Drawing The Line

Critics are always available to assail whatever is printed under the mastheads of newspapers. There's no end to it. If, all things weighed, a paper simply reports happenings with perfect accuracy and avoids commentary, it's out of business. The appeal is gone. Enter other critics. It's an indictment of our inner nature, they'd say.

Newspapers can't win. A long time ago the afternoon editions went the way of arm-garters and buggy whips. People used to come home from work and settle back in cozy armchairs and peruse the happenings of here and abroad and read the opinions of columnists they loved and hated in evening circulations of papers delivered by kids who made a penny a day for each copy they laid or threw at doors. Time's rationed differently now. Afternoons are rostered into television's gossip shows and "soaps." The news, metamorphosized away from print, is read to us by teams of actors and enhanced by video-film. It's truncated to short bites so the viewer with marginal interest won't flee to cartoons on other channels.

For many, no news is no news. It used to be said that "in Philadelphia nearly everybody reads the Bulletin." You didn't have to live in Philadelphia to know that. A full page ad-cartoon appeared regularly in the New Yorker and probably elsewhere in journals not quite as far west as Samoa. But now newspaper readership is in decline. Why bother with the details if someone can read abridged versions to you?

Eventually in some future society even television might give way to a more personal way of absorbing the interesting...a redefined set of needs. Eat a mushroom or snort a potion and drift to la-la attainments. The pioneers are at work already.

When I was a small boy and incapable of reading newspapers in the way that serious minded adults did in normal regularity, I picked and chose: the "funnies," baseball, pictures, and headlines. The war expanded my reading interest beyond these things because I and other little kids had a stake in the events that sent our relatives away to do battle and for a while threatened even our lives because of the probability that we would be bombed. The hysteria of Nazis on the loose, spies and saboteurs and traitors in our midst made it imperative for kids to be alert.

We were introduced to geography in school. In normal times we looked at fairly stable maps: Pennsylvania, Norway, Brazil, The Philippines, Guam. When war came old symbols locating coal mines and coffee plantations and cotton fields and oil wells on maps were replaced by the flags of combatants and by arrows that marked the daily changes in what used to be borders of countries no longer governed the way old rulers intended.

A map is worth a million words. Maybe more.

Evening papers have gone the way of arm-garters and buggy-whips. Those who read "the funnies" and sport pages and scandals in the morning are armed with conversation pieces to compliment last night's television entertainment that appeared in segments between commercials. Their talk may rise to greater issues like where Elvis is or of Woody Allen's fantasies-come-true or where to get free rubbers instead of buying them from the supermarket shelf. Who says people lack the ability to communicate?

It's a shame that evening papers have disappeared. They were at once a stimulant and measured relief from the frenetic bombasts that steal the attention needed to concentrate. In the morning those who are disposed to read newspapers gather up whatever interests them and it's all downhill after that because they can't reinforce their wits with an evening edition. The day has grown old at five o'clock and the morning's knowledge is smothered by television's vacuous-vacuum tube.

Two analogies might be applied to newspapers. One regards them as poor man's (or the contemporary) Encyclopedia Britannica. That's up to the publisher. The other is that they are our cerebral digests. Like food ingested, we are fed news in the morning. We are starving in the evening and television offers snacks and junk food. Even the best reporting from radio or television puts a demand on their listeners to "stay tuned." Phone calls or trips to the bathroom or knocks on the door or family discourse or any other diversions become irreparably rude interference to the attention that the programmer must get. It's all supported by "commercials" that pay the rent but demand interest from those who are not interested. Newspapers have comparative patrons but their readers are not forced to their attention at the expense of interruption, neither separately nor midway through an article or a story.

One thing has survived in the more than fifty years that I have been reading newspapers other than the lives of the immortals on the comic strip pages. Maps still accompany stories. Readers exposed to names like Ciskei and Sarajevo and St. Petersburg and Somalia are not left ignorant of their world. Cartoonists draw other lines and there are those whose knowledge of Miss Wormwood and Lex Lothar and Sid Fernwilter and Sam Ketchum speak for a different set of interests made serious. Is it fair though to judge competence, intelligence, a person's value in society by familiarity with the fiction of entertainments or with the history of the world? In the extreme we are left in safer company with highschool dropouts than with idealogues.

There's a place for drawing one line or another and people who are really "well rounded" appreciated either effort. Snobs will say they abandoned "the funnies" a long time ago. The funnier stuff to them might be editorial cartoons where their own sensitivities are drawing the line. The fault lies in limiting response to just being clever (or worshiping those who are clever) and that, for its own sake, is an inadequacy.