Sunday, April 20, 2008

Does It Get Any Worse?

Today is Sunday, the first day of the week, and the only day of the week that I get The Daily Oklahoman, the worst newspaper in America. Don't look for any world or national news in this rag. It devotes only a single page of it during the week--since returning to the state year ago, I cannot recall a single day that had any national or world news on the front page--an avalanche on Sunday--2 pages. Jim Lange, the editorial cartoonist, is a simple-minded moron whose work rarely rises above the 2nd grade level. He can be counted on the faithfully depict the politics of this rag, which, naturally, are to the right of Genghis Kahn. This 1999 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, which singled out The Oklahoman as the worst paper in the country, may be out of date in some particulars, but the thrust of the article is still correct. I've decided I'm done with this piece of shit. I cannot imagine what possessed me to subscribe to it (and I'm talking about just the Sunday edition) in the first place. But having only recently returned to the state, I entertained the fantasy that perhaps the paper had changed. Well, it does appear I was right. It got worse.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

PF:

Newspapers all around the country, small city papers, are reducing drastically national and international news for a very good reason: by the time it appears in the paper, people have already learned of it on line, on websites, on blogs, on cable TV. Newspapers, which are losing readers all across the country, are therefor concentrating on providing what the web and cable news services can not and do not: local news, local stories, local color, etc. The few small city papers still making money... and there are not many of them... have mastered that tactic successfully. Simple fact is, whether you like it or not, small city papers [local papers] are no longer the primary source of national and world news for their readers. New information delivery technology has passed them by.
Your paper may be an embarrassing rag. I don't know. I don't read it. But if it is, it is not because it does not much cover national or world news.