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 The Chronicle welcomes you online! Please feel free to respond to these editorials or letters to the editor by sending your letters to the editor.

We condense letters; most, as published, won't exceed 300 words. A letter must include the writer's name and city, which will be published, and an address and telephone number for verification, which will not be published. Writers may be limited to one letter every 30 days. Open letters, letters to third parties and poetry are not considered. Letters from people living outside the Chronicle's circulation area usually are not considered.

Column: Government, media fail Georgia's greatness

Editors note: The author, who has been a reporter for Morris News Service since 1985, is leaving journalism for the law profession. This is his last column for The Chronicle.

Web posted May 23, 1999

By Frank LoMonte
Columnist

You're about to read a word seldom seen in this newspaper column in its nine years. That word is ``I.''

The omission has been purposeful.

Politics and the press are full enough of ``experts'' who believe their soon-to-be moot opinions about politics are precious gems. Anyone with more than 450 deeply felt personal beliefs about Georgia state government (that's a column a week for nine years) probably needs to be sedated, not listened to.

Having said that, it's time to step out from behind the safety of third person to say goodbye.

Newspapering is a fickle business, one that few people get to leave gracefully on their own terms. For that opportunity, I will always be grateful to the Morris family, which publishes this newspaper, and to some patient and forgiving supervisors, Richard Allport, Rexanna Lester and Edward Skinner.

I thought for quite a while about -- given one last weekend atop the soapbox -- what message I'd like to leave with.

Part of me was tempted to use the opportunity to plug my simple, one-step solution to the campaign finance system.

MAKE IT LEGAL for anyone to give any candidate any amount of money -- hundreds, thousands, even millions -- as long as it's anonymous. And make it a felony punishable by life in prison to tell anyone you gave him a campaign contribution.

Money would dry up instantly when special interests realized they'd no longer get credit -- and be able to call in favors -- for what they gave.

On the other hand, I was inclined to talk about education, the most important thing state government does.

Here, too, the problem is obvious and the solution is simple: school starts and ends too early in the day. Going to school needs to be a 9-to-5 job, especially during teen years, when idle afternoons promote experimentation with

sex and drugs.

Let parents get kids to school somewhere between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m., to account for varying work schedules. Everything before 9 a.m. and after 3 p.m. would be supervised study hall, freeing some evening homework hours for actual parent-and-child conversation.

THOSE IDEAS all sounded great -- until I got the phone call on May 7. My father, who thought he had nothing worse than the flu, was in the emergency room suffering with the advanced stages of lymphatic cancer.

He is a tough old soldier, and his quiet courage has been inspiring. Thinking about losing him has given new weight to my favorite throwaway line for students who ask what they can do to become successful journalists: Get born into a family that encourages you to love reading and to ask questions.

Let me honor my father's bravery today by saying the boldest words I can muster. Georgia is a state of exquisite natural beauty that is not and never will be great until its lackluster news media leads the drumbeat to run out its corrupt state legislative leaders.

This state has some tremendously bright and well-intentioned elected officials. State Rep. Charles Smith Jr. of St. Marys and Bobby Baker of the Public Service Commission, to name two, are models of honesty for whom voters should pray nightly.

But the contribution of a few outstanding individuals is drowned by a system in which the spineless majority of lawmakers continues to honor the unworthy -- backroom wheeler-dealers who sell out the public to corporate lobbyists, and shameless skirt-chasers who abuse their power to coerce young women -- with offices of leadership.

STATE GOVERNMENT'S proper job is to protect the helpless public against abuses by insurance companies, developers, nursing homes and utilities. But House Speaker Tom Murphy's insular circle of leaders -- with members who depend on lobbyists to finance their campaigns, pay for their hunting trips, employ their indolent family members and provide their barroom dance partners -- returns to Atlanta each January to protect these industries against the public.

The Capitol's culture is so pervaded by the selling of influence that even decent, hard-working leaders have lost their capacity for outrage. News that a legislator has been arrested for stealing through the state budget brings nothing more than a so-what and a shrug.

This sickening system is perpetuated with the acquiescence of a compliant or downright ignorant news media, which on the whole has never appreciated the enormous importance of state government decisions on the daily lives of viewers and readers.

NO LESS THAN government, the first and highest duty of the news media is to protect the public against abuses by the privileged and powerful. If we are not about that -- if instead we are about providing daily updates on the length of Star Wars ticket lines -- then we are no better than barkers at the carnival of human freaks.

The new generation of newspaper ``leaders'' charts its course by watching brainless television news and trying to be just like it, or by worthless public-opinion polls that fail to account for a common-sense reality: Customers cannot volunteer that they are interested in reading about something that newspapers have refused to tell them about.

Georgians frankly deserve better than they are getting.

AND I CANNOT think of a higher standard for our public servants -- those in the news business and those in government -- than this one: Be as honest and fearless and uncompromising as my dad.