We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Indeed. When we can’t get accurate, intelligent reporting from newspapers, we turn elsewhere. Hey mainstream media, nobody really cares about Brittany. That’s what People magazine was for. Missing white women don’t trump telling us what’s really going on in the world. And for goodness sakes, pay people. And hire some good political cartoonists, like my good friend John. He could use the work and your paper would at least be more interesting!
Like a lot of progressives, I’ve been an enthusiastic newspaper reader over the years. At one time, I would have found it inconceivable to start my day without reading the Times along with my local newspaper.
But those pre-Internet days are long gone. The Times is no longer the beacon of top-notch journalism that it once was. In fact, American journalism in general has seen a steep decline in quality since the days of the Watergate era produced the hard-hitting investigative journalism that drew many of us into the field in the first place.
The reasons for the decline of U.S. journalism are many. But one reason I rarely see discussed is the increasingly shoddy way that newspapers have treated their employees in recent decades. As a former journalist, I saw first-hand just how crappy this treatment was. Journalists today have to contend with low wages, long hours and a crushing work-load.
When you have journalists making so little money that they spend half their time fretting about how to basic bills, you tend to create an environment that doesn’t produce great journalism. Many journalists today are overworked, demoralized, bitter and burned out (and if the younger ones aren’t, they will be, soon enough). Overall, the working conditions in America’s newsrooms don’t lend themselves to sort of great investigation journalism that our era is crying out for.
The New York Times arrogantly still regards itself as the nation’s “newspaper of record.”
But for many of us progressives, it lost that title years ago.
Indeed, if I were going to a desert island today and had to choose one newspaper, it definitely wouldn’t be the Times. I’d probably select Britain’s Guardian newspaper, or even The Financial Times.
Indeed, no less a commentator than Noam Chomsky has proclaimed The Financial Times as the best newspaper in the English-speaking world today.
Although it’s hardly a liberal newspaper, The Financial Times offers many of the things that once appealed to us about The New York Times decades ago: intelligent, in-depth articles, extensive world-wide coverage, and a newspaper that puts substance over style.
Between The Guardian, The Financial Times and the progressive blogs, I have plenty of great reading material these days. Frankly, outside of columnists Paul Krugman and Frank Rich, I couldn’t care less about The New York Times these days (and I suspect I’m not alone among progressives).
One Response
I haven’t read a newspaper in years, and don’t plan to.
By the time a newspaper cuts down the trees and prints up its product, I have already seen the stuff they print. This might not be true for local news where the paper resides, but I don’t really care, for example, about local crap in Manhattan (it is not the center of my world). A few minutes watching crappy local news shows on TV in my area brings me up to date.
I wouldn’t care if all print newspapers went under.