I'm letting my home delivery of the Red/Libertarian newspaper expire in two months, blame internet?
The terrorist NAVARRETTE has won.
In my Blue region with unaccountably Red overlords, there was always a daily newspaper in my home since way before I was born and for the following 60+ years to date. It was owned by a Libertarian chain, part of the Red overlord infrastructure. I wrote my first dissenting Letter to the Editor in my teens, a defense against an early revisionist slur against FDR, and reached a lifetime total of less than a dozen, fading out with the internet’s avalanche of instant opinions that taught they don’t matter much and don’t convince anybody, especially not the owners of newspapers.
But besides that, my Red newspaper, for 60+ years carried opinion writers who, at most, irritated me with lessening power to do so over the lifetime, and, at least, were completely irrelevant to me. I was a late bloomer for the internet, actually far from reaching full bloom at it, and dragged at shifting over completely to e-readers and especially not ditching the hardcopy paper newspaper. I had always skipped sections of no interest, all opinion pieces, and then time-lagged news items already covered more currently on t.v., but with the internet the paper’s news articles were now days or more late. Then there was the stable of unchanging, the same, tired columnists, just their irritating headshots since their writing was irrelevant and unread.
Here’s how I’ve ended up the newspaper reading process: Snap off the rubber band, hurting fingers. Pull off the “bra,” half-sheet of advertising corseting the first section. Read the very occasional, very local, and very hot story not covered via national media outlets (t.v. and internet). Continue with the second section the same way. Toss the entire Sports section. Turn the pages of Opinion and toss. Turn the pages of Entertainment, already covered by national outlets. Read selected comics and the horoscope. Toss the Classifieds. Leave this edited version for the rest of the household to read. Dump the previous day’s leavings into the recycling bin. The whole time, five minutes tops.
Don’t blame it on the internet (entirely). 90% of my home territory’s newspaper content has always been irrelevant and yet politically oppressive to my life.
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