Unfit to Print

What happens when SuperGoodMedia, a ridiculous out-of-town newspaper chain buys the venerable Boston Daily Tribune, which has published every day since 1823? Heads roll and the few journalists left wonder when it will be their turn. That's protagonist Nick Nolan's worry, too - until he gets exclusive coverage of a single mother who claims that the Virgin Mary is speaking to the world through her young comatose daughter. Nolan not only keeps his job but becomes an international celebrity as The Tribune's circulation soars, advertisers bring record revenues, SuperGoodMedia negotiates lucrative movie and TV contracts, and circus-like crowds of thousands gather outside the single mother's home, awaiting miracles as the pope plans to visit... and a secret disaster looms. Enter Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father and early pillar of the American press. Appearing to Nolan in dreams, Franklin offers a brutal critique of much of today's media, when real-life hedge funds and chains gut and close local newspapers, creating an unprecedented threat to American democracy. Franklin also prompts Nolan's eventual crisis of conscience, which leads to his redemption and an initiative that might help save local journalism while furthering social-justice causes. By turns dramatic, fantastical, and darkly comedic, "Unfit to Print" is a scathing indictment of today's media by G. Wayne Miller, author and multiple award-winning journalist for four decades, most of them at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Providence Journal, oldest continuously published newspaper in the U.S. "Unfit to Print" is also a keen commentary on today's politics and culture, when so many get their "news" from social media, misinformation from domestic and foreign sources distorts truth, and reporters are disparaged as enemies of the people. But why a novel and not a memoir or exposé? Because as Ralph Waldo Emerson is purported to have said, "fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."