Suggestion Box
Who here reads a decent Sunday newspaper? I’ve recently given up on the Observer after overnight it became a Brownite propaganda sheet. I switched to the Independent on Sunday but it’s so, well, bitty - all little boxes and News In Briefs. No meat.
Plus the IoS’sJohn Rentoul makes me wish I had a cat to kick. Not content with his unseemly fawning over Blair he’s now hitching his skirts up for Cameron. In the words of John Mclane, ‘How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?’ He’s a courtier and not a very appealing one.
So, any suggestions or should I just not bother?
Posted on August 1st, 2007 at 4:42 pm
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Don’t bother. You’re paying far more and what you’re paying extra for is all lifestyle stuff anyway, and lifestyle stuff that is really only for you if you’re young and affluent and living in London. (Indeed, it’s really for people who aren’t fully aware that there is a world outside that one.) I stopped reading the Observer several years before I emigrated and I never missed it once.
Use Sundays to get outside, or if you stay in, there are so many great works of literature that you’ll otherwise never get around to reading.
I ditched the Observer several years ago for its imbecilic reporting on online matters - around the time they ran the story that led to them paying out vast libel damages to the guy who ran Demon Internet after smearing him as ‘responsible for most of the child pornography in Britain’. Since then I’ve watched in horror as the only even vaguely leftish quality Sundays, the Observer and the Indie, have slipped into a swamp of piss-poor uncritical reporting and new-age fuckwittery. The Indie’s current campaign against wi-fi may yet prove to be what finally stops me reading a Sunday altogether.
Scotland on Sunday is fine, if you can get it.
Is the Observer still going?
The Grauniad on a Saturday is better than any Sunday.
k8, indeed it is. It giving a home to Armando Ianucci is its one saving grace right now, if you ask me.
., aye, but only for Charlie Brooker and Marina Hyde. And Matthew Norman’s restaurant review if its a particularly bad one. Norman + bad restaurant = comedy gold.
I’ve taken to buying the Guardian on a Saturday and leaving it lying around unread until the next day. I finally had no more stomach for the Observer when it began starting headlines with the word “Now…”, Daily Mail style.
Well - I was being kind of ironic about the Observer. It must still be around, because I lined the kitty-litter tray with one recently.
But the hell with that. Back to the topic at hand.
I only look at front pages of papers online now, and I only do that because my day job requires a basic grasp of the mainstream media’s prevailing preoccupations. Other than that, I can’t rise to it.
It’s the mainstream hangup with celebrity that gets me - not quite sure what I’ll do with myself if I see another mainstream article about Victoria Beckham’s shrinking arse, etc. I turn when I see that manure, man.
Do people really read whole mainstream newspapers today as a matter of course? Isn’t that just like reading a folder full of press releases? I spend most of my day writing appalling press releases and other comms garbage and, I guess, feel less and less compelled by all aspects of the process (except, of course, the money that writing crappy press releases pays).
I mostly read blogs now anyway.
Good topic, though. Thanks 4 the thread.
Isn’t that just like reading a folder full of press releases?
It probably is and that, probably is (as I said on here not long ago, I think) because newspaper offices which might once have contained experienced reporters are now full of kids either on work experience or just out of it.
Saturday papers seem to be turning into Sunday papers. Well, they are in England. El PaÃÂs here is much better - on a Saturday, anyway - which may be because the senior figures on the paper can remember why serious issues are to be taken seriously and not just mocked or treated ironically.
Sunday Times. It’s the AA Gill column that makes it essential; most of the rest goes into the recycling.
I’ve given up on both the Observer and Sunday Times. They both became more and more lightweight, ditto the Times. I now scan them online.
Kate, you’ll get AA Gill online, so you have no more excuses!
STB
Totally agree with the above. The Guardian on Saturday is the best by far. You have Jon Ronson in the mag, the review section with the best of literature. Screw the Sundays.
I gave up on the Observer, too.
Believe it or not there are some nuggets of real information tucked into the Sunday press.
I wouldn’t recommend any of them as a news source at all so don’t go buying an armful tomorrow and search out the nuggets.You’ll likely not find any at all.
Yet,just on occasion you can be flabbergasted as I was the other Sunday in Portugal where I bought the Sunday Mail.Secreted at the back was a piece by Craig Murray that stated quite bluntly that our boys in Afghanistan were dying for the sake of propping up a government of drug-runners and warlords.
He mentioned the opium he’d seen coming in huge convoys into Uzbekistan from Afghaniatan where he was formerly our ambassador.
Sooner or later that opium will be processed in labs into heroin and dealt on the streets of New York and London.
To learn that we have evidently thrown in our lot with the US who have a long record of underwriting nasty regimes dependent on the drug traffic(from Chiang Kai Shek,Laos,Vietnam to present day Colombia and Afghanistan)from a mainstream media outlet was unusual to say the least.
Nevertheless it does suggest that there is some disquiet in high places about our Afghanistan commitment right now.