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This from Eschaton, which has been posting at light speed with Atrios on the lam:
An internal committee of the New York Times has come up with a list of recommendations "to increase reader's confidence in the newspaper"....more coverage of religion, rural areas and Bobo's world. And starting a blog!
It's worth applauding the NYT's effort to engage more readers, but it's also worth asking - what sorts of religious people will they be covering? More stories on Hindus, yes? Lots of those in America...And how about Buddhists? How about Wiccan-centric pieces, as they make up the fastest growing religious population in the U.S.?
Rural areas? Fine. Good. I guess we'll be hearing all about how Wal-Mart guts small town communities, or why so many prisons have become the economic anchor for so much of flyover country, or how difficult it is to get an abortion in many small towns, how corporate, monoculture farming has killed the small farmer, right? Right?
Oh, great, and a blog! That should be about as exciting and edgy as Harvard basketball.
Big media seems to fail to understand there are deeper, more endemic reasons people are running from the husk of teevee news and aiming for newsprint's head - in many ways, the reasons a lot of people even bothered asking "why do they hate us?" kinds of questions can be laid squarely at the feet of cost-cutting, celeb-obsessed, establishment-fellating news orgs; and even supposedly respectable papers like the Washington Post and NYT admitted they dropped any pretenses of speaking truth to power in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq because they didn't want to be left behind.
Little hint - that thing, down there? The navel? Yeah, staring down there - that's not outward looking, even if you do end up finding more lint.
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