Unbeknownst to me, the first week in October was National Newspaper Week. I was apprised of this by an old friend with whom I share my columns. My friend and I go way back to our schoolboy days in a rather stiff-rumped Episcopalian boy's school off in the wilds of rural Minnesota. These days he lives in Virginia and is a free-lance writer who had a Letter-to-the-Editor published very recently, which he forwarded to me. He was reminded (and so was I) that once long, long ago I had a letter published in one of the Twin Cities’ dailies. It’s subject is another column (maybe), but I think that I was sixteen and, of course, knew absolutely everything.
My friend’s recent missive honored newspapers in general and identifies them as his primary source of news. He knew that he was preaching to the choir with me. Neither of us pays much, if any, attention to national television news anymore. No matter your personal bias or which source of TV news you may favor, television basically tells us what to think; we as viewers are passive. The tube provides us with only the producer’s chosen information presented as the producer sees fit. I prefer to actively read my news in print where I often find several points of view expressed in detail on the same page. I like deciding for myself from among many opinions. As well, and unfortunately, television news must rely on a certain amount of visual sensationalism to attract viewers to a modicum of carefully edited “fact,” and too often the sensationalism ends up as the story. I have come to think of television news as being like the grocery store rags pitching huge, lurid headlines with very little to back them up. I very happily choose to ignore “The Enquirer” in favor of “The Christian Science Monitor,” just as I have been known to change the channel from ABC to the BBC. I don’t care about British politics, but their view of Washington’s political shenanigans is both fascinating, and quite neutral.
And if television news is mind-numbing, don’t even get me started on the travesty known as social media. In a medium where small bits of artfully massaged partial information (memes, for example) seem to take fire and roost as truth … well … just never mind. How anyone with more than a very few functioning brain cells can judge any issue via 280 characters is beyond me. Somehow some celebrity’s breakfast tweet or post has become more important than truly educated, carefully weighed observation. Oprah’s thoughts about this or that, often things she clearly has no personal notion of … marriage and child-rearing, for example … bear more import than those of some well-experienced, but woefully unknown PhD.
Okay. My soapbox has collapsed under the weight of my own opinion. I only rarely “soapbox” because soapboxes are almost always riddled with splinters, and I have trouble with those.
Of course I love newspapers, I write for one. Lucky me.