Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

I dont get the love for WSJ. Unless they improved dramatically since the late 90s, I was not impressed the last time I read a copy...which has been a while.

Early 90's I had a student subscription and the WSJ was awesome. Lots of great and insightful info. If you had the time you could spend an hour or better reading everything that was interesting. Then I let my subscription lapse and picked it up again around 1998. It wasn't the same. There was no edgy or insider info being shared. It had turned into the McDonalds version of itself.

So I dropped my subscription again. I did some investigation and found that WSJ had been sold sometime in the mid 90's. The new ownership had ruined it. Maybe its been sold again and has redeemed itself......

 

WSJ of today is part of News Corp (Robert Murdoch) since 2007. I noticed with this era of ownership they invested heavily into WSJ for digital, news, etc. Yes the Opinion section is a Conservative jizz fest, however, they must be this way since well did you ever read the NYT Opinion section and see how well.....silly it is? Also, the volume of Opinion pieces from NYT is overwhelming with crybaby pieces IMO. NYT IMO were idiots for being triggered over Sen. Cotton-AR piece a few months back about brining the military to the streets to stop the riots. WSJ Opinion on the other hand gave the WSJ News side the middle finger due to WSJ News side of the business were bitching about the WSJ Opinion pieces. When did Opinions became voodoo?

We can lay out some criticisms against Murdoch, but with his money WSJ has various resources and it isn't something that is dying, if you know what I mean. They still get good news executives here and there, and when reading their news reporting I don't feel like a smuck in skinny jeans with a BS four year degree and $100k student loan debt drinking their Starbucks coffee and want safe spaces.

 

I suppose it wouldn't be a first choice for all you Americans, but am the only The Guardian reader here? Yes, I know, lefty liberal; I should be the red hiding under someone's bed!

Back in work days, I used to buy the paper every day. In the last couple of years I got fed up with the BBC, and drifted to the on-line Guardian.

During my early days on in London (1970-something), I applied for a job on the Economist, production team. I didn't get it.

 

I’ve kept up with the Guardian since moving to live overseas in the mid-90s, when it was a treat to get a tracing-paper thin Guardian Weekly in the post. I also subscribed to the Telegraph for a contrasting, conservative perspective on the news back home. Sadly, the quality of their journalism has declined significantly over the past couple of decades, just as it has for other British broadsheet newspapers (the fact that they no longer print on actual broadsheets is but a partial reflection of this trend).

Still, the Guardian does have a few attractions. It has pretty good international coverage, it has the occasional, excellent commentator on British politics—Rafael Behr, for instance—and it’s pretty decent for some cultural stuff. The music coverage is lacking but the film critics, in particular, are very good, especially Mark Kermode and Peter Bradshaw. Bradshaw’s one-star film reviews invariably make for fun reading, and his review of Eat, Pray, Love is a highlight (“sit, watch, groan. Yawn, fidget, stretch.“). Jay Rayner, the restaurant critic (and a jazz musician) sometimes turns out hilarious restaurant reviews (“The dining room, deep in the hotel, is a broad space of high ceilings and coving, with thick carpets to muffle the screams. It is decorated in various shades of taupe, biscuit and f**k you“). There are some amusing opinion contributors, as with Martin Rowson, whose cartoons against the Tories are getting ever more scathing and apocalyptic (I’m fond of his “fur cup” visual jokes - say it out loud). And there are a couple of knowledgeable sports writers, at least for (association) football, although they’re not very good writers.

The Guardian’s decline, alas, is the same as that of most of the other English-language newspapers I’m familiar with in the UK and US. The British tabloids always were the scum of the earth—do you remember the days when the News of the World used to list the number of nipples in each edition on the cover?—but the journalistic collapse of some of the serious papers is to be greatly lamented. The Independent of old has essentially ceased to exist. The Times was a rag even before the Murdoch empire drove it further into the ground, and while the Telegraph’s exposé of the MPs’ expenses scandal was admirable, what was once an excellent paper has very much lost its way over the past five or six years (and not necessarily because of its hijacking for the purposes of pro-Brexit advocacy).

Unfortunately, the same trends are seen here in the US. The Washington Post fails to distinguish properly between reporting and commentary, and trying to pass the latter off as credible news is unacceptable. The NYTimes has a basic identity crisis. It simultaneously champions left-wing causes even as it mounts aggressive propaganda campaigns against Bernie Sanders, and while it hews unwaveringly to establishment Democratic identity politics and seeks, on the surface, to advocate for the downtrodden, it also devotes far too much space to indulging in all sorts of aspirational neoliberal fantasy nonsense. Its lifestyle pieces, for instance, glamorizing the troubles of twenty-something trust-funders in finding their perfect $800,000 condos are particularly unbearable.

I should give the Financial Times another go, and I’m almost tempted to try the WSJ again, although the moral deficiencies of the Murdoch media make me reluctant to do so. I shan’t forget any time soon the Guardian’s exposé of the phone hacking scandal and the shameful things done in the case of the missing child, Milly Dowler. I’m not sure the stain of that scandal was confined to a few bad apples.

Thank goodness there’s still the Economist.

 

An interesting review of the state of British media! Thanks.

I used to visit the BBC News site daily, for a quick update on the news. I find that I spend a lot (hours sometimes) longer on the Guardian site, and am much more likely to stray into cultural and "lifestyle" stuff. Yes, I enjoy Jay Rayner's restaurant reviews too, despite being very unlikely to ever visit any of the places that he covers. Of course, there has never been anything, since her retirement, to match the TV reviews of Nancy Banks Smith. I used to read them even when I didn't even have a TV

 

I'd forgotten about her reviews after they started petering out a few years ago, for shame. She's a great writer. I'm fond of her short, sharp sentences, and her quick wit.

The BBC news still has a few good qualities but it increasingly wants for sustained, adequate analysis. I can't stand the single-sentence paragraphs. An organization with such a global reach really ought to be pushing back against the dumbing down of the news. I get, though, that they're swimming in the same, shrinking digital puddle of financial viability as other traditional media outlets and have to keep people clicking. I suppose this is the same underlying reason why once credible news sources have become devoted to the cultural and lifestyle stuff. At least they fill the time while I wait for new impressions to be posted on SBAF.

 

On the contrary, it led the way into that decline. It also led the way in quoting twitter rather than interviewing people. Twitter was probably very welcome to media organisations who could no longer afford to keep a reserve of journalists at the ready.

The BBC still does have slightly more coverage of my now home country, India, than does The Guardian. I guess they have slightly more international resource. Mind you, they also used to have, until quite recently, an attitude to India that was condescending and patronising. That's improved a bit. It was a Now lets see what those funny people with their elephant-head gods have been doing thing.

I wonder how our representatives of other Asian countries feel about the BBC?

 

I hesitate to reply because I’ve posted too many opinions in this thread already and, more important, I should get out of the way to let others chime in - I’d be keen to hear what they have to say. I don’t know enough about these things but I’d like to learn more.

From the little I do know, I fear the condescension and patronizing attitude you mention comes from an all-too-large and ever-replenished reservoir. This is the same British condescension (and arrogance and mangling of the historical record) that claims India’s success as the world’s largest democracy as a consequence of colonial beneficence (and that fails to understand that colonialism is, by definition, anti-democratic). This is also the same story that gets trotted out in the UK's establishment narrative about democracy in Hong Kong—a story, of course, that has a hard time acknowledging the British East India Company’s past and an even harder time seeing that “company” for what it was: a rapacious, state-sponsored, quasi-official organized crime syndicate, extortion racket, and drug cartel. This brings us back around in a depressing loop of historical evasion and silencing whereby few in Britain know how their county came to control Hong Kong in the first place.

 

Hmmm...

???

<thinks>

You're right: I don't. Anything to do with opium?

 

Because colonialism was, by definition, anti-democratic, there is no reason to assume that, by definition, the citizens of Kong Kong would prefer to die in mainland China during the time of Mao and cultural revolution, then live in a former colony. And if you give the choice to people of Hong Kong right now, who would they prefer to rule Hong Kong?
I do not know why people have hard time remembering that other people living in the shadows of any totalitarian superpower, I am talking 20 and 21 century, do not make nit picking moral decisions, they make live or die decisions.
And whatever would be their decision I doubt if would be greatly influenced today by what the British East India Company was or was not.

 

I share your revulsion at totalitarianism. I gather from what I’ve read of your previous posts that you have a much more immediate and greater appreciation for the horrors of totalitarianism than me. Please know that I am not suggesting that the people of Hong Kong would have fared better under the Chinese rule. Nowhere do I suggest that totalitarianism should be an alternative to colonialism. That is not my intention. To the contrary, one of the tragedies of this year is what is happening in Hong Kong. To return to my points about journalism, above, it is distressing that the plight of democracy in Hong Kong has begun to disappear from news headlines. I worry that not enough is being done to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms—or what remains of them.

I understand your point about nitpicking and I accept your point about the luxury of being able to think about historical perspectives from afar and without facing life and death consequences. I can’t argue with that and won't try to. My point was that there are unfortunate consequences of people not knowing their history. Totalitarianism provides no shortage of tragic examples of the dangers of this, and one of the mechanisms by which totalitarian regimes shore up power is by obscuring and changing the historical record. Let’s recall Orwell writing in 1984 that “who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” and that:

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.” (from 1984 on google books)​

 

Sadly, when one surveys all of human history, we see that there are always people that aspire to control the lives of others to their detriment, leading to my conjecture:

All government tends toward tyranny.​

 

NY'ers in DT NYC say the same shit about Florida until they retire and move to FL for tax savings and lower COL.

I guess the Cali friends won't even talk to you again after moving to TX, I guess good riddance?

 

> Why areCalifornians not marching down Sacramento with torches andpitchforks (or assault rifles)?

it’s easier to move somewhere else with better QoL.