'The Times' is going to start charging for online content after June with content being offered for one pound a day or two pounds a week. Daniel Finkelstein, the paper's Executive Editor, has just said on CNN that he thinks people will be prepared to pay for quality journalism. Of course, he might be right, they might, but what has "The Times' today got to do with "quality journalism"? Or does Daniel perhaps have in mind the article he wrote, at at time when the IDF were slaughtering men, women and children in Gaza, entitled "Israel acts because the world won't defend it"?
Daniel hopes that 'The Times' will be setting a trend, which the rest of the daily drivel will follow. However, it is a trend that has in fact already been established. For instance, 'The New York Times' wrote a couple of months ago that "starting in January 2011, a visitor to 'NYTimes.com' will be allowed to view a certain number of
articles free each month; to read more, the reader must pay a flat fee
for unlimited access." Of course, with newspaper sales falling something has to be done. Nevertheless, here is a suggestion.
With your own paper Daniel producing Zionist drivel of the sort you were writing when Israeli soldiers were killing innocents and with 'The New York Times' publishing propaganda of the sort mentioned in my earlier post today, why don't you just try to publish real news? After all, the trash that you write is available in a hard copy of the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" in the town where I live. Trash that is recycled time and time again throughout and through that "marvelous" "free press" which we have privy to from Sydney to Stuttgart, Oslo to Ontario and New York to Naples. Trash which should be analysed and treated with skeptisism but not, at least not as far as the content is concerned, treated with any seriousness. Unfortunately, for Daniel and his ilk, real news is already to be found away from the manufacturers of consent, in the blogosphere, in the alternative news sites, on certain foreign news sites, and for anyone with half a brain it is there that they will be looking. My analysis of the daily drivel, should I have to pay for it, will continue with free copies at airports or with the hard copies that I pick up on the High Street here and elsewhere.
3 comments:
Hi James - i agree their comment articles are worthless, but some of their investigative journalism is extremely good (including some good reporting from Afghanistan which is surprisingly critical of NATO for a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch and full of very right wing opinion pieces)
Oh and i completely agree with you about Finkelstein's piece. Both Fatah and Hamas have often offered to recognise Israel's right to exist within it's pre-1967 war borders in return for a withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlements to those borders and a Palestinian state.
No Israeli government has ever offered to recognise a Palestinian state's right to exist - only some Apartheid style townships surrounded by Israeli forces and Israeli settlements - and with Israeli forces having the right to invade the Palestinian state and arrest people, but enjoying total immunity from prosecution when doing so.
Yes, you are probably right; there probably is some decent investigative journalism in the 'Times" and some of the other mainstream dailies.
Unfortunately, it is not only the comments that let those papers down but rather the "news" articles where one of the papers, AP or Reuters, set a trend for the other papers and any investigation into the actual news is neglected, probably for political reasons but probably not only, and it might be true to say that the journalists are quite simply not doing their job.
John Pilger's "Tell me no Lies" is worth a read!
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