Austin Lewter, my former editor from where I worked in North Texas before coming to Silsbee in February 2023, has an article in the February 2025 issue of the Texas Press Messenger titled, “Where have all the opinion pages gone?”
In it, he notes that, among many other changes in newspapers in recent years, a major change is that fewer newspapers today have opinion pages.
He had noticed eight years ago that fewer newspapers now are having opinion pages, and said he believes they are continuing to decrease.
At the Silsbee Bee, we have an opinion page such as this one, usually on page 4, every week.
Our problem is that we have trouble getting people to submit columns, letters to the editor or expressing their opinions in other ways.
Last week at the top of page one of the Silsbee Bee, candidates for upcoming city council and school board elections were listed.
We welcome letters to the editor supporting a favorite candidate. None have been submitted yet.
Prior to the general election last November, we printed a few letters to the editor supporting Republican candidates, such as Janis Holt, a local running for state representative, and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
We got a phone call from a Democrat asking if we simply destroyed letters from people supporting Democrats.
I quickly told him we did not, but that we just never got any.
We welcome letters to the editor from people of all political parties. And we will run opinion letters even if we disagree with the content.
I admired Austin Lewter that he strongly believed in running letters and columns from people he disagreed with. On one occasion, I wrote an opinion column. He told me he disagreed with it, but he ran it anyway.
Lewter also noted in his column that something else missing in many of our newspapers today is humor.
People these days are badly in need of a good laugh once in a while.
While in North Texas I went to the same barber for more than 10 years. He thought it was funny that, as a newspaper man, I had said, “The only thing worth reading in the newspapers is the funny papers.”
When I had an appointment with him, he would always have the color pages from the Sunday comics ready for me to read.
Newspaper people also need to have the ability to laugh at themselves.
Will Rogers, who was once the nation’s most popular newspaper columnist, said, “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.”
When Richard Nixon came to Longview in the early 1970s, he was quoted as saying, “East Texas is a vast journalistic wasteland.”
Someone said, “If you don’t read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.”
I strongly disagree with that statement.
I have often said, sarcastically, “At least 80 percent of what I write in newspapers is true.”
Dan Eakin is the editor of the Silsbee Bee in Silsbee, Texas. He is also minister at Woodrow Baptist Church in Silsbee. Eakin is a former News-Record staff writer and longtime minister at Collinsville Bible Baptist Church. This column was originally published in the most recent edition of the Silsbee Bee.