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We've had a priest jogging naked in Frederick. In
Denver, Edward Nottingham's off-duty activities have gone a
long way toward explaining why no one uses the phrase
sober as a judge
any more.
Clearly the silly season is upon us, to the degree that
it was difficult to believe that Rove leaving White
House
was a real story, and not the result of alleged
UFO activity, except that the place where we learn of such
things, the Weekly World News in the supermarket checkout
line, is planning to suspend its print edition.
The combination of aliens and newsprint brings us to the purchase of the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch, the Australian native who once paid one of our previous local cable monopolies $10 a head to drop a PBS channel and the Weather Channel so it had room for Faux News or Fox Noise or something like that.
Murdoch's purchase of the Journal has caused a lot of anguished hand-wringing about how one of America's great national newspapers might slide into mediocrity, but the the Journal actually began to slip years ago.
I used to subscribe. My liberal friends would see me
toting it from the post office, and stare pointedly. I
would reply that it's important to know your enemy; the
military calls it intelligence.
A decade ago, the Journal presented a sober appearance and first-class writing. Almost daily, a whimsical front-page feature sparkled and made me wish I could observe and write that well. The editorial page may have yearned for the halcyon days before the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but it was always clearly written.
The first symptom of decay came when barbarisms like
alright
and would of
appeared with increasing
frequency. Reporters, like all other writers, will make
mistakes, especially under daily deadlines. Copy editors
are supposed to catch them.
If you're going to pinch on the news side of a
publication, that's an easy place. You can still have as
many reporters in the field, filing as much copy as before.
The results of this cutback are not immediately obvious.
But copy editors are the quality control
of the news
side of a newspaper, and eventually readers start to think
If these morons don't know to use 'could have' rather
than the idiotic 'could of,' why should we trust them to
know how the GATT works?
The Journal started running more reader service
features, especially in its new Saturday edition. Granted,
the Journal caters to an affluent audience, but I'm not
especially interested in comparative yacht shopping or
diamond-adorned wristwatches. If such articles had been
written well, I might have enjoyed them anyway, but they
seldom were. It was like pornography that focused on
conspicuous consumption instead of sex; call it
plutography.
The Journal started running photographs and color. Those
have their place, of course, but I had hoped their place
would not be the Wall Street Journal. It started selling
merchandise with Journal branding, like flashlights,
tote-bags and ponchos. This may extend the brand
in
modern marketing parlance, but I'd have preferred some
brand building
from solid reporting and editing.
Dismayed by the Journal's course, I let my subscription
lapse. I thought I should get some national publication, so
I tried the Economist. It had the merit of philosophical
consistency -- i.e., the Economist sensibly believed the
War on Drugs was evil, whereas the Journal somehow acted as
though a rational person could believe in both free men
and free markets
and the war on drugs.
But the
Economist's fine print was too fine for my bifocals, so I
tried the Sunday New York Times for a year. Sure, there was
some good writing -- but the Times also published too much
plutography to suit me. I didn't renew.
There's the Internet, except that every time I build a faster computer or get a faster connection, the genius of American commerce soon finds a way to slow things down. Pages take longer and longer to load, pieces are chopped up so that you spend more time staring at their ads while you wait for the next few paragraphs, gaudy graphics add no information, etc. It gets tedious, and it's not something you can read in an easy chair.
Unlike many modern media barons, Murdoch does seem to believe in print. And given the course the Journal took all on its own, it's hard to see how he could make it worse than it would have been anyway.
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