Newspaper Wars
Yeah we had a little heated conversation over the holidays. Nick’s a great brother and we get on about most things but he can definitely get my back up when we start to argue about certain things.
We got talking about the standard of newspapers here and in the US, we’ve both lived there for a while so can compare. I was saying that papers I read in California, the LA Times, New York Times, Santa Barbara NewsPress etc were all ok but were pretty dry and boring, skipped over lots of stuff that happened outside the US and I just found them a bit dull to read. I said I thought the UK papers had a lot more opinionated writing, they’ve certainly got more of a political slant one way or the other, and covered a wider range of topics.
Nick was coming back with most people in Britain read The Sun or some tabloid and all they’re getting is a pair of tits on page three and lots of football and are happy with that, whereas everyone back there reads the Register-Guard or something similar, is fully informed and the only form of tabloid is the Enquirer in supermarkets.
I was saying sure lots of people read The Sun or whatever but lots don’t and the ones that do don’t treat it as gospel, most people pick them up during a coffee break, flick through for five minutes and go back to work. He wouldn’t have it that things like the New York Post or Daily News were big sellers or that if Oregon had a bigger population something similar would appear there.
It came down to US papers were better staffed, better written and read by a better educated readership. We agreed to disagree, but I must admit, at the time I wanted to put his head through the fucking wall. Sorry bro.
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Newspapers reflect the populace yet, they also affect the populace by airing their views on political candidates. Why should a newspaper be liberal or conservative or….?
Report all sides - equally and totally.
Power corrupts.
Having said that, I’d find it distressing not to read the Chicago Trib daily (considered a conservative paper) and the Montreal Gazette (considered liberal).
Thing to do is read as many perspectives as possible. Who has time?
As an Australian temp here in the UK with NOTHING else to do but surf the web while the British government pay me £10.00 an hour to sit in this prison like office so I can fund my travelling, I have had the pleasure of spending a lot of time on both US and UK newspaper sights reading and reading - Yes the UK has loads more tabloids that feed this nation with every pointless piece of information and distorted truth they can find, but there decent papers like the times and the Guardian are much further ahead and seem to be willing to take more risks than the journalists of say the New York Times. - Just a thought from a bored Aussie!
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I agree the British papers are more opinionated than those in America. Politics in Britain is just more extreme in general and that overlaps into the press. American papers can possibly seems ‘dryer’.
My main point was that the tabloid press has such a foothold in Britain that a certain percentage of the population get dummed down and are fed a constant stream of pop culture instead of news about the things that really affect them. I’ve noticed that in the last 10 years ( I read it online )the Times has included more pop culture type stuff. I could be argued this simply reflects the interests of its current readers, or is an attempt to draw readers from the tabloids.
I still think there are decent papers in Britain…Times, Telegraph etc. Some of my favourite parers in the US are NY Times, Chicago Tribune and San Jose Mercury News. Take a look at the staff list for the Tribune to get an idea of the size of this paper and the amount of journalistic talent here.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/site/chi-newspaperemail.story
What are other people’s opinions?
Nick