Michael Kinsley
In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal.
| ... with the former predominating... |
But when the United States faces a danger to its most important institutions and values, Americans can count on the newspaper industry to put aside petty differences and speak with one voice.
| "[rhubarb... rhubarb... rhubarb]... HEY! WE'RE GOING BROKE! |
Now is such a moment. The enemy is invisible, indeed inexplicable, but could be fatal to all we hold dear. In short: Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers!
| Darth Vader? Fu Manchu? Howell Raines? |
Newspaper circulation figures, which had been drifting decorously downward for years, have started to plummet. At the current rate of decline, the last newspaper subscriber will hang up on a renewal phone call that interrupts dinner on Oct. 17, 2016. And then it will be over.
| Coincidentally, newspaper ownership has been decorously consolidating for years, and the long term effect has been that most local newspapers are owned by interstate and often international conglomerates. Some of those small-town papers used to be alarmingly diverse in opinion. Also coincidentally, newspapers used to hire people who could write, and now settle for J-school graduates. |
This alarming possibility threatens all of us, because reading newspapers is, in the end, what makes us Americans.
| Sunday I took the Little Woman to a baseball game for Mother's Day. We stopped on the way home and had apple pie. Neither of us read a newspaper that day. |
We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense — more downright American — than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piled into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there so that a network of newspaper deliverers can go house-to-house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away?
| Aye, laddy! I can remember when I was a lad, they used to put news in newspapers! But that was a long time ago, though not in a galaxy that far away. |
Newspapers are essential to every American, and none more so than the fools and ingrates who have stopped buying them. It is up to us, as members of the last generation that experienced life before computer screens, to make sure that future generations of Americans will know what to do when it says "Continued on Page B37." In a recent survey of Americans under age 30, only 26% said "Look in Section B," and a pitiful 13% chose the correct answer: "Look for Section B. It's around here somewhere."
And when I was a lad, there were lots of people who were literate. And some who could write, too. They were called... uhhh... they were called... subscribers! That's what they were called!
Self-consciously tongue-in-cheek 7-point plan to save the newspapers snipped because it was silly, even for Michael Kinsley. |
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