Bob Deans: Black and white and no longer read all over

But February made me shiver, with every paper I'd deliver. Bad news on the doorstep; I couldn't take one more step.

MARCH 26, 2009: My good friend, Bob Deans, was in Tiananmen Square when the tanks rolled in. Two days later Chinese soldiers pointed their weapons at him and flinched as if they were pulling the trigger, just because that is what you do to Western journalists when democracy rears its ugly head.

My good friend, Bob Deans, was in Islamabad during the world’s first riot following the publication of the book “Satanic Verses.” He walked over to the American Embassy to see what the commotion was all about and was soon being attacked by a mob – as Western journalists sometimes are. He was saved when police showed up and killed six people, the sort of thing that happens when the free press rears its ugly head.

And my good friend, Bob Deans, was walking with members of the Mujahedin just beyond the Khyber Pass when a Soviet jet spotted the group and turned to drop its bomb. They ran for cover — an abandoned brick and mud building. Deans and the “muj” somehow survived the shrapnel, a less-than-gentle reminder that freedom better not rear its ugly head either.

The author of “The River Where America Began” (for his interview on the Colbert Report http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/87481/may-23-2007/bob-deans), Bob Deans also covered the White House during portions of the Clinton and Bush administrations for Cox Newspapers, which includes the Atlanta Constitution. He knows much and has seen plenty. But if you ask him about the latest interesting thing in his life, he’s more likely to tell you about coaching his daughter’s grade school basketball team or his wife’s latest business-art-children’s book enterprise.

Bob Deans’ journalism career didn’t start behind a desk but on a bike delivering the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He remembers this:

“It was more than a daily newspaper to me, it was a daily miracle, the north star of civic discourse in good times and bad, the cultural totem pole we touched each day to remind us we were all on the same page, reading the same black inky word etched forever in newsprint. And the word became news at the unerring hands of reporters, remote and almost delphic figures with the alchemist's gift of rending order from chaos. They were all I had any right to expect from the minor gods of my schoolboy pantheon - omniscient, self-directed and utterly remote. I wanted to be one of those guys.”

Today, my best friend, Bob Deans, is out of a job, the latest victim of American’s insatiable desire to pay for anything but journalism. Everybody wants to talk about how newspapers are a lousy business model and the Internet has all the news for free anyway. Meanwhile, one of the very tenets of the American experiment – a free and freedom-loving press – is atrophying job by job.

Those who see the world only through blogs, Facebook and anonymous comments on chat boards will never understand what America lost today.

The angels weep.