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Cancel Your Newspaper!
Along with any other mainstream news media. I’m more than a little impressed with Kurt Schlichter’s latest rant: The Media Hates You And Is Shocked That You Hate It Back. A taste from Schlichter:
I guess we’ll be told we’re unseemly if we giggle at the cancellation of useless stooge Don Lemon’s low-rated airport lounge video muzak, or at how the Israelis leveled the Gaza high-rise housing the AP and Al-Jazeera. Well, color us unseemly, because when the media suffers, we celebrate.
And we’re not going to apologize for it. Half of America, at least, now cares about the media precisely as much as the media cares about us – that is, not at all. In fact, we actively wish it ill. We cheer when some trash website or paper folds. The frequent layoff announcements make us giddy. Sad journalists whining about how people on Twitter dare criticize them cause us to howl in delight.
I am entirely with him when news media report layoffs and their employees whine about it. And I am with him when he condemns as enemies those organizations, like the Associated Press, that fabricate news to suit the anti-American propaganda efforts of terrorists. And I am oh-so-tired of “journalists” deciding I shouldn’t hear about some events.
FWIW, I fired my then-local newspaper back in 1995. I was a bit ahead of the curve, after a slow start in childhood.
Schlichter’s closing graf:
Published in JournalismThe media hates you. You owe it nothing. Give it nothing, except your contempt.
I canceled the Wall Street Journal and local paper several years ago.
Got an email from NR ( subscribed from 1980 to 2017) saying ” we miss you”.
I don’t miss them a bit.
I wish it was simply the Major Players who can no longer be trusted as journalist providing a look into current day realities.
My spouse got a free local newspaper handed to him during his Saturday morning trip to the grocery store.
Items on Page One of the Lake County Calif “Record Boll Weevil” —
The top story was regarding Gov Newsom’s tremendous budgetary wisdom. That story, which portrayed Newsom as a beloved and dedicated servant to the people of California also took up most of page three. Several paragraphs were devoted to the idea we have a state surplus of monies.
So then why, pray tell, did he cut funding to the fire districts, after what has been the worst six years of wild fires? Or was his use of vetoing programs that are needed on a massive scale the only way he co0uld arrive at this mysterious budget surplus. (Remember: a great deal of this surplus must go to the awarding of 500 bucks a month to every newly arrived immigrant household from south of the border, per one of Newsom’s EO’s.)
Only in the real estate section does anyone find out that there is a log jam of how there had been 196,000 additional new claims for unemployment inside the Golden State. And almost all of which are churning about inside of the bowels of a non-operative computer programing system that will possibly have a handle on these claims sometime in the 22nd Century.
In a world where our Fourth Estate cared about revealing Truth to readers, such an item would be on Page One. Oh plus that story also details how there is a pending 20 billion dollar deficit in the loans the EDD agency has borrowed from the state to pay off the unemployment claims that have already been processed. I have the feeling that Newsom ensured that deficit doesn’t get reported as far as the state’s budget operations until later this year. He needs to soften up his political reality, as right now voters are deciding which Republican should replace him since the necessary number of signatures for his recall have been approved.
I thought about cancelling our local paper, but there’s just too much information on local news and events. Besides, I mostly read the sports and comics anyway . . .
Its been almost two decades since I canceled our local paper because of their bias. The paper still survives, but with much lower revenue & and fewer journalists.
Zombie newspapers sound okay to me.
You and me both. Also the Weekly Conservative. I think it was the Weekly Conservative? Bill Kristol’s travesty? Oh, Oh I remember, the Weekly Standard…
Reading Irving Kristol in the WSJ was one of my greatest pleasures. Along with Robert Bartley. And Alan Abelson of Barron’s. Alas, it is indeed a barren media landscape now.
Quote: “I don’t miss them a bit”
I will never take the Atlanta Journal.
I do take the Marietta Daily Journal. It gives me local news (that I read online) and is not relentlessly liberal. It is owned by at least Center Right types.
But I dropped the WSJ ages ago because I could not stand it. Same with National Review. They hate me anyway. Oh, I know they will claim that they don’t, and the people here at Ricochet will go on and on about how they are not really sneering at me, but please. I can read.
I know James Lileks is still a real newsman, so I’d love his take on my belief that the young people going into traditional journalism are, in general, a confederacy of dunces. The stuff I read in the San Antonio paper is astonishing in how poorly it’s researched and the whoppers they will print as known facts. As my major piece of evidence I hold up Syndicated columnist Catherine Rampell, a journalist who appears to serve to simply assure boomers that their low opinions of millennials are well founded.
I see lots of great young journalists on The Federalist and elsewhere, but in the legacy media it seems irredeemably bad.
Well if the great young journalists aren’t wasting their time with the legacy media, that sounds smart.
At one point I got NR, Weekly Standard and American Spectator.
All done now.
I’ve long believed – since I was on my college paper in the early 80s – that an unbiased reporter would be thought of as either “neutral” in the best case, or “too conservative” or “too liberal” by a roughly equal percentage of readers (or viewers).
So, by that reckoning, very few reporters today would qualify as “neutral”, at least in the US.
If we look at well-known news people, say, the anchors of the big networks nightly news shows, how many would be seen as unbiased under those criteria?
Dating myself here, from about fifty yrs years ago I can vaguely remember Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC, Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith on ABC, and of course Walter Cronkite on CBS. I have zero awareness of bias when I was seven to seventeen years old, however. ;)
Move ahead to the late 70s and 80s, we have John Chancellor on NBC, Max Robinson and Frank Reynolds on ABC, and the odious Dan Rather of CBS. So there’s at least one flaming liberal there, haha. Chancellor struck me as a leftie, too.
You get the idea. I guess I could run through all the reporters I can remember – Roger Peterson, Roger Mudd, Bernard Kalb, John Cochran, Irving R Levine, Leslie Stahl – but now I’d basically be writing a book.
I’d suggest we Ricochetti could name a lot of today’s prominent journalists we’d call ‘liberal’ and a few ‘conservative’. But who are the unbiased ones where we just can’t tell?
My local paper is called the News and Observer and was owned by FDR’s press secretary. Back in the late 80s my brother had bumper stickers printed up with ‘Just Say No to the N&O.’ It was because of local issues. But it got a lot of reaction. The paper has gone into a definite slide and has been sold off to corporate media.
I still get the local paper because yes, it’s local, but mainly because I enjoy writing letters to the editor pointing out the mistakes in the ones written by doofus lefties. I swear they’ll print anything someone sends them, including mine.
Except Kurt Schlichter couldn’t be bothered with basic fact checking/verification. Don Lemon is not fired. His show is not cancelled. Instead, it is being rebranded “Don Lemon Tonight.” Same host, same time, same channel.
Remember “learn to code” from a couple years ago?
Well, boo-hoo for journalists. But I think “turnabout” still counts as fair play.
I’m torn. Quality news organizations are really important.
Like Schlichter, I cheer when bad news organizations suffer. Enemy of the people is not an overstatement. But I really want to see honest news thrive. Where to find some? Are there bright spots at the local level? The Epoch Times? The Post Millennial? The Spectator?
When I drafted my post, I had a section on news I currently trust, but it didn’t flow well with the rest, so I left it out. The Epoch Times is among them. Another is OANN. There’s a long-time local paper I trust.
But the best sources of news today are bloggers-turned-aggregators, like The Instapundit, and a scattering of focused blogs. The traditional media simply can’t compete with bloggers who cover their own turf.
A great aggregator is bonginoreport.com
Agreed, and it’s in my daily bookmarks.
I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in so many years, I can’t remember when I ditched it. But National Review is essential reading. It keeps me sane.
I am NR Plus. I tossed three issues in a row when they made me mad in the first article then got two in a row that I read from cover to cover and kept every article. It is still worth it for the articles that I do like, for the Lileks and Long pages, and for the book reviews.
As long as the keep the subject off Trump, they are often good. Often I can gain insight from bad opinions, but not from NR. They just don’t seem to correspond to reality.