Politics & Power Quote by Robert Scheer

A veteran journalist’s complaint becomes a tight little parable about how power actually works in American media: not with jackboots, but with payroll and personnel changes. Scheer frames his firing as ideological housekeeping - “new people come in” reads like the corporate version of a regime change, where management turnover doubles as political realignment. The phrasing is canny: he doesn’t say he was let go for performance; he says it “doesn’t go along with their politics,” making the act feel less like editing and more like governance.

“Silence a voice in Los Angeles” is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s geographic - a specific market, a specific paper, a specific audience cut off. Underneath, Los Angeles stands in for the civic commons: the idea that a city’s public life is partially built from a reliable chorus of dissenting columnists, and that removing one is a form of soft censorship. He’s arguing that local institutions still decide what counts as legitimate conversation, even in an age of national reach.

The most revealing turn is the concession: “They can’t silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.” That’s not optimism; it’s a diagnosis of fragmentation. National platforms may keep a writer “alive,” but local gatekeeping determines who gets to shape the daily political weather where people actually live. Scheer’s intent is less to portray himself as a martyr than to expose the mechanics: the mute button isn’t the government, it’s ownership.