Week Twelve: CHAOS!!!!!!!

Bob Garfield’s opinions in Chaos Scenario were very… strong. I wasn’t a huge fan of the jargon. It may be direct, but I prefer to be treated like an intelligent audience. Looking past that, however, Garfield’s arguments can’t be ignored—if they can be disputed. Admittedly I don’t really have much stock in television—it’s nice to flip it on and watch Family Guy or How I Met Your Mother, but it’s not anything I’d hate to live without. What’s more disturbing to me is the state of the New York Times (or the New York Fuckin’ Times, as Garfield so aptly calls it) and other papers, which are struggling as an industry. The fact that even the Times struggled off to pay its debt of $400 million is more indicative of this fact of anything. However, I don’t think that newspapers are going to die off. Other print media are still around—Kindles haven’t eradicated books yet. It’s true that it’s far easier to put a newspaper’s contents online than a book’s due to length, and we’re seeing a lot more of that with the latter. However, newspapers have weathered the test of time and the changes that accompany it. Radio didn’t obliterate papers, and neither did television. The Internet is the next big thing, but it, like every other media that was once new, does not guarantee the same qualities that print does. Having the same material online is just not the same, for online material is under pressure to be short and watered-down. Online material of the print media will likely at one time or another assimilate to these standards to reach readers, setting them apart from their printed counterparts. Thus there will still be a demand for a product that’s still original. I’ll be the first to admit not knowing enough to make an adequate hypothesis, but there it is. Have at it like piranhas.

I was one of the few kids who read the Times last semester—before things got insanely busy, anyhow. One of the things that struck me was that the coverage on Romney exceeded the coverage on Obama during the 2012 presidential campaign, but I supposed that that was because Romney was the new candidate. Speaking as a liberal, I do not believe the Times is slanted. Of course, I don’t really read the Opinion section where the slant purportedly shows. Anyhow, I chose “In Gun Bill Defeat, a President Who Hesitates to Twist Arms” for this week because I’m trying to follow the standing of gun control in America. One thing I found interesting was the statement that Obama “rarely demonstrated an appetite for ruthless politics that instills fear in lawmakers.” What about drones, then? I do love Obama, but I wouldn’t call his instances of ruthlessness rare. However, I do agree that Obama uses reason to get his way quite often (more often), as this is one of the many things I like about him. I wouldn’t have seen this if not for the NYTimes because I deactivated my Facebook and am not active with Twitter, and I don’t own a radio or a car or a television or seek out television news. Talk about cut off.