Reading The New Yorker and then The New York Times in concurrence, it’s easy to see why the newspaper industry in this country is financially wheelless. The New Yorker is about four times more liberal than The New York Times, which is generally regarded, rightly so, as the most liberal paper in the nation. I believe what we have is a LIBERAL POPULACE, suggested by Washington D.C.’s 90% popular vote in favor of John Kerry in 2004, and arguably, unlike with conservatism, which simply resolves to keep the status quo, there is no limit to which one can be liberal. In other words, if you choose to attempt to initiate change and challenge the government’s practices and tenets, there is no limit to the extent to which you are in danger, there is no ceiling to this. But most people want the socioeconomic gap to be removed, and most people want for everyone to have equal rights, be they reproductive, educational or otherwise.
The New Yorker‘s writing is immediately more palatable than The New York Times’ because, instead of handling tedious specifics, like exact geographic locations in Iraq in which scuffles are now taking place, its article begins by making a broad but clear, immediately understandable statement: “President Obama won the White House in part by promising to end the war in Iraq, and since then he placed his faith in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to help him do so.” This statement, in all its crisp, informative, if subjective tone, would not fly in newspaper reporting, because it would be considered editorializing, furnishing an opinion, rather than the facts. Yet, in conversation, what do we furnish? Opinions. No one wants to sit at a bar with someone who goes, “The specter that has haunted Iraq since its founding 93 years ago appears to have become a reality.” For newspaper style reporting to produce a full picture of the situation would also violate the attention span of Americans, who are used to viewing accounts of massacres in neat, packaged little segments adjacent to fashion reviews of a recent Beyonce performance. Magazines’ zoomed-out moxie is too lithe to be denied preferential attention.
The Times’ statement typifies newspapers’ inherent conservatism, in addition, because it glosses over the adverse effect that America’s invasion of Iraq must obviously have had on the country’s political stability, which before, if tyrannically derived, was at least ordered and intact. It’s such flaccid acceptance and pardoning of the government’s practices by the media that has many people in extremely liberal communities like Boulder, Colo. saying things like, “We basically live in Nazi Germany.” But in Nazi Germany, The New Yorker probably wouldn’t exist, with its resilient penchant for delivering informed but lively commentary, diamond sharp and always fresh.