Editorial: Watchful, But Positive Observer’s Approach to Local News
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The Anderson Observer’s instinct toward the positive is less a sunny disposition than an editorial choice about what kind of community Anderson County wants to be when it looks in the mirror. In a county where every pothole, rezoning, and rumor can metastasize in a Facebook thread by lunchtime, the paper has chosen to tell a different kind of story: one that begins with the assumption that most of the people in charge are actually trying to do the right thing.
Knowing the people in the room
The first reason for that posture is almost embarrassingly simple: the names on the council dais and on town letterheads are not abstractions but neighbors, Sunday-school classmates, and the person who once helped patch a roof after a storm. The Observer’s reporters have watched these council members sit through long meetings on drainage ditches and rezonings that will never make a campaign mailer, and the cumulative impression is not of schemers but of people who have traded away their free evenings for the unglamorous arithmetic of public service.
Over time, that familiarity has hardened into conviction: the county council, and the councils in the smaller towns and cities, are populated by people who came to office to serve the community, not to strip-mine it for personal gain. There are disagreements—sometimes sharp ones—about growth, taxes, and how to handle the steady press of new residents, but those arguments play out against a shared baseline of sincerity that the paper has seen tested in budgets, crises, and the occasional political misstep.
Choosing a different default
In the current media climate, the default assumption in many places is that any elected official must be angling for a contract, a cousin’s job, or a quiet per diem. The Observer, by contrast, has adopted a different default: that motives are clean unless the facts prove otherwise. That does not mean the paper ignores mistakes or soft-pedals bad votes; it means the starting point is that human error and policy disagreement are more likely explanations than corruption.
This approach has practical consequences for coverage. When council rewrites a land-development code to curb mass grading and preserve trees, the story is framed not as a triumph for one faction but as a collective attempt to reconcile property rights with residents’ complaints and the county’s changing landscape. When the budget swells past three hundred million dollars, the paper follows the line items—jail overcrowding, staff raises, new deputies—rather than defaulting to the idea that money is simply vanishing into smoke.
A delegation governed by conviction
The same philosophy extends to the Anderson County Legislative Delegation that shuttles between Columbia’s green carpet and the county’s patchwork of mill villages and subdivisions. The delegation’s members, spread across House and Senate districts, are rarely in lockstep on ideology, but the through-line the Observer has traced is that each is trying, in the language of the era, to “serve their people” according to personal convictions rather than convenience.
That can look like different things. One freshman representative talks about his “shallow but long” knowledge pool and spends his time on the Medical, Military and Municipal Affairs Committee translating town-council experience into state-level policy, a job that involves more homework than headlines. Senior members of the delegation preside over a lattice of appointments—to mental-health boards, disabilities and special needs, fire commissions, and the county transportation committee—that shape daily life but rarely show up in campaign ads, the kind of work that rewards patience more than ambition.
What the paper does not see, and has never had cause to document, is the telltale pattern of self-dealing: contracts steered to family businesses, land quietly snapped up ahead of zoning changes, the soft clink of insider advantage. In the absence of that evidence, the Observer has chosen to treat the delegation as a group guided—however imperfectly—by the belief that their votes in Columbia and their appointments back home should add up to a better Anderson County, not a better personal balance sheet.
The politics of positive scrutiny
None of this is sentimental. To write about local government with a presumption of good faith is not to abandon skepticism; it is to direct skepticism at the right targets. When the county’s attempt at a transportation sales tax fails under a cloud of misinformation, for instance, the Observer’s coverage digs into how bad information spread and what that means for future infrastructure, rather than imputing dark motives to every supporter or opponent.
The positive tilt, then, is not about boosterism but about proportion. It allows the paper to celebrate a half-century of an ambulance company that has become part of the county’s emergency-medical backbone without losing sight of the policy debates that shape EMS funding. It creates room to praise a unanimous vote on a tree-saving ordinance while still asking whether the county will ever find the three or four hundred million dollars needed to repair its roads.
What kind of town this is
In a national environment that rewards outrage and cynicism, a county daily newspaper that assumes its public servants are, on balance, decent people is making a quiet, unfashionable statement about itself. It is saying that Anderson County is the kind of place where the story of government is not primarily one of grift but of imperfect people trying to knit together budgets, ordinances, and appointments into something like a livable future.
That does not mean the paper will not be ready if and when a scandal arrives, or that it will avert its eyes from misuse of office if evidence appears. It means that until that day, the Observer will continue to cover council meetings, delegation appointments, and board decisions with the working theory that the men and women on the nameplates are there to serve—and that the most radical act in local journalism, at this moment, may be to take them at their word while still keeping the notebook open.
