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April 26, 2007

Canary in a coal mine

... it seems my departure from The Dallas Morning News last fall really was a sad harbinger. Here's Art Winslow's round-up for the Huffington Post on the appalling "rolling blackout" of newspaper book sections across the country. What's stunning is how quickly they've all folded or been gutted and stuffed into some other section.

Anti-intellectualism is a proud tradition in American journalism, and often a worthy one -- that take-no-nonsense, Front Page-style skepticism. But that's different from this bottom-line, anything-for-the-stock-price mentality that currently grips newspaper management. The big-city daily was once considered a cultural asset, a provoker of civic self-examination and discussion. Nowadays, newspapers seem determined to fulfill the prophecy of eager webheads that they're worthless, their time is past.

Newspaper managers are succeeding at this very well -- by giving us nothing to read.

Posted by jweeks at April 26, 2007 11:20 AM

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COMMENTS

That's a depressing thought. I hate to see how rampant anti-intellectualism is in our culture. Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? It's about a dumbed-down future where "The #1 movie in the country was called Ass, and that's all it was, for 90 minutes. It won 8 Oscars that year, including Best Screenplay." Since seeing it, I often wonder how long it'll be before that movie gets produced. I guess we must fight against it while we still can, huh?

Posted by: Library Diva at April 29, 2007 10:42 PM



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