Newspapers Suck – Here’s Why
Well the title says it all – because they really do. I was just reading a Powerline article about the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and got to thinking about how pissed I was on Sunday when I read the Delaware Newsjournal and thought “My god, it’s like reading the New Indicator.”
The “New Indicator” was the campus Communist rag of my alma-mater UC-San Diego. Nobody read the thing because it was full of socialist slogans – meaning lots! of exclamation marks! – as if punctuation could make up for the emptiness of the writing.
This was the time before blogs, and one when I considered myself to be closer to the Left side of things, so for an aspiring political writer I thought that I would join the New Indicator and see if I could add some substance to the thing. I
I attended one meeting with my roommate Adam – a Jewish biker from Philly (email me you bastard) – and all I recall is a terrible smell in the office and listless hippies who needed no-doze or crystal meth to get up off their butts and take a bath. So, to make a long story short, that was it for me and the New Indicator which – according to a recent alumni caller – is no more. Boo fucking hoo…
It used to be that I read at least two newspapers a day – in Japan it was three being that the English ones were quite small. Now I don’t read a single one daily, and often skip the Sunday edition of the NewsJournal because honestly, who gives a rat’s ass about the Mayor of Elsmere using a city vehicle to pick up his kid from Little League.
Why? Becuase the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, LA Times, Philly Inquirer – all the newspapers have the same Leftist slant. They run the same Left-wing columnists with the token Robert Novak and Cal Thomas. They run the same articles from the pro-European/anti-American Reuters, French AFP, and leftist AP wireservices. They run the same Left-wing anti-Bush, anti-military, pro-UN and pro-transnationalist opinions. Even their formats are the same. First section important news, second section local, then sports, business and finally lifestyle.
There is nothing new in newspapers. There are no innovative ideas. There is no balance to the slant – only the dogma that newspapers are non-biased. Most newspapers hold monopolies in their markets and when criticized deny it by saying that there is no market for a right-wing newspaper – ignoring the fact that the start-up costs for a newspaper are just as prohibitive as for a software company with a new operating system to take on Microsoft.
So I’ve stopped reading all newspapers and rely upon weblogs in their place. This has happened gradually over the past 4 years and during that time I notice that blogs have lessened their reliance on the mainstream media for content. Years back most blogs used a newsarticle as the basis for discussion, but today the Blogosphere has its own articles and columnists and the reliance upon newspapers is decreasing.
