The new News
I was on the Al and Mike Show last night and, for a moment talked about why I don’t own a TV and can’t take newspapers seriously, James Lileks gets it,
On the Hewitt show yesterday we were talking about the LA Times difficulties – alas, I can see why their readership has dipped a tad, since the last time I read the paper it was careful, thin, and dull; the national stuff was all tepid Received Wisdom, the international stuff was the standard assemblage of chattering bureaucrats Deeply Concerned about this and that, and the editorial page read like last week’s blogs. likeks
The news sounds like I read it a day and a half ago.
I keep asking people, “When was the last time you saw anyone under the visible age of thirty reading a newspaper in public…under 40?” Us old guys, before smoking became modern leprosy, would rather enjoy going to the local cafe/pub and reading a newspaper in public. I still do of a Saturday afternoon. And I can assure you, in the up market ‘burb I live in, there is not another soul crinkling the pages of the Post/Globe/Sun. It is all old news and really weird spin from boomers who lost the one clue they had back in 1992. The news is dated, the opinion, by and large, a sort of politically null leftism.
Little wonder that the wheels are falling off.
That gives me an idea. I plan to buy pork flavored pipe tobacco and smoke it upwind of a local mosque. While reading a Playboy (for the articles, of course).
I think most newspapers, and tv news for that matter, are too worried about offending people, thinking the correct thoughts and assuming there is only one correct way to think about any number of issues. I love reading newspapers, or at least I used to, but they don’t engage me. It is always too predictable.
I was born in 1970 and I wonder if the press has always been this way in Canada or did it start after Trudeaumania swept across the country. I read something by Andrew Coyne the other day that made me believe it was related to Trudeau. We use to have a more knockabout press and now they value consensus and telling us how we should think.