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01/13/2005: "Paper Training"

I had a New York City moment the other day coming out onto 7th Avenue from Penn Station, when I was handed a freebie copy of the New York Sun as a promotion. I hadn’t gotten around to checking out this particular masthead, so when I hit the subway and settled in with my headphones I took a look. That’s when I had the NYC moment. First some background. Rush keeps talking about the “mainstream liberal media,” and what could be more mainstream than newspapers? Yet every paper I’m exposed to in this, the bluest city in the bluest state, is a Right Wing Rag (RWR). Am I exaggerating? Let’s make this a fact-based analysis by itemizing the instances. On the one hand, there is the New York Times, my personal paper of record since my Academy days. (As an aside, I wonder if it’s still delivered to cadets, considering the politicization of the military that’s happened since I was at the rockbound highland home? I’ll have to ask my niece, a cadet. N., if you’re reading this, shoot me an email). Anyway, I consider the NYT to be a moderate to left (MTL) paper, which obviously does not conform to the Rush party line labeling of XL, but there it is. On the other side is every other paper you can lay your hands on in the Big Apple. They are, in no particular order, the Wall Street Journal, most definitely a RWR. Then there’s the Daily News, which was once a working man’s paper. Truman once said that any working man who voted against the Democratic Party needed to have his head examined. What a quaint idea! Alas, the allure of fiscal free lunch and military antics as a spectator sport has captured the NYC everyman. Ditto (or maybe I should say Dittohead) for the New York Post. Indeed, all I need to say is that the NY Post is put out by the same crowd responsible for Fox News. (As another aside, I should make it very clear that I’m not expanding RWR coffers by paying for any of these papers. I read them for free while getting a shine at lunch or when they’re left on the train and I’m already done tapping away for the trip.) Then there are the freebie papers. They’re not only pseudo-freebie like the News or the Post, so ubiquitous that you’d be almost crazy to buy your own copy. The freebies are really freebie – you couldn’t pay for them even if you wanted to, something I told the Sarah Jessica Parker look-alike who, on the subway yesterday, asked where she could buy my paper (come to think of it, maybe it was her. How else could an upscale Upper East Side New Yorker not know about freebie papers unless they are a celebrity who rarely hits mass transit anymore? And that paper had a picture of SJP, didn’t it?). Anyway, the freebies – Metro and AM New York, aren’t really substantive enough to have a political point of view. They instead rotate through guest columnists. This might seem on the surface to be a policy that would result in balance. Unfortunately, because the RW columnists are always on message as Bush apologists, and the “equal time” columnists write about pretty much anything they want, the net political slant of the freebies is Skewed Right (SR). So in the bluest of the blue the odds are one MTL paper opposed by 4 RWR and 2 SR. If only there was a liberal bias in NYC papers! Of course, if there were, I might be spending the trip reading them rather than tapping away like I am right now.