the “Pentagon Papers”. (Violated contract, paid a fine.)

Anyone believing we don’t need a local press need only consider the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, postwar-China, prewar-Japan, Fascist Italy, apartheid South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Somoza’s or Ortega’s Nicaragua. The list goes on.

I worked at the Times because my father was pressroom foreman and he could get his 16-year-old son part-time work at $6 an hour in 1970. (Labor law said we must be 18, but he was my Dad.) He passed away, I joined the Navy and my newspaper work was over.

The local paper is not perfect but it is miles above no daily paper at all. I subscribe, I donated to the drive a few months back and will again if there is another. I hope the Bradenton Herald survives COVID-19 and I will help if I can.

I’m not a journalist but I hope my point is clear.

Stephen Essex

Bradenton

This story was originally published July 7, 2020 at 2:49 PM.