I spent some of the election campaign reading some of the US commentators I’d heard of. Of every four pieces I tried to read I reckon I finished maybe one. It was very very dull. Dull and portentous. Some of them even managed to make Sarah Palin seem dull, a remarkable feat. Perhaps it’s because they seem not to have read all that much - they have a very narrow range of cultural reference, for all their claims to being open-minded.
Over here the Glasgow Herald has sacked all of its 250 journalists and made them re-apply for 210 lower-paid posts. The result has been a mass outbreak of Bush Derangement Syndrome as various Lefty columnists (calumnists?) trot out the usual gliberalities about the President as they compete to save their jobs. Not a single new thought to be seen.
It’s not the new technology that’s killing newspapers, it’s the fact that they’re dull dull dull. Even The Spectator is dull compared with the back copies I’ve been reading from the early 90s. I really don’t see the point in shelling out hard-earned money to be bored silly when I can read Steyn or ninme or RC2 online.
Well! Cited in the same sentence with Steyn and ninme and helping kill bad papers to boot! That's almost as good as the "Kipling of American Politics."
