The opinion pieces I see referenced from the NY Times, the New Yorker, Slate, etc seem to have become a sort of genre fiction, like romances or even more, westerns. The reader knows what to expect but enjoys having the repetitive experience, and in the end is reassured that their desires, their intuitions, their values, their heroes and heroines are the right ones. Everything is put nicely in place by the end. The current fashion is that the bad orange man has been banished, and all's right with the world. But that is only one variant. It has been going on for some time. It's the Hallmark Channel for urban liberals. I wonder if opinion pieces in the major corporate outlets have always been genre fiction?
I generally don't read opinions in "news" sources I don't trust, which you have mentioned. They harsh my mellow and angry up my blood.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the answer is "not always". IIRC some newspapers liked to stir up controversy in the editorial page (letters/columns) to encourage people to pay their nickel to see the donnybrook. But most of the time the purpose of the house organ is to make you feel, not think.
ReplyDeleteNow that I think of it, maybe the editorial page is like the house organ in a theater showing silent movies.
There is less reading sources across the line these days. When I was growing up my dad read the Chicago Tribune (republican) on the train downtown in the morning and the Sun Times (democrat) on the way home. Without the internet this let you get the latest sports and news. Now these were not that far apart culturally since then if you told a “priest, rabbi and minister enter a bar...:” joke all three would have agreed on most issues. Today this is definitely not true. But I do notice on my trips to NYC it as the WSJ or NYT inbound and the NYPOST going home. You can prove this by looking at the number of full page ads by Real estate brokers for multi-million dollar hamptons homes in the NY Post!
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