Canadian newsprint isn’t the enemy: Tariffs are
TALKING POINT BY DAVID CHAVERN
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very day at the News Media Alliance headquarters, a stack of newspapers arrives for the staff and myself. But with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission currently considering tariffs on Canadian newsprint, those days of screen-free reading could be coming to an end. The fact that newsprint is being threatened is the work of one newsprint mill in the Pacific Northwest, NORPAC. In August 2017, NORPAC petitioned the Department of Commerce to begin applying tariffs to newsprint imported from Canada, claiming the imported paper was harming the American newsprint industry. But NORPAC is not acting in the best interests of newsprint consumers or the U.S. paper industry at large — it is acting in its own interest and no one else’s. The buying and selling of newsprint has always been regional without regard for the border. Consumers of newsprint — from newspaper and book publishers to tele-
PHOTO BY THE VILLAGER
The Villager, like other New York State communit y papers, would be hur t by new tariffs on Canadian newsprint.
phone directory manufacturers — tend to buy newsprint in their region, close to their printing operations. The printers who typically utilize Canadian newsprint are those in the Northeast and Midwest, where there are currently no U.S. mills operating. But those regions are not newsprint deserts because of unfair trade by Canadian paper mills. Rather, newsprint mills shut down or converted to producing other, more profitable paper products when the demand for newsprint fell, something that has been happening steadily for decades. Since 2000, the demand for newsprint in North America has dropped by 75 percent. But affordable Canadian paper has helped keep the printed news alive and flourishing well into the 21st century. With
new tariffs, though, many smaller newspapers will feel their belts tightening. The combination of preliminary countervailing and antidumping duties increase the cost of imported newsprint by as much as 32 percent, and a number of newspapers have already experienced price increases and a disruption in supply. If the International Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce make these tariffs permanent in the coming months, it could lead some small local publishers to cut their print product entirely — or even shut their doors. Some, like NORPAC, may argue that by imposing duties on Canadian imports, we’re saving American jobs and boosting our own economy. But while that may sometimes be true for other industries, the opposite is true of newsprint. What we’re seeing with the newsprint tariffs is not a government acting to try to better the economy for its citizens. Instead, it is “political arbitrage” by one private investment group — where it is effectively looking to use the U.S. government to tax local and community newspapers across the country in order to bolster its own bottom line. When considering whether to take NORPAC’s claims seriously, D.O.C. excluded input from U.S. newsprint mills owned by Canadian companies — specifically Resolute Forest Products and White Birch. Excluding manufacturers who, dur-
ing the period of investigation, had three functioning newsprint mills in the U.S. because they have sister mills in Canada, shows an unwillingness to understand the borderless newsprint industry and the restructuring that has taken place in recent decades. If the tariffs on Canadian newsprint are allowed to stand, we’re not only risking a centuries-old relationship with our neighbors to the north, but we’re putting our own U.S. news industry in jeopardy. While the big national and regional papers may have less trouble finding the funds to keep their print editions coming, we could see small publishers lose footing, and those tiny local papers are some of the most vital members of our news community. Under the right conditions, those papers can find a way to maintain their footing — but if the newsprint industry can’t support them, those communities will become news deserts, and that’s a future none of us want. We may not be able to save the entire industry by keeping tariffs off our paper, but we can keep it thriving while we reposition ourselves for the years to come. Having affordable newsprint will help us do that. Chavern is president and C.E.O. of the News Media Alliance. He has spent 30 years in executive strategic and operational roles, and most recently completed a decade-long tenure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
New York kids should be free to be Free-Range RHYMES WITH CRAZY BY LENORE SKENAZY
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h, to be as ahead of the curve as Utah! That state just passed the firstin-the-country Free-Range Parenting Law, based on the movement I founded, Free-Range Kids. The law guarantees that parents who choose to let their kids play outside, walk to school, wait briefly in the car (under some circumstances) or come home with a latchkey will not be considered “negligent.” Why would anyone need a law like that? Because being investigated or even arrested for giving kids some old-fashioned, unsupervised time is now something parents have to worry about, thanks to two recent developments: 1. The belief that any time kids are out of their parents’ sight, they’re automatically in grave danger. 2. Cell phones. Here’s the toxic scenario: A passerby sees a child outside on his TheVillager.com
or her own. This has become so rare, it is like spotting a lemur escaped from the zoo. So what do they do? They whip out their phone and dial 911. Then they pat themselves on the back — after all, they just “saved” a child — and off they go. Do they stop and make sure the child is actually O.K.? Of course not! All that matters is that they made the call. They’re on a moral high. What happens next can involve anything from a shrug by the cops, to a warning to the parents, to a Child Protective Services investigation, to an actual arrest. For example, the state of Illinois cited Natasha Felix for neglect after she let three children, ages 5, 9 and 11, play in the park next to her home, where she could see them from her window. She checked on them every 10 minutes, but a passerby thought the kids were unsupervised, and called Child Protective Services. It took two years of fighting before a state appellate court overturned the finding of neglect. Or there was the Omaha woman who was taking her niece out of the SUV and was shocked when the wind blew the door shut with her keys and the child inside. The car locked! The aunt, the girl’s mom, and two other relatives frantically tried to open the door using a hanger and
screwdriver, and when they couldn’t, they called 911. The cops arrived, broke the window, and got the child out, safe and sound. Then they ticketed the mom on “suspicion of child abuse by neglect.” There have been other stories of families investigated for letting their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the park in Silver Spring, Maryland; a South Carolina mom thrown in jail for letting her 9-year-old play in a popular sprinkler park without her; a Connecticut mom clapped in handcuffs when she overslept and her son, 8, walked to school on his own. And closer to home, a dad here in Central New York was investigated for letting his 9-year-old wait in the car with her 6-year-old (snoozing) brother, while he ran an errand. These are not crazy decisions that endanger kids. Even waiting briefly in cars is safe. Kids who die in cars were forgotten there for hours, not waiting a few minutes while their parents picked up the dry cleaning. (And, actually, more kids die walking across parking lots than waiting in cars, so why do we criminalize the safer of the two alternatives?) As for abduction — the rarest of crimes — our crime rate today is back to what it was when gas was 29 cents a gallon. Back then, we didn’t arrest parents who let their kids walk home from the park.
Decent, loving parents should not have to worry about being second-guessed by authorities excessively worried about unlikely dangers. Especially since not giving kids any independence turns out to be dangerous in its own right. Peter Gray, one of the co-founders of my new nonprofit, Let Grow, has been studying the connection between free time and child development for decades. He’s a professor of psychology at Boston College and author of the text book “Psychology” used at colleges across the country, including Harvard. He has determined that when kids have all their time structured and supervised by adults — parents, teachers, coaches and tutors — they don’t get a chance to develop the skills that make them healthy, well-adjusted adults. Skills like creativity, compromise and problem-solving. “Nothing we do, no amount of toys we buy or ‘quality time’ or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away,” Gray has written. “The things that children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways.” Parents must be allowed to give that freedom back to their kids. Utah paved the way. Let’s make New York the next state to go Free-Range. April 5, 2018
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