You feel strongly about Black Lives Matter, climate change, democracy in Hong Kong or Israel’s West Bank policies? What do you really know about the issues that are close to your heart? How confident can you be in an opinion that is based on a chance swipe and scroll that engaged you for, like, 22 seconds? It takes months maybe years of thoughtful, critical, informed, and in-depth reading to formulate an educated opinion.
No one said adulting would be easy.
Plenty of people older than you make no effort to be informed. Or they read and watch only what they agree with. But look at the shape of the world you inherited from them. Your millennial elders have not set much of an example either with their laptops sharing random Facebook posts.
You Gen Z people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s seem to have mostly dispensed with Facebook and laptops.
What you know comes from scrolling through your smartphones on Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and lately the hyper-vacuous Tik Tok.
Left to
your own devices, how can you separate the wheat from the chaff? Chatter from substance?
You may think I am being extra. But I maintain you can’t be legitimately woke if you do not read a newspaper regularly – like every day. The routine is important.
A literate, educated, grownup needs to know what is going on. Your best bet is to habitually turn to the same, single, cohesive, comprehensive platform.
You need to get beyond the echo chamber that merely reverberates the whims of your social media cohorts. An acceptable platform is one that offers under one roof reliable news, views, literature, and culture.
You’re thinking “Ok boomer, what makes you think any news source is reliable?” Point taken. Nonetheless, the better newspapers and websites maintain standards and don’t hide their biases. Regardless, it is your responsibility to be a discerning information consumer.
Personally, I subscribe to the online editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. I peruse both and usually read several articles from beginning to end in each. I also take the daily Hebrew-language Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz newspapers in PDF format. I don’t get through all four periodicals obviously.
Haaretz and the Times give me little joy, but I read them anyway.
I always had a love-hate relationship with the Times. I began reading it on a regular basis in 1971 when in the eleventh grade at Mesiftha Tiffereth Jerusalem, a Jewish parochial school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I’d plop down 15¢ at the candy store at Canal Street and East Broadway above the F-train subway station. My money bought me a 96-page broadsheet jammed with seven columns of newsprint. (Most surviving newspapers today are tabloids and nobody uses seven columns anymore.)
In the afternoon I would buy Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post
(another 15¢) to read the pugilistic writing of columnist Pete Hamill. The
Times was an altogether more demanding experience. To read it made me feel
grownup, part of a larger world. Like maybe I was going to go to college.
The Times was painstakingly compiled and meticulously edited and really was an early draft of history. I would force myself to deliberately read an article in newsprint from start to finish without any expectation that dopamine would wash over my orbitofrontal cortex. Instead, I could be sure that my fingers would be smudged with newspaper ink.
It took me years to learn how to read the Times and what interested me.
Today little of what you read on the Internet is anchored in original reporting; much of what you read is aggregated, curated, and ideologically dogmatized. Where possible read original reporting.
Fifty years ago, the Times operated in a looser ideological straitjacket and – like other quality newspapers of the day – maintained bureaus in major US cities and across the globe. Because there were many prestigious newspapers around, it was theoretically possible to get different vantage points.
When I came of age, telephones were rotary, newspaper pictures were not in color, the US was at war in Viet-Nam, Republican Richard Nixon was president, and Soviet Jews were barred by the socialist authorities in the Kremlin from emigrating.
Reading newspapers I realized that politics, Jews, and Israel were the subjects that most captured my attention.
Usually, around page 46 toward the back of the first section, the Times published editorials – unsigned articles attributed to the editorial board expressing the official position of the newspaper. These were ordinarily uninspiring and eminently worth skipping. Alongside the editorials were letters to the editor that had arrived at the Times' offices on West 42nd Street via the US Post Office (some had been handwritten) and selected by a team of letters editors. I would skim this section; "letters to the editor" were often signed by professors, heads of organizations and retired diplomats who disagreed with something they’d read in the newspaper. They were comparable to talkbacks except that they adhered to standards for decency and grammar, you had to sign your real name, and it took an effort to submit one.
The page opposite the editorial page was the “op-ed” page. It carried articles by Times and guest columnists. I did not read staff columnist Russell Baker whose wry humor was culturally over my head or Tom Wicker because I did not have prerequisite knowledge of the political scene. Washington bureau chief R.W. Apple’s assessments were similarly beyond my ken.
The guest columnists either wrote on apolitical subjects or shared the Times’ outlook. Nowadays, the Times is even more myopic, illiberal, and closeminded about giving a platform to those its editors disagree with.
Then as now, it is worth paying attention to bylines (the writer’s name).
Before any Times article was published, it was revised by layers of editors. The first paragraph or two of a news article often encapsulated the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the story. Currently, because of the Internet, such "just-the-facts" journalism is passé.
In the old days, reporters showed unique styles and covered beats (subjects) that made
some more interesting than others to read.
The starting point for just about every article is influenced by the predispositions, inclinations, and leanings of its editors and writers. Humans come to writing preloaded with bias. These days latent bias by a writer is not an issue since there is no longer any pretence of objectivity.
As Donald Trump reinvented what it means to be president, the Times (and the Washington Post) countered by unabashedly reinventing themselves from ostensible news and feature outlets to deliberate views-outlets. Content is seldom slugged (or explicitly categorized) to differentiate news and features, analysis, and opinion. It is all one mishmash.
But you at least get edited, vetted, coherent coverage on a wide range of topics by turning to an outlet like the Times.
Back in 1971, with 90-plus pages to digest daily, I soon found out where to focus. There was plenty of stuff to skip: theatre reviews (I had never seen a play), wedding announcements (dull), business/finance/stocks (yawn) and sports (the venerable Yankee baseball players I'd worshipped had been traded or put out to pasture). Shipping news? Nah. A long weather column? Usually, not. Classified job ads -- only when I got to college.
Officially, the Times was not a Jewish newspaper though when
I began reading it the Ochs-Sulzberger clan which owned the company could still
be charitably described as assimilated Reform Jews of German origin.
Many of the top editors, including Max Frankel, Joseph Lelyveld and A.M. Rosenthal were Jewish. Wolfgang Saxon wrote obituaries worth-reading about the Jewish departed. (An aside: get into the habit of reading the obituaries; they are like mini-biographies.) The Yiddish-speaking Irving Spiegel covered the city’s Jewish beat with panache.
The Times was never comfortable in its Jewish skin. It had underplayed (though not completely spiked) coverage of what Hitler was doing to the Jews of Europe during WWII. The first mention of the Warsaw Ghetto on January 3, 1941, was a stand-alone photo with a single sentence caption. Earlier, in the 1930s, the Times had whitewashed Stalin’s atrocities in the Soviet Union.
The paper was anti-Zionist – its owners opposed a national homeland for the Jewish people. Once Israel fought its way into existence in 1948 the paper more than tolerated its existence – though it hardly ever sided with Israel editorially. After the 1967 Six-Day War, the paper advocated for Israel to pull back to the 1949 armistice lines – the boundaries from which the Arabs had initiated their attack in the first place. Even though the Arabs insisted they did not want peace with Israel not even in exchange for the land they'd just lost.
With the election of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister in 1977, the Times took a more robust adversarial stance – maintained ever since. It toiled to demonize Israel’s control over the former Jordanian West Bank and played up the claim that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestinian territories.”
Only in 1984
did the paper send its first Jewish bureau chief to Israel – Tom Friedman. But only
later did I learn that he had been a campaigner for Breira, a radical student
group that advocated for the PLO (when Yasir Arafat was explicitly committed to "armed struggle").
Wait. So why do I want you to read the Times? Or the WP Post (now owned by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame)? Because with all their faults and aggravations both newspapers/websites provide a literacy you need – a literacy you just can’t get by scanning random stuff shared on social media by friends.
Regrettably, there is no real alternative to the progressive Times – no genuinely liberal, centrist or enlightened conservative platform with global reach and intellectual depth. The Wall Street Journal is focused on business and is editorially Trumpian. Like Fox News, the Times of London, and today's New York Post, the Journal is controlled by the Murdoch family. (Only lately do the Murdoch’s seem to be distancing themselves from Trump.)
On top of it all, the Times has gotten more insufferable for Boomers like me with its infantilizing how-to articles, transparent manipulation of semantics for trendy political ends, and supercilious social hectoring. The paper is experiencing its own sort of cultural revolution (*). The Times riles and infuriates, even as it informs and illuminates.
I can still handle it. I'm no snowflake.
Further Reading:
The Powers that Be by David Halberstam
The Lady Upstairs by Marilyn Nissenson
Double Vision by Ze'ev Chafets
The Trust by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones
Personal History by Katharine Graham
A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill
(*) Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter
