I’ve just found an excellent example of why United States newspapers are in so much trouble. “We told ourselves that we had learned the lessons of Sept. 11; we had the safeguards in place to prevent a recurrence, and we had torn down the walls that prevented the coordination of intelligence among agencies.” This from columnist Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His columns appear twice weekly, taking up nearly a quarter of the valuable real estate called the “Opinion,” section.
Does anybody out there remember having this confidence in our safeguards and the communications across agencies? I know that I didn’t and I can’t imagine anyone that has flown recently, or kept up with current events having these beliefs. What planet is this columnist from that he thought that we the people had some belief that we had safeguards in place to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes? Note that in this same addition of Friday Atlanta Journal and Constitution is the story of a man at the New Jersey airport that was having trouble saying goodbye to his female companion, so he snuck past airport security for one last goodbye and ended up shutting the airport air traffic system down in parts of America and Europe. These incidents are all too frequent and too silly and yet we have a columnist with a major newspaper writing that people thought we were secure.
Why would a major American newspaper place such shallow thinking in such a prominent position? If newspapers wish to recover they need to cover the spectrum of news – unfortunately that is what most Americans want – the entertainment, sports, and soft sells the bulk the papers, but they also need to utilize places like the Opinion section to act as thought leaders. This column is not thought leadership. And, this column contains more of questionable quality.
This columnist, and other regular columnists at this newspaper, are very big supporters of government controlled healthcare and much greater government control of our overall financial system, yet in the same article I talk about above, this columnist points to an economics conference that took place this past week in Atlanta (American Economic Association) where the economists talk about their failures in understanding and predicting our recent economic difficulties. He points out, correctly, that economists thought they understood the markets and financial systems. Yet, these economists not only failed miserably in their understanding of markets and financial systems but that failure in of itself was part of the reason for the economic collapse. Bookman points to all of this yet has written nothing to explain how he can support such tight economic controls when those that would do the controlling don’t know what they are doing.
Newspapers are too valuable to our nation for this level of waste.
{ 5 comments }
I stopped reading newspapers years ago. Except for the NYTimes and WaPo, the now crumbling twin pillars of leftist thought, they (the rest of the papers) could disappear and no one would notice.
In all likelihood, the disappearing act will re-surface on the Internet, supported by on-line ads and perhaps a small monthly subscription fee, if the market will bear. There is just so much interesting, FREE content available, most of these rags won’t even make it there.
So it’s good riddance to bad reading…When a publication loses sight of the “separation of news and opinion”, it has nowhere to go but down and away. Like my Polish grandfather used to say “Opinion is one thing but the facts are usually quite another”…Thanks GrandaPa Banachek!!
Hey dummy….What I said was ” you have a right to your own opinion, but you don’t have a right to your own facts”…And I’m not Polish, I’m All American with a Polish heritage….But thanks for thinking of me…!
Re future of newspaper, read an article- Biological reasons why paper reading speed faster than screens. Human eye bandwidth and brain processing speed…. btw, some young business leaders featuring in ”The YES Movie” by Louis Lautman.
http://www.TheYesmovie.com
Daisy is SPAM–ing….SPAM…. SPAM……It’s not a real movie. It’s get rich quick scheme….
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. ”
~ Thomas Jefferson ~