Steve Bailey's Blog : National Newspaper Week

The first week of October (Oct. 2-8) was National Newspaper Week, so I thought I would write a tribute to our nation's tabloids. I subscribe to several and prefer getting news from them instead of television for several reasons.

First is my control over what sort of news I absorb. Television producers and anchorpeople determine what information I will get on television and in what order. I can scan my newspaper headlines and focus on the articles I want to read.

Most of these stories provide useful information and help me maintain my commitment to lifelong learning. Television news is light on facts and heavy on sensation. Take our local news, for example. Given a choice between reporting the outcome of a city council meeting and a terrible crash in another state, they will always provide more play to the latter. Newspapers are also guilty of sensation; however, as a reader, instead of a watcher, I can skip past all that. Instead, I can focus on getting information about the city council that might affect my taxes or city services.

All media have some bias, but television news is the weightier with political slants. Yes, there are over-the-top biased papers like The Washington Post, which unabashedly appeals to the liberal side of the spectrum. But there are smaller papers that make an effort at balance. Take, for example, The Roanoke Times. In its opinion section, it regularly features Leonard Pitts, a liberal columnist, next to Christine Flowers, a conservative one. So, on the same page, I can see both sides of the coin.

Then there is the mental activity involved. Reading is active; watching is passive. The evidence that newspaper reading is good for maintaining critical thinking skills and avoiding dementia is profound. Unfortunately, the reverse is the case for watching television.

Television news and social media have threatened the newspaper industry's survival, and several small papers have closed shops. It is essential to remember how beneficial newspapers are and how their extinction would be a dreadful loss.

Steve Bailey,

Richmond

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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