ArcaMax

If you've been a reporter long enough, you learn that when people say you're a "member of the Fourth Estate," they mean to insult you and to let you know they read a book once.

The only exception is lawyers, who use the term the same way they use Latin, as a way to remind you that they've read a lot of books.

And in America, we can afford a Fifth Estate, which is bloggers, Substack geniuses, "citizen journalists" and "independent journalists."

A citizen journalist is someone who has nothing on his/her resume except being born in America. An independent journalist is someone who can't get a job in news. Both of them write stories that are more than half their own opinion, and both of them desperately need an editor. Their battle cry is, "They tried to silence me."

You read their stories, and you get the feeling that they never spent any time as a reporter, covering cheap shootings, house fires in which no one was injured, traffic pile-ups and bone-crunchingly dull meetings of a suburban zoning board.

So, it's no surprise that they were all over the trial of Karen Read, a Massachusetts woman who was alleged to have drunkenly hit her equally drunk cop boyfriend with her SUV and then left him to die on the ground in a blizzard.

The prosecution said she hit him like you'd hit a possum on a state two-lane. The defense said she was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy dreamed up by equally drunken cops who beat the guy to death, dragged him outside to die in the snow and then framed Read.

She was found not guilty of everything except the drunk driving charge.

Drunk driving is the judicial equalizer. You go into a courtroom to wait for an arraignment, and the most middle-class person in the courtroom is some suburban drunk who got caught driving home drunk after a gender reveal party. Everyone else has another case hanging, is on probation or parole, or has at least done county time.

The poor do not embarrass the criminal justice system. They get arrested, they take the deal, or they get convicted.

If everyone in the Karen Read case wasn't white and making a couple bucks, you couldn't have gotten the story on the front page for more than a couple of days at the beginning and then another day for the verdict.

None of the independent journalists are going to be too interested in "justice" for some Black woman from the projects who ran her boyfriend over with a 12-year-old Toyota while high on crack.

I've left that kind of trial with the verdict safe in my notebook and limped back to the newspaper office and had an editor remind me that the Garden Club was having its annual flower show in a week and I needed to write 700 words about that by the end of the week.

The fewer newspapers we have in this country, the more people we have who call themselves "journalists."

Like a lot of people, my grandmother Grace used to say that in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Turns out that in the country of the blind, if you're blind but you have a pretty good sense of smell, you can be king.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.