I’ve been wanting them for years, since I loathe reading the paper. Apart from a couple of columnists, it’s tripe: I can see it turning into the Daily Express for people who don’t care about Diana. It’s a coarse, inaccurate right-wing tabloid which doesn’t have the political punch of the Sun or the Daily Mail.
I stopped the Sunday Times first, a few years ago, because that’s even worse. I sometimes miss John Cornwell’s magazine pieces, but they are rare. The religious news, which I have to read, I can get from the web site.
Then, at some stage quite soon after the Times went tabloid in format as well as policy, I realised that I didn’t need to buy it any longer. I could just whizz through the web site once a day. I know that for the Church Times press column I should in theory skim all the papers but if you try to do that, it takes two hours from the day – or did when I filled in on the Wrap from time to time. So I buy the Telegraph, the Mail, the Guardian, and the Independent every day and subscribe to the FT online.
If you read these four you’ll know most of what’s going on in Britain, except for what’s on mass market television – for that you’d have to read a proper tabloid as well, preferably on Sundays. In fact I could drop the Indie without much pain but it does have Fisk and Adrian Hamilton is fun. Anyway, my wife likes it. But the Telegraph, the Mail, and the Guardian all in their different ways illuminate aspects of Britain that no other paper can.
The interesting divide in British politics is anyway not between Right and Left but between the American imperial party and the incohate rest. Though the Times does represent Murdoch’s pro-Empire line entirely faithfully, it’s not as informative on this as the Daily Telegraph which tells me in its leader columns exactly what Karl Rove wants me to believe; and in its news reporting shows he’s lying.
The paper papers do get read, from cover to cover. But even the FT doesn’t get read as often as it should and the Times, I realised when a friend pointed out a particularly shameful story, just doesn’t get read at all. On the web, it’s just another site less interesting than Metafilter.
The RSS feed should at least make it easier to skim the headlines, and sure enough I was rewarded at once with a classic of the modern Times: ‘Wonderbra saved my life’ says woman caught in crossfire.
“An accountant told today how her bra saved her life when she was caught in the crossfire of a street shoot-out between rival gangs….”
I’ve put my take on the ‘Bible not true’ story here.
A recent trawl established that Expressen and lah-di-dah DN have gone RSS while my beloved Afonbladet continues to hold out, dammit. (This may be old news to you, of course.)
Dave: that is wonderful. I do — sort of — hope you’re not David Walker.
Des: I couldn’t give a damn about DN, but Expressen in RSS is going straight into my list of time-wasters. I’d thank you on your own place, but it keeps muttering about a directive it can’t process. I hope it’s not a Commission directive.
It certainly isn’t an Imperial directive! Are you using Opera or something weird like that? It works most of the time in Firefox.
There’s Norwegish VG, too, if you like it sleazy and eccentrically spelled.
Friherrn von Bladet, sleazy and eccentrically spelled I can get in English, thanks to the miracle of the wubblywub, as my mother in law calls it. But I should not mock the Norwegiens, since, yes, I do use Opera.
Surely John Lichfield’s superb reporting from France is another reason for sticking with the Indie, despite the way in which some aspects of it are becoming more and more irritating.
Thanks Andrew. No, I’m not the Bishop. Though would it be a problem if I was? Actually, I think he had the idea for the name first.