Newspapers in the Old Days

I like the web site Worthwhile Canadian Initiative and I have followed and even commented on the writings of Frances Woolley. In my own way I think they do a wonderful even handed job. However today Woolley put something up that I do not understand and while I sit here down south in the drenching rain I took a break to try to make a point.


You see, when I was growing up, before television, we did not even have a radio, and I lived in New York City, we always had newspapers. My father had a morning paper and then an evening paper. In the morning it was the Daily News, I guess because it was easy to read and in the evening he had the Telegram. Now my grandmother read the Post, she was a socialist after all, yes the Post, before Murdoch, was very left wing, it had a light blue mast head and you could always see a Post reader. Then there was the Mirror, the Journal American, the Tribune, the Times, and even more. There were dozens of newspapers and each targeted a specific audience of political belief. I would read the Times on Sunday, we also got the News, and even the Newark Star Ledger, never really understood that. I delivered the Staten Island Advance everyday except Sunday, 109 customers over a 7 mile route.


I even knew a few old New York newspaper guys. Damon Runyon types all. Well that gets to Wolley and her piece. News, what is it and who will do the job? Yes news is a commodity like any other, people want it and will pay something, depending on what value it has. Before Television the newspapers were the only way to get news, and it was the news you wanted. Republicans and Democrats, Socialists and Communists got "their" news from their newspaper. Was there a spin, well look at Hearst and the Journal American, they actually "made" the news in many cases. If you were in their club then you liked what they said.


Now this gets to Fox. Poor Fox, somehow it is likened to some evil empire. She writes:

Which brings us to the rise of Fox News. If mere information provision is no longer profitable, who will volunteer to subsidize a news operation? Someone who is looking to re-design the flower beds - or a nation's government.

Yet as an explanation for the rise of Fox News, this is too easy. Why did Katie Couric ask Sarah Palin which newspapers or magazines she read? It's because what we read defines us. Like it or loathe it, Fox News provides its viewers with a strong sense of identity: Fox Viewers are Stupid, Less Informed and the list goes on.

Now what is the basis for that statement. Google's search suggestions? Is there any fact that one who watches Fox is stupid? Let's see, 14 books, 125 papers, six start ups, four Professor positions, six languages, ah stupid! You see I watch Fox, also MSNBC, PBS and even CSPAN! Now perhaps we down here should take our guidance from those up there but alas, we do not, except I do listen to my Nova Scotian wife! So why all the upsetness, my neologism, as to Fox? A lot is just "entertainment". Now I do not go to football games but I hear many people do, it is their entertainment. I do not go to hockey either but I gather my friends up north do.

Thus the better thing to do is ask why do people watch say Fox over MSNBC, perhaps it is "obvious" to some but a fact based analysis would help. No one in my opinion really buys pure news. They buy a package. In some cases it is entertainment, in other cases it is reinforcement of their own views. In today's Internet world one often must create their own news, scanning across a multiplicity of sources. They are there and one gets to make a judgment as to what is and is not "real". One uses analytical reasoning to accept or reject the "facts". Thus out of hand dismissing of the Fox audiences is a contradiction to that method, the method of fact based accumulation of knowledge.

The Fox viewer is there. Okay, who are they, I would assume they are not all neanderthals. Remember back in the old days, the 1940s, there were dozens of newspapers, and people often read two to three each day. No television. I would suspect that the same happens today. There are those who switch from Fox to PBS and then back again. That does not make them troglodytes.