Not many people read newspapers anymore. The big dailies are dropping like flies and the day of the local newspaper may be drawing to a close. It’s tough times in the dead tree publishing business. Even the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are laying off hundreds of employees. These young kids today they get the news on the TV, radio or this newfangled internet. No time to read.
So that makes me all the more out of step with the times. I try to read five newspapers a day. I say try because it never works out that way. The counter in the kitchen becomes newspaper storage during the week and on the weekend I plow thru them. At five a day by Saturday or Sunday that can be 20 or 30. It becomes a job.
It’s sort of interesting to go thru a weeks worth of newspapers at one sitting. You can truly see the development of news stories and how each newspaper handles them. Here in good old Northeastern Pennsylvania I read the Times Leader, the Citizens voice and The Scranton Times. There is an almost 100% duplication in the big three with national news. You read the same copy word for word in all of them and wonder if there isn’t a better use for all that ink and newsprint.
But the local stories? Each has its own flavor. What’s page one in the Times leader can be buried in the Obits in the Citizens Voice. What is covered thoroughly in the Scranton Times can be totally ignored in the Times Leader.
I used to believe that news coverage in all media was unbiased.
I am no longer so gullible. It’s easy to see when you track it day to day that the Editors have an agenda and what you see and more important what you don’t see is carefully controlled.
But my interest doesn’t really get piqued by the big news stories. I seek out the quirky little items that often get overlooked. Give me a three headed calf over a politician being caught beating his girlfriend any day.
And so most every weekend you can look for me somewhere in the stack of newspapers piled high around me, scissors busy cutting out stories that will someday become these pointless little rants.
Anybody need some slightly used newspapers? I have lots.
