Save The Texas Observer! Save the World!

For 70 years, the Texas Observer has been the best investigative reporting and social commentary magazine in Texas. Now it needs our help.

UPDATE: The Board that oversees The Texas Observer has rescinded its decision to cease publication and lay off the staff after the GoFundMe campaign raised over $300,000 in two days. Thanks to those of you who contributed to the campaign and otherwise showed your support for the Observer.

To be clear, this is not the end of the Observer’s financial troubles. But it is a validation of the important role it plays in the Texas media ecosystem. Now is the time to buy an annual subscription!

Welcome to another installment of Life Its Ownself. If you enjoy reading it, please let me know by 1) hitting the Like button at the bottom, 2) subscribing to this newsletter, and 3) sharing it with others. Also, hit the comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

         Last Thursday, Texas Monthly published “An Elegy for Ten Late Great Texas Brands,” including Blockbuster, Foley’s, and Braniff Airlines. If they’d waited through the weekend, they’d have had another iconic Texas brand to mourn.

         On Monday, the board of the Texas Democracy Foundation, publisher of The Texas Observer, announced this it was calling it quits after almost 70 years as one of America’s most fierce and fearless purveyors of liberal journalism. And it was purveying it n Texas, no less.

         To be sure, the Observer has never been flush with cash, and rumors of its demise have popped up over the years. But this time sounds more serious, absent some stand-up commitment from Texas progressives and a lot of old-fashioned moolah.

         This is bad for journalism. Bad for Texas. And bad for our nation.

A Boy and His Texas Observer

        Growing up as I did during the 1960s and -70s (I know, it’s hard for me to believe I am that old) I was attuned to national affairs – Vietnam, the battles over civil and voting rights, assassinations, Kent State, Watergate, etc. I mourned Kennedy, was disappointed by Johnson, and hated Nixon with typical college student passion.

        But I was not that familiar with, or captivated by, Texas politics. Like all children who studied Texas history in seventh grade, I knew nothing of my state’s complex reality, neither the good, the bad, nor the ugly.

        Then, in about 1982, I woke up. I had the enormous good fortune to work with Ernesto Cortés, the brilliant community organizer who was then transforming Texas politics. Most of my tutelage was on building local organizations, first in Fort Worth and then in San Antonio, focused on improving lives at the local level. But we had begun working on statewide issues and strategies, and it opened up a wonderful new world to me.

        My guidebook to that world was The Texas Observer, by then 30 years old and as scrappy and unrepentantly liberal as ever. The Observer reported how the oil and gas industries extracted the state’s natural resources without paying a fair price for them. The Observer explained how school districts had been configured to make rich families richer and poor families poorer, so that the state’s constitutional command to educate all its children itself became an instrument of growing inequality. The Observer showed how, in the days of “Dallas” and the Southfork Ranch, millions of Texans lived in squalid colonias, with little hope that things were going to change. For me, each issue was a revelation and an education in how Texas really worked.

        Slowly, with the Observer blowing the trumpet and pointing the way, Texas actually made progress on some of its intractable problems. Just as important, it helped change the culture of the state. Way back when, the Observer called racism and homophobia what they were – bigotry – and for a while it became déclassé for the good old boys to be too upfront about it.  

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        The Observer was born in the Mordor of 1950s Texas one-party state Democratic politics. Against the old guard, exemplified by the Shivercrats who preferred Republicans to racial accommodation – gasp! – there emerged a new generation, liberated by the experience of saving the world in World War II and convinced Texas could do better. They decided to found a magazine that would tell the other side of Texas’s story – the story of the poor and dispossessed for whom the phrase “Texas Miracle” would still ring hollow a generation later.

        The Observer’s founding statement said it all:

We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.

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        The Shivercrats were consigned to the ash heap of history, but their spiritual and political descendants now rule Texas in the form of a vicious and intolerant GOP. Which makes it all the more important to have a living, breathing Texas Observer doing its iconoclastic thing.

        A group of Texas Observer staffers led by James Canup have started a Go Fund Me page that raised $237,000 (out of a $250,000 goal) in about 24 hours. I ask you to make a contribution to support this preeminent Texas institution. Your contribution now can buy the Observer’s board and staff time to get their feet back under them and plot a new way forward.

        I always am loathe to ask for money. That’s why this newsletter is free, and I hope will remain so. But the Observer needs your help right now, and I pray you will be generous.

        In the comments below, please share your thoughts about the Observer and its value to you.

         Some enlightening reading … I use this space to suggest edifying magazine or newspaper pieces to read. Given this week’s events, what better curation could I do than a smattering of terrific Texas Observer articles of current relevance?

“Voucher Scheme” … How the voucher program in Arizona keeps special needs kids out of private school.

“Border Militia Bill” … How the State wants to create a militia for further militarize the border … but with less accountability.

“‘Border security’” … is a financial black hole that will consume us all.