Letters to the Editor
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Rotting Corpse
The subject today, which is now depressingly familiar, is the continuing degradation and subsequent demise of print media as the vehicle the founders intended for the political discourse democracy requires, which now seems a distant memory.
In a futile, relentless, and ultimately self-defeating pursuit of a "readership" resolutely hostile to actual reading, the heedless, Epimethean corporations that now have absorbed our "free press" have chosen to cheapen their "product," appealing to the "Survivor" set, rather than realizing the simple fact that in so doing they lose the faithful and render useless the higher knowledge that is really their only selling point in a fast-paced, dumbed-down world.
As Anonymust pointed out, the futility of making the product cheesy and indistinguishable from the offerings excreted by their broadcast brethren, even great newspapers relinquish their reason to exist, not to mention any residual prestige they may have retained from the past. And I would add to WT's thought that Sulzberger ought go about in disguise, that his rag no longer carries any whiff of erudition the reader might hope to gain from familiarity with it. It's the readers who need a disguise. Maybe hide your NYT under a copy of People. To have one's intelligence insulted repeatedly by nearly every writer on the op-ed page with utter falsehoods, rote dismissals of actual thinkers like Chomsky, always based on the ignorant and arrogant assumption that the reader doesn't know better, is to ask for the shovel to dig your newspaper's grave. The pursuit of "balance," which is currently fashionable but absurdly indifferent to truth, appeals only to those too addlepated and dumb to read a newspaper anyway. Does anyone who believes a word Kristol types spend $1.25 and a half hour reading anything, except perhaps on the toilet?
Nice business plan. Why not market mink coats to PETA?
PS... Bahhummingbug.. I'm glad to know that I've still got you, and your gun, where I want you. What are you pouring tonight?