Who Needs Yesterday's Papers?
by Alexander Cockburn
I read the anguished valedictories to our sinking newspaper industry, the calls for some sort of government bailout or subsidy, with mounting incredulity. It's like hearing the witches in "Macbeth" evoked as if they were the beautiful Aphrodite and her rivals vying for the judgment of Paris.
Sonorous phrases about "public service" mingle with fearful yelps about the "dramatically diminished version of democracy" that looms over America if the old corporate ...
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Posted by: Paul M. Petkovsek
Comment: #1
Fri May 15, 2009 4:56 AM
The two funniest words in our language, when used together, are "liberal press." I am amazed, in light of the fact that most newspapers are owned by mega-corporations (which are inherently conservative), that these same corporations would shoot themselves in the foot by allowing those two words to go unchallenged. Our society has become less educated in recent years, with most of what passed for news being passively fed to us in sound bites. This undereducation of Americans has led to us being less questioning or insightful, since we are far less capable of any sort of critical or independent thought than in years past. Aside from independent thinking, the basic skill needed for reading a paper is reading. Reading is discouraged in our society in many blatant and subtle ways, so much so that children in school will spend many precious minutes of their lives in class looking at books which are never read. Reading is percieved as too much work by students who don't see their parents read at home and see no need for it in their lives. In schools, teacher evaluations demand "active teaching" which means that the teacher must make presentations in an entertaining way and will be marked down if the evaluator observes children reading in class at the time of the evaluation. If people don't read, no one will read newspapers.
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Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Comment: #2
Sat May 16, 2009 8:52 PM
Sir;...It has been a slow, painful death the press has been dying... While the right more and more called them liberal they have cowtowed more and more to the right, and all the while lost credibility with the middle, and the liberals... All we could ask from the press is truth... And What is truth??? What ever it is, the right wants no part of it; and for that very reason will not bear the teaching of history...So history, as it is first written, as journalism holds no charm for them...Instead they would revise history while it is lived, and so deny to the people the knowledge upon which to choose the correct course... We have been driving blind, and it couldn't get much worse; but it could get better Because truth is that quality that no matter how bad it is makes everything better... We have been denied truth... And it is for lack of truth that newspapers die...No less; it is for the want of truth that this nation dies, that brother is turned on brother, and children are set upon parents... Having too little truth we have too little of all we need, including liberty and justice... People have found how to live with lies, knowing they are lies, or they have found another source of truth... Were all newspapers to fall tomorrow the people would not want for truth more than at this moment... They would suffer for not reading their own obituaries with that of this people, and they would suffer the loss of classified ads... In other words: no great loss...Thanks...Sweeney
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