Here Now the Newspapers

Doom-scrolling news sites gives me agita. And I hate navigating around all that damn click bait (“Brooklynites, Do This to Double Your Lifespan!” or “Joe! Don’t You Wonder How We Know Your Name?”). No sir, I prefer to read a tabloid in the morning. Paging through it all – the gory news, the op-eds the Times rejected, the letters to the editor transcribed from crayon, the 1940s comics updated to change crew-cuts to buzz-cuts, the skimpy weather maps, the astrological advice, the sports stories/box scores, the endless celebrity crap – serves as my wake-up slap in the face before venturing forth into the muck and mire of another New York day. A day that I know will surely be reported in glorious gory detail tomorrow. Which is why I stopped reading the New York Times.

Sure, I could live without the comics. But no gossip, no crime, no leggy females, no horoscopes, no TV listings, and now a sports section with no box scores, no game scores, no standings and no schedules? Are you kidding? Reading the Times feels more and more like a homework assignment. Besides, there’s no way you can read that paper from front to back and still have time for the rest of your life. But I still get it because I absolutely refuse to do the crossword puzzle on a screen.

On a recent Saturday morning I strolled down to the “24 Hour Mini Mart” on the corner, its awning proclaiming: “Breakfast (Kosher & Halal), Lunch, Dinner, Grocery, Sandwich, Cold Beer, Soda, Lotto, etc.” Twenty to thirty years ago, it surely would have listed “Papers” before that “etc.”…Further indication I’m part of a dying breed?

Yup. A recent PEW Research Center Fact Sheet found newspaper circulation continues on its sad 20 year decline. And the explanation might lie with this fact: the average time per visit to the websites of the top 50 US daily newspapers over the past eight years has fallen 43%, from 180 seconds to 91 seconds. People today just don’t spend a lot of time reading the news, whether online or in print. The first indication of the bleak future facing the industry came in 2004 when PEW found 21% percent of those age 18 to 29 cited The Daily Show and SNL Update as the place where they regularly kept abreast of presidential campaign news, almost the same proportion as those who cited ABC, CBS or NBC’s nightly news shows.

Anyway, I scooped up the three dailies and over coffee and donuts devoured the News and the Post. Each was exactly 56 pages. Each adhered to their time-honored credo: if it bleeds, it leads and if there’s pics, it clicks. In tabloid land, you’ll never confront a Times-ian front page headline of “Ukrainian Offensive Sluggish, Intel Suggests.” But you will get a steady cavalcade of “Day Care Horror,” “Caught in the Crossfire,” “He Shot Me,” and the like, usually with photos of cops, crime scenes, or instantly erected street shrines for the dearly departed, featuring candles, flowers and inserts of weeping relatives.

However, while the News might highlight a “Terror Rampage,” the Post will add more beef to the same story, trumpeting a “Terror Horror Rampage Outrage.” And usually the Post layout illustrates their journalistic style: Editors skewer their selected target in large-font pejorative headlines because the reporters’ stories lack the juicy explicit bias that MAGA readers crave.

The News doesn’t engage in such vitriolic ad hominem attacks disguised as news stories, although they do manage to come up with headlines for Trump indictments which leave no doubt about their dislike of the anti-Christ. But their sports section, once a strength, can’t compete with the depth of the Post‘s coverage. By and large, politics remains a politics-free zone, although one Post columnist, Phil Mushnick, will wax MAGA from time to time; but he files some great pieces, so I give Phil a mulligan.

Oh, well. Time to face another miserable day. I’ll do the Times crossword on the subway if I get a seat. And I’m warning you, Gray Lady: if you keep publishing puzzle clues that require me to squeeze multiple letters in the same square as an underhanded strategy to force me online, I’m done.

FUN FACT ABOUT “MULLIGAN” AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU OR YOUR FAMILY!

According to O Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun: An Etymology of Words That Once Were Names by the late Willard R. Espy, a life-long philologist who imbued his writing with great wit and good fun, the word Hooligan originated in the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. That’s where many of the Irish and Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad wound up. The Irish were ruffians and many had the surname Mulligan. The Chinese corrupted the M to H and presto, Hulligan, aka HOOLIGAN became their term of disparagement for the feisty neighbors who got their Irish up. There are many other theories for the derivation of hooligan, and almost all of them involve the Irish. HUBBUB is another word with an Irish derivation. It seems the Celts would make much noise before engaging their enemies on the battlefield, a noise which sounded to the English like “hubbub.” Finally, DONNYBROOK was the name of a settlement on the outskirts of Dublin which began hosting an annual fair in 1204. During the ensuing centuries, drunken brawls became more and more prevalent until the fair was abolished in 1855. But donnybrook lives on wherever fisticuffs break out on a hockey rink or a baseball field, or over-served customers get their Irish up.