582
PARTISAN REVIEW
New Jersey, and writer of an unconventional column for the
New York
Post.
A burning question in today's newsroom is how
to
rekindle in the
American people an interest in reading. My mocking answer has been
in the revolutionary spirit of freedom-maybe we should ban books and
ban newspapers. Maybe then people who believe in freedom will rise up
and protest, go
to
the bookstores and libraries, head to the nearest
newsstand for newspapers-and read! Seriously though, it's not that
people are not reading, but they are not buying what they read. And
they are reading what they are being given
to
read, which has been
dumbed down. Yeah, there's bias. Bias against the reader. Bias in the
sense that the people who edit our newspapers and the people who pro–
duce TV shows and TV news really believe that people out there are
dumber than us. I think that's the root of media bias. A sort of arro–
gance that is anti-intellectual, that is anti-democratic.
Is the
New York Times
biased? Yeah. There is no question of it.
In
fact, I was one of the forerunners of a personal boycott against the
New
York Times.
The problem of boycotting the
New York Times,
of course,
is they boycott you in return . So everywhere I've gone
to
speak, I have
retitled or renamed the
New York Times,
the
New York Paternalistic
Times .
Whether I do it in my newspaper column, on TV, or on the radio,
it's the
New York Paternalistic Times.
Of course that means that I am,
in effect, banned from the pages of the
New York Times .
You call that
media bias? Some people call it self-defense.
There is bias against the reader, I know, because newspapers used
to
run op-ed pieces of fifteen hundred words in length. Then they went
down to twelve hundred words. Then nine hundred words . The
New
York Post
is now, at least for op-ed columnists like myself, six hundred
and fifty words. Some people get three hundred words, which is the
standard for papers like
USA Today.
Sometimes the very words that we columnists use are changed. I
remember in one of my early op-ed columns I wrote the word
juridical.
An editor changed it to
judicial.
I didn't mean judicial. I meant juridi–
cal. But as it was explained to me, you can't expect people
to
under–
stand the meaning of juridical.
It
used to be that if people couldn't
understand a word , they'd look it up! That's how some people learned
English. They used
to
pick up the language by reading newspapers.
We're living in an
Alice in Wonderland
cu lture now. Everything
appears, at least to me, backwards, turned around, upside down, and
yes, slanted. We are far away from the time Nancy Reagan said, "Just
Say No
to
Drugs"; now, on MTV, we have a regular dose of Ozzy
