01/31/2009
From my time as a journalism student and newspaper reporter, I can vouch for Peter Gadiel’s description of the "corporate gypsies" who populate the profession. Working for small-town newspapers was seen as a way to get "real" experience until you worked your way up to bigger papers — and, for the lucky, talented (or black) few, The New York Times. In other words, suffer these patriotic hicks for a while, then get out of town.A few years back (and maybe still), unknowns (i.e., people who hadn’t won Pulitzers or gone to Yale) had to apply through an African-American woman named Sheila Rule to beg for a job at the Times.
Needless to say, Ms. Rule’s rule probably didn’t help white applicants much.
I share some of Mr. Gadiel’s happiness about the death of newspapers. Yes, they are evil, and they are supreme sinners on the topic of immigration. What I find amusing is that the open borders they champion are likely hastening their death: immigrants don’t read newspapers, and if they do, it’s one in their native language.
The profile of your average newspaper reader today is probably old and white — and much less liberal than the producers of the product. Thanks in part to the Sex in the City attitude the papers promote, new whites aren’t replacing old whites. There is something particularly delicious about newspapers' own hatreds helping to bring them down.
Even the Washington Times (Vdare.com readers will recall it fired Sam Francis), which I understand to be a big money-loser, is slipping further into irrelevance with the hiring as editor of a weasel named John Solomon who’s said to be enforcing political correctness in coverage.
But I can’t be completely enthusiastic about the death of newspapers. Atrocious politics aside, newspapers are a great joy to me, and a part of what made the once-great America great. The written word, carefully crafted, is a high point in a civilization. As we descend into Third World madness (ever notice how newspaper boxes aren’t found in ghettos, and increasingly, suburbs?), we're losing that.
The Internet is great. But somehow, it doesn’t replace the warmth of a newspaper, big town or little town. I should point out that there some fundamentally conservative things about newspapers: they (can) hold officials accountable, tell of local sports, deaths, births and marriages, bounce around the latest controversy, and, horror of horrors, enforce community norms. And the thing’s on paper. Unlike fleeting ones and zeroes on our screens, it’s got some tangibility.
The death of newspapers is a part of the death of America. On a personal level, that’s painful to me, because I’m forced to watch whites being sharply shoved aside to make room for the sprawling Idiocracy our country is literally becoming. I put newspaper death in the same category as "Press One for English,"a president whose preacher damns America, illegal alien gatherings at 7-11, the "diversity recession" and all the rest.
So while the thought of America-hating journalists out of work makes me smile, the bigger picture is a little sadder.
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