In Brownsville, A Glut Of News And No Newspaper...The Mexican Border As Motherlode Of Stories...

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
Editor of The Tribune

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - It's been said by out-of-town reporters many times: If ever there was a place for mind-boggling news stories, that place would be the lawless Texas-Mexico border. But, as with fairy tales that become too-familiar, the tales of woe, of corruption, of malcontents, of under-achievers, of the excitable, of the criminals have innured the population and the region's press to the point of indifference. How many times can you read that the Three Mexican Bears were busted for dealing drugs?

Now, again, comes the renegade Blogger Jerry McHale, shown in photo above, to drag his dictionary across the harsh, dusty local geography in search of those very stories. It is the latest promise by the California transplant who's made a long-running, curbside career out of shaming this town's mediocre politicians and the local culture. McHale, a schoolteacher by day, has declared he will aim his blog - BrownsvilleLiteraryReview.blogspot.com - to higher ground. Gone, he promises, will be the pornography and alley lingo he has used for years. It's a wait-and-see moment for his targets and neighbors.

We have long contended that the existing mainstream press in the Rio Grande Valley has never been up to the job. Freedom Newspapers, Inc., which owns the Valley's three dailies, has turned its back on stories that should have made their newspaper here the national "go to" daily on all things to do with the region. Is there a Pulitzer Prize in coverage of the ongoing miserable drug war across the Rio Grande? One would think so. Merely taking second-hand info from the news outlets across the river has not worked for The Brownsville Herald, The McAllen Monitor and the ever-hapless Valley Morning Star in Harlingen. What stories they'd have told had reporters for those three dailies been sicced on the drug war; that is, had they been dispatched across the river to report firsthand.

McHale's declaration comes with a clear angst. He has the talent to undress any politician or city bureaucrat doing wrong, a species of which there are many in town. He has the contacts, having traded in comfort easily found elsewhere for a life of cheap laughs and booze in this hardscrabble town of a quarter-million residents unable to bridge into anything that could be labeled as being nice. Stray dogs and wild, booze-fueled driving got the attention of the town's previous mayor. The current one has so far ignored animals...and humans. It's a good time for crusading, for muckraking, for exposing all that is wrong with this depressing community, one more attuned to Mexico's ways than it is to anything American. McHale has mined that environment in the past for excellent reporting, although it's been awhile.

He should start with a lengthy essay on the State of Brownsville, noting its deficiencies, its horribleness and its recent failings, followed by some insightful profiles of the miscreants who continue to soil his homeown, and, then, perhaps he should simply hound those he knows are not serving the community. In all this, he should forget about those locals he has protected for so long. We suspect that McHale himself is aware of the criticism he has received for bailing on people who should have been exposed. And, of course, it goes without saying that he should not trade his objectivity and credibility for free food and booze, as is the practice of the town's other bloggers.

This is a great time to re-shape news in Brownsville. The local newspaper has ceded its claim to being the newspaper of record, ignoring a mountain of stories and covering others so topically as to be useless.

We encourage McHale to give this one his best shot.

As Elvis might say about here, it's now or never...

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