About The Hays Highway

December 17, 2007, 2:30 p.m.

A statement of transparency

History of this site
The Hays Highway launched in September 2005 when the editor, Bill Peterson, wished to set up a platform for publishing about news, culture and sports in the Hays County, TX, cities of Buda, Kyle and San Marcos along Interstate-35. The site published on an irregular basis during the next two years.

However, audiences persisted with encouraging feedback. Despite virtually no promotion, site traffic spiked when articles posted to address heavily discussed issues and concerns. Readers registered no complaints, except that the site wasn't updated often enough. Furthermore, promising traffic fundamentals emerged – low rates of readers leaving the site after looking at just one page, and high rates of returning visitors.

Noting a desire among Hays County residents for a robust publication that would place the facts within their broad context and without political commitments, The Hays Highway ramped up for daily publication, starting the process in September 2007. The Hays Highway sets out to provide factual and interpretive accounts of issues concerning the interstate cities in Hays County, addressing the highway area as a continuous community of interest at once challenged and gifted by rapid residential and economic growth.

Why The Hays Highway is only on the Internet
Fast growth along the Austin-San Antonio corridor through Hays County has closely tracked the growth of the Internet. The Internet began taking America by storm in 1995. Buda and Kyle remained rural communities numbering barely more than 4,000 residents between them and San Marcos counted only 28,743, according to the 1990 U.S. Census, which showed only 65,614 people living in Hays County.

Today, by professional estimates, Hays County is twice that large. Buda and Kyle, between them, have grown approximately eight-fold to more than 30,000 and the Hays CISD is up to around 60,000. Demographers estimate that Hays County will substantially exceed 200,000 residents in 2015.

In the last year, Buda officially claimed a population of at least 5,000 to trigger home rule provisions, while Kyle claimed a population exceeding 25,000 and San Marcos passed a resolution claiming at least 50,000. A recent demographic survey commissioned by the Hays CISD said population within the school district will increase from 30,767 in 2000 to 74,166 in 2012, a 140.86 percent increase in 12 years.

As recently as 2000, Internet penetration in Hays County hadn't grown beyond small numbers. Widely distributed broadband Internet access was still a dream. But the technology has expanded about as quickly as the Hays County population and the Internet by now has long been commonplace in Hays County homes and businesses.

The Internet lends to written communication the benefit of immediacy, an attribute once available only to broadcast media. In addition, the Internet facilitates wide distribution of written information. As more people go to the Internet for news and fewer people go to newspapers, even newspapers are shifting their emphasis to the Internet, which is much less expensive to publish and distribute. Rather than invest heavy capital in a newspaper when the newspaper industry has long feared its own impending extinction, The Hays Highway is betting on the Internet.

Goals of The Hays Highway
The Hays Highway wishes to stimulate, refine, extend and clarify discussion about public affairs in the interstate communities of Hays County. In view of the growth illustrated above, these communities face a vigorous challenge to develop in a prosperous, sustainable manner that will enrich the lives of their citizens.

The Hays Highway firmly believes that the public process is one of the few and best vehicles for the development of the whole person, as well as the community. Some such participation is overtly political, some of it is involvement in local schools, some is business development and much of it is informal, but all of it cuts against contemporary forces of isolation that minimize human beings.

Only by citizen involvement can people control the destiny of their community. At the same time that involvement enables people to control developments, it also enables them to discover those developments and understand what they mean. Growth is an exploration into the unknown. This publication is part of that exploration. Larger communities are different systems, in kind and in degree, from smaller communities. The Hays Highway is committed in its effort to make sense of the change.

Truth
In other words, The Hays Highway is committed to a perspicuous description of reality. A perspicuous description of reality is known as "truth." Reality is objective, in that its being is distinct from its seeming and it doesn't depend on what we think it to be. Thought merely aims at reality. When thought hits its target, it speaks truth.

Truth, of course, is a notoriously elusive concept. Even the description just offered is packed with metaphysical assumptions that make philosophers blush. And that's before we're begun looking for the truth. But we must not pretend there is no truth as an easy way out of the difficulty, because giving in exposes more problems than it conceals. To steal the point from a philosopher, people who try telling you there is no truth are asking you to not believe them. So don't.

In many cases, as adults know, truth is beyond the scope of journalism. The journalist works without the tools of an attorney or prosecutor, such as subpoena power and the leverage to make deals for hard information. For cases in which journalistic tools are insufficient for finding the truth, the journalist must settle for, and attain, accuracy.

Objectivity
A better known aspect of the journalist's struggle for truth is the problem of objectivity. Some immature journalists would have you believe they are endowed by the creator with a God's eye view of reality such that they can describe the truth absolutely, without subtraction or addition. In the real world, humane persons of good will understand this is nonsense.

How does a journalist proceed without the God's eye view? Many hope that dry, factual accounts will pass for objectivity. Such hopes are vainglorious. Even the most clinical accounts begin from assumptions, spoken or not, about why the report matters, which facts are relevant and why those facts are relevant. No report is, or can be, comprehensive.

However, the journalist can follow a program of best practices, so that even if he can't possibly be objective to an inhuman degree, he can mitigate natural biases by spelling out assumptions and working with, at least, a tincture of humility.

Most obviously, a journalist must strive for all sides to be heard. Further, a journalist must spell out guiding assumptions as much as possible within demands that a report contain itself to a few hundred words. Indeed, the extent to which a journalist can succeed in this regard is a mark of her skill.

And a journalist must be open-minded, which is a widely misunderstood attribute. Open-mindedness is not, in any sense, a refusal to hold beliefs or develop perspectives. That's closed-mindedness. A closed mind shuts its gates, allowing nothing to come in and take hold. An open mind happily lodges beliefs, but only provisionally and to the extent that such beliefs stand up to experience and cohere with its other beliefs. An open mind, therefore, revises its beliefs appropriately in the light of new evidence.

A person with an open mind will, at times, as we say, "change his mind." Such changes don't necessarily reveal inconsistency of character, though they could. In some cases, though, persons who change their minds are entirely consistent in character. Some persons, indeed, change their minds too easily, not worrying to understand how their new views cohere with the old views still in place. Others change their minds not at all, refusing to accept new evidence if it conflicts with old views.

The happier character carefully weighs its beliefs and the evidence, assessing their qualities and adjusting its mind for no other goal than to more closely apprehend reality. The process is called "learning." It is in this sense that the journalist must be open-minded, which makes him no different than other persons of intelligence and aptitude.

Biases
As the foregoing pragmatic account of objectivity suggests, The Hays Highway casts a very skeptical eye upon partisan politics. In other words, The Hays Highway isn't partisan, nor is it merely bi-partisan. It is forthrightly anti-partisan.

No one likes to be called dirty names, but if The Hays Highway could pick its own dirty name, it would take moderate or centrist. The Hays Highway feigns little sympathy with the attitudes known in today's parlance as liberal (read: morally permissive, softhearted, left wing, hostile to markets, etc.) or conservative (read: morally rigid, hardheaded, right wing, market fundamentalist, etc.).

It's pointless to choose between them, especially in light of their rough contrasts: Liberals tax and spend. Conservatives borrow and spend. Liberals steal from the middle class and give to the poor. Conservatives steal from the middle class and give to the rich. Liberals would compromise economic liberties. Conservatives would compromise personal liberties.

Though neither position is attractive to most people, the contemporary political discourse offers precious little alternative to these false choices. But what are the real choices?

We want economic development, which compromises natural resources, and we want a green environment. We want to hold persons responsible for themselves and we want to be compassionate when they go wrong or badly. We want reliable public amenities and we want low taxation. We want people free to own guns and we want people to be safe from gunfire. The list goes on.

In the course of living and thriving, we often countenance such pairings of beliefs or desires in which both seem to be true or desirable, yet they appear to be mutually inconsistent. Apparent contradictions of this sort are philosophical problems. From the grip of philosophical problems, four basic approaches have emerged through time: 1) defend one position and argue against the other; 2) defend the other position and argue against first; 3) argue that neither position is true or desirable; and 4) seek the underlying consistency between the two positions, which involves much more than simply juxtaposing their attractive theses.

In philosophy and policy, the action is in (3) and, most productively, (4), as they lead to the deeper insights and dissolve false choices. Sadly, the general marketplace of ideas eschews these approaches. They're not good for ratings. It's easier and more lucrative to just put on fights between (1) and (2).

If The Hays Highway is to serve a useful purpose, it will take the less traveled path, examining the controversies of growth from the standpoints of (3) and (4). The Hays Highway, then, hereby declares that bias in its approach to the issues and the assumptions corresponding with those approaches.

With all that said, The Hays Highway also admits to three more specific and less formal biases, guiding principles forged through time, experience and thought to the extent that they may now be marked as assumptions:

1. The correct response to poor government is not the elimination of government, but the development of better government. In some circles, government is disparaged as an evil intrusion against free markets. To the contrary, effective government is a necessary safeguard for economic and extra-economic ends. Not only is market fundamentalism insufficient to sustain social cohesion, but market fundamentalism can't even sustain market cohesion. Nations with weak governments lack the legal infrastructure to ensure the legitimacy of transactions, too often sacrificing economic development to the machinations of graft and bribery. A strong, legitimate government expedites economic development while balancing economic interests with the society's additional goals.

2. Observing Hays County ten years ago, when it was much less sparsely populated, one heard long-time residents wish to maintain the area's traditional rural environment in concert with growth. As the traditional way involved people living in single-family homes on large pieces of land, it was generally mandated that new development should require single-family homes on large lots. The outcome should have been predictable. We're stuck in traffic with sprawling developments.

The lesson for us should be clear. Hays County, especially the eastern side, is not and can not pretend to be rural anymore. The area's best chance for combating the ravages of sprawling suburbia is to embrace higher-density, mixed-use development, placing citizens within walking distance of many amenities, reducing the necessity of automobile traffic and, rather than spreading people across the land, preserving large swaths of land as public parks and open spaces.

While the economic, ecological, public health and social benefits would be numerous, we concede that it's a tough sell. Everybody loves their cars, The Hays Highway included.

3. Little children don't get to pick their parents. Sadly, many start life poorly on that account. A community might be measured, in part, by its commitment to assisting those least fortunate members of the society. Therefore, the general dissemination of knowledge through public education, difficult though it may be for numerous reasons, is a value that can't be over-estimated.

Public education invites the children of the disenfranchised into the society, develops their skills, socializes them and persuades them of their stake in the community. Admittedly, this is all rather utopian talk. The Hays Highway does not pretend to knowledge or expertise about how, specifically, all this is to be accomplished.

Again, the above three points are guiding assumptions. As with other beliefs, The Hays Highway stands willing to make revisions in the light of sufficient evidence to the contrary. However, the evidence would have to be quite compelling, as the above three assumptions are foundational.

Conclusion
The above is an attempt to state, as transparently as possible, The Hays Highway's orientation and commitments. We apologize for the statement's complexity. But that's often the nature of transparency. It's complex.

As always, The Hays Highway is grateful for feedback, intelligent criticisms and suggestions. We appreciate the community's attention and support.

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