Avoiding the media

I’m reminded by Joe Soucheray in the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.) of the advantages of not watching television news, and particularly of my ceasing to read the once indispensable, and now thoroughly repellant and worthless, New York Post:

You could not avoid it, even if you made a specific effort to skip the Michael Jackson trial. Enough of it leaked through every day that you picked up something from it just by being alive in the world and thus feeling less clean.

As I said the other day, other than seeing an occasional newspaper headline on a newsstand, I literally did not read or hear a single news story about the Jackson trial these past five months, until, after the trial, I read one article about why the jurors voted for acquittal. So it is possible to be alive in this world, and even know about the important things going on the world, and not be showered in filth. You just have to tune out a lot. Leaving the tv off and getting one’s news via the Internet is one way to do that.

Speaking of headlines, and specifically of what’s happened to the New York Post under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch, here’s one I saw in the Post the other day after the jury in the Jackson case had retired for deliberations. It was directed at the defendant, in huge letters filling the entire front page: “SWEAT, FREAK.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 16, 2005 10:01 AM | Send