[Leica] RIP, my newspaper

[Frank Dernie]

Is this all that new?
My first visit to the USA was in 1970 when I did a summer exchange with a US student, with me working at the Milwaukee factory of Falke Gear Corporation and he at David Brown Gear Industries, the company with which I was doing my apprenticeship.
I was warmly welcomed and the people I met were extremely hospitable and polite. My big shock, however, was how little the people I got to know knew about World affairs, politics and geography in general. I knew more about US geography than anybody I met. Schools taught nothing about the World at all, as far as  could tell from the friends I made of my age.
There was no locally available newspaper that I found with more than perfunctory and very US-centric articles on anything which was not local and these were lurking on one non-prominent page like an afterthought.
The general knowledge of what was happening elsewhere in the World was absent (in fact most people seemed to assume the USA was the world…) even though American boys were being brutalised daily in Viet Nam at that time.
For me the newspapers and tv news were parochial. Anything worthwhile was only in magazines like Time.
It is something which massively shocked me at the time and that I have never forgotten.
Frank D.


> On 30 Mar, 2015, at 09:04, Peter Klein <boulanger.croissant at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The answer is that the media do not think that their American readership is
> interested in anything international except if it directly affects the
> U.S., or if it somehow confirms or (occasionally) refutes a dominant
> American attitude. Or if it is horriffic, or has something to do with sex,
> and the more outrageous the better.
> 
> Compare the U.S. vs. International editions of major American publications.
> You'll get a rude shock.  Also, compare a 1950s or 60s edition of Time or
> Newsweek with a recent one. You'll find less content, less depth, and a
> much lower grade-level of writing. None of this is accidental. The
> publications life blood is the delivery of eyeballs to advertisers. They
> know that today's American eyeballs, on average, will not stay on the page
> of intelligent, in-depth articles long enough to see the ads.
> 
> --Peter
> 
> On Sunday, March 29, 2015, Jim Nichols <jhnichols at lighttube.net> wrote: