From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Press Ahead
Don't be an idiot. Read newspapers.
The launch of the New York Sun (the city's fourth local daily) has prompted me to ask: Why read newspapers?
1. The most important reason of all: So that you don't have to talk to people at breakfast, or with your morning coffee. My biggest solecism--which occurred on my first day as a callow lecturer at Oxford, when I first took breakfast in the senior common room of my college--was to say "Hello, Dr. Simopoulos" to a Dr. Simopoulos. The good doctor glowered at me from above a newspaper, which he'd lowered briefly to allow him to make the point. "At breakfast," he said, "we do not speak."
One communed, I learned, with one's newspaper, not with one's fellow breakfasters.
2. Because they provide me, and my colleagues, with a living. Inadequate, it may be. But a living.
3. Because they are the first draft of history. Without them, you wander blindfold in the world. Wars, sports, votes in parliament, U.N. resolutions, marriages, divorces, deaths, births, elections, defections--they're written up the day after, then reassessed the day after that, and the day after and so forth.
4. Of course--and to mix my metaphors--as a first draft of history, a newspaper is also a mirror on the society where it is published and read. Newspapers are also storehouses of prevailing prejudices, of mood and whimsy. Historians need access to those as much as to facts and technical information.
Newspapers are even a kind of tribal mark, especially clear in Britain, and to a lesser extent in France. If you sit across from a man reading the Guardian on the Tube in London, you have all you need to know about him right in front of you. Ditto, to a great extent, with the Daily Telegraph, and the (London) Sun. Spain, where I used to live, is more like Britain. Anyone reading the ABC, a monarchist daily, is likely to be an adamantine conservative.
In the U.S., however, there's no necessary link between the paper you carry under your arm and the politics you carry in your soul. This is because, in most towns and cities, one paper predominates. New York Sun readers, with time, might evolve into an immediately identifiable tribal group. But today, they're as likely to be seen reading it out of genuine (and laudable) curiosity as from any ideological proclivity.
5. Because television and radio are superficial and trivial by comparison. The Wall Street Journal (or the New York Times) contains as many words as are in four novels of average length. (I exclude anything by Trollope, who, incidentally, in "The Way We Live Now," has some of the best discussion of newspapers I can recall having read in a novel.) To get as many words from TV, you would need to have a set on for 24 hours a day.
6. A newspaper is a great hamper with many parcels and packets. In the Journal, you have the first section, then Marketplace, Money & Investing, and, on the right days, Personal Journal; there are also special reports, and the Weekend Journal section. The New York Times, for its part, is "section" heaven--or hell, depending on your perspective. There's Section One, Metro, Business, Sport, Arts, Science, Circuits, Dining In, Dining Out, Dining in the Air, Subterranean Dining, Subaqueous Dining. (OK, the last three are a joke, but only just!)
You do not have to read them all. You would be mad to try. But you ought to be able to understand them all--except perhaps the Money pages, which are above and beyond all understanding, except by God or nerds.
That said, the New York Sun might advertise itself thus: "At last, a newspaper with no sections to throw away!"
7. Without reading your daily newspaper, you are opting out of life. Ditto for not reading the new novels, going to the movies and theater and listening to the music of our contemporaries. Someone I had lunch with last week said that reading newspapers was a mark of civilization, the informational equivalent of taking a shower every morning.
That's debatable, especially since the world is awash with dreadful rags that abuse the word "newspaper." But one thing is true: Of all the world's great cultural divisions, or clefts--such as the one between those who use toilet paper and those who use water; between those who drink tea or coffee, or red or white wine; or those who wear boxer shorts or Y-fronts--the one between those who don't read newspapers and those who do is right up there, a paramount cultural indicator--of something. Of what, I'm not sure, but of something.
8. The need to read a newspaper in the United States is less pressing than in, say, England, because we have good newsmagazines. (The New Yorker, The Weekly Standard and The Atlantic Monthly come to mind.) And many of our papers (though not The Wall Street Journal) are exceedingly boring, and bad.
9. The word idiot is derived from the Greek idiotes, means a private person who keeps himself to himself, who pays no attention to public affairs. In other words, he reads no newspapers.
Conversely, nothing is more gratifying than to read an article, or an editorial, and find that it reflects exactly one's own views. Of course, newspapers are also very good at helping one decide what one's views are--at telling us what we think, or what we ought to think. (There's the old joke about The Economist--not a newspaper but a newsmagazine, but the joke serves just as well--in which a man says to another: "I don't know what to think until Thursday. And then the Economist arriveswith my opinions.")
10. You meet some of the best contemporary writing and thinking in newspapers. You also meet some of the cleverest wordsmithery. "Headless Body in Topless Bar"--a famous New York Post headline--has endured far longer than anything Paula Zahn has said, or Bill O'Reilly.
Apropos of this is that newspapers are so cheap. The New York Post costs only 25 cents. Is there anything else that you might spend a quarter on more profitably? Can you spend 50 cents in a way better than on the purchase of the New York Sun? And The Wall Street Journal is just a dollar, less than a cup of undrinkable coffee from your nearest street-corner vendor.
Finally: 11. If you believe in democracy, as you should, the least you can do is to keep an eye on the rogues and liars who govern us. Newspapers help you do that. Newspapers hate rogues. And that's why you should read them.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
