YES!!! I honestly used to use WaPo and NYT as my credible sources. Now I cannot get through just their headlines (do not get me started on the editorial board pieces of trash) without anger and frustration. I feel like they’ve been co-opted in ways not unlike Musk purchasing and then ruining Twitter and turning it into a bastion for racist, sexist, xenophobic propaganda and conspiracy theorists. WaPo and NYT decline has been more subtle and nuanced but no less dangerous. They have, as is the new code word, “sane-washed” the horrific things coming from MAGA land. And I am sickened by it.
Same-washed by NPR as well! They quote him and it’s not I just heard myself! They edits what they they think he should, or was trying, to say! Yes he needs an editor, called voters, who will defeat him and his vile minions.
I believe Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a few years ago? Can one expect newspapers under such ownership to be investigative, objective "hard-hitting" sources of salient and relevant information? I renounced my subscription to the New York Times in late 2001 after their pretty obviously biased and doctored coverage of the September 11, 2001 (so-called) "terrorist" attacks. (What ever those events were they were not well reported by the Times or any establishment publication as far as I was and am aware.)
American newspapers are clearly dying. The pubic increasingly sees prominent newspapers that once served journalistic purposes of informing the public now as propaganda vehicles of a U.S. establishment both increasingly cut off from the needs and desires of the working-class public and that same U.S. establishment which is increasingly siphoning off the wealth of the public into the private coffers of that same establishment such as financiers, Wall Street banks and the 1% capitalist class.
Like most of U.S. establishment media nowadays the purpose of newspapers is no longer to inform a relevant public in a democracy but rather to amuse an increasingly irrelevant public in a waning democracy and rising plutocracy.
Of course Irv was. I lament what happened to newspapers. (I used to write a column for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper and was paid 450$ a column. Then wrote for Ames Tribune in Iowa (where I live) -- paid 50$. Now Tribune has no letters to the editor, scant local news. Might as well read USA Today.)
Having a son with college loans, I am one of the one's whispering in Biden's ear. Sorry. We are in agreement, however, on coverage of Trump. Journalists were all over Biden after the first debate, but Trump gets a pass after talking about pet eating at the second?
What is more frightening than dribble WaPo does publish is what it does not tell us. One gets an idea of it from reading the foreign press or the occasional piece of solid journalism one gets in other sources, e.g. sometimes the New Yorker. Every American should read this and consider what is at stake in the upcoming election: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war-in-the-arctic
Michael Mike, you may want to check out getpocket.com (and the Pocket app). It allows you to save links to your personal reading inbox, and for some sites (the New Yorker is one) it will show you the content of articles behind paywalls. I'm not sure how/why it works, but it does. A similar service is called Instapaper. They are both free.
How do you do all this editorializing and now in your 80's?
Your former PP editor, Mr. Walt Streightiff, groomed you well: Walt knew in his heart that nothing was in most others. They grommeled and tried to explain, and circled over and over as does Trump today. Now he can no longer play a round of golf. What a world we are in....and you do help us see it better. That's what a good writer and talker do. Walt would be proud of you as you stepped into the spotlight and opened up. We loved it!
Best new term for what the mainstream media are doing for the orange menace: sanewashing. They try to make his word salads into some sort of policy pronouncement that we can compare with the clear and sane statements of VP Harris, like he's some variety of normal. He has no interest in governing; he's running to stay out of prison. Let's put him there and out of our misery asap.
I love the "work" (it's work for you but great fun and joy for us) you do. It is brought joy to my life on many occasions as well as, I'm pretty sure, millions of other Americans.
But you're way off base about the student loan situation in America today.
First, many young people, smart and motivated, need to take out loans to fund their education because tuition at colleges and universities have gone sky high in recent years. This is what happens in a capitalist system that puts profit maximization ahead of education. Tuition needs to be brought under control. It has risen in recent years well above the rate of inflation.
Second, young people are one of the most profound assets of a nation. Educated young people are the heart and life of a civilized nation. Many civilized nations such as Germany essentially pay their able young people to pursue education knowing that to do so will benefit everyone in the long run.
Third, big banks are making a killing off of peddling student loans to unwary students. These banks charge well above market rate interest and burden and oppress young people who then can't afford a house or even marriage because they are working to pay off student debt.
Fourth, the amount of money the government loses to forgive student loans is relatively trivial. All student loans could be forgiven for less than our (U.S.) cost of funding the Ukraine war. The "defense" budget is aprox. 850 billion a year. With an additional "black budget" of about 500 billion a year. The U. S. economy produces about 23 Trillion (with a "T") worth of wealth a year in goods and services produced by its hard-working people. Forgiving all student debt would cost the U.S. a relatively paltry 400 billion dollars and unburden millions of young Americans to live productive lives rather than be burdened by interminable student loan debt for 20 or 30 years of their adult, productive lives.
The student loan business in the U.S. is a racket. Big banks prey on young, vulnerable students extracting money from them as they, the young people, desperately try to educate themselves to "get ahead" and find opportunity is a society of increasingly limited and constrained opportunities. And the institutions of higher learning are just as guilty; charging tuition well beyond the background rate of inflation as they opportunistically prey upon vulnerable students trying to find opportunities in America through higher education.
If America fails, as many commentators increasingly see happening in coming years, one of the reasons it will do so is because the youth of society were burdened and oppressed and thus constrained in living their lives, by the student loan racket involving big bank lenders and institutions of higher learning more interested in profiting (really more appropriately profiteering) off of students than in providing a solid, affordable education.
Thank you. we were able to use college funds established when our kids were infants in '68 and '70 to send them to college anywhere in the country. By the time they went to college, '86 and '88, scholarships paid half (our son, athletics and performing arts, our daughter academic -- Div III college), 1/4 by the college fund, and 1/4 out of cash flow. We couldn't support our daughter's grad school education and psychology didn't get the grants that this chemist did in the '60s, so she accumulated student debt. Both she and her husband, both PhDs, were working in areas where student loan deferment was easier to get ("depressed" areas professionally) and she got his deferred and hers deferred during that brief period when Biden's loan deferment was active.
A tad bit curmudgeonly this morning, Mr. Keillor. I hope your mood lightens because your usual good humor helps us make it through these horrible days were all suffering.
While your periodic references to God and Christianity make me a bit nervous, coming as they do from an ex-journalist, I agree that WashPo exists to expose all layers of our government. And they do a good job. Please check out my Substack column about Sid Olson from Utah (a Mormon!) who won the hearts of Eugene Meyer (Washington Post) and Henry Luce (Time Inc), and documented the final months of WWII in Europe. He ate his lunch at midnight too, and had a hard time believing in God when he ran through Dachau in the first hours of its liberation. He enjoyed your radio broadcasts very much.
I agree they (WashPo) do a good job. I get free feeds but without a subscription I get to read only a few articles. Their OpEd opinions are great and usually come up with "don't vote for Trump and here's why". One must read past the headlines. I have a digital subscription to the NYT and they do a pretty good job as well.
Once upon a time, I wouldn’t even discuss a current topic until I had read the Washington Post first. I concur with your assessment.
YES!!! I honestly used to use WaPo and NYT as my credible sources. Now I cannot get through just their headlines (do not get me started on the editorial board pieces of trash) without anger and frustration. I feel like they’ve been co-opted in ways not unlike Musk purchasing and then ruining Twitter and turning it into a bastion for racist, sexist, xenophobic propaganda and conspiracy theorists. WaPo and NYT decline has been more subtle and nuanced but no less dangerous. They have, as is the new code word, “sane-washed” the horrific things coming from MAGA land. And I am sickened by it.
Same-washed by NPR as well! They quote him and it’s not I just heard myself! They edits what they they think he should, or was trying, to say! Yes he needs an editor, called voters, who will defeat him and his vile minions.
I believe Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post a few years ago? Can one expect newspapers under such ownership to be investigative, objective "hard-hitting" sources of salient and relevant information? I renounced my subscription to the New York Times in late 2001 after their pretty obviously biased and doctored coverage of the September 11, 2001 (so-called) "terrorist" attacks. (What ever those events were they were not well reported by the Times or any establishment publication as far as I was and am aware.)
American newspapers are clearly dying. The pubic increasingly sees prominent newspapers that once served journalistic purposes of informing the public now as propaganda vehicles of a U.S. establishment both increasingly cut off from the needs and desires of the working-class public and that same U.S. establishment which is increasingly siphoning off the wealth of the public into the private coffers of that same establishment such as financiers, Wall Street banks and the 1% capitalist class.
Like most of U.S. establishment media nowadays the purpose of newspapers is no longer to inform a relevant public in a democracy but rather to amuse an increasingly irrelevant public in a waning democracy and rising plutocracy.
We’re with you!
You don’t bury the lede!
Amen! And the NYT is running articles about what jeans to buy instead of Sudan or wildfires or other things that should matter.
Irv Leftofsky was very likely Jewish.
Of course Irv was. I lament what happened to newspapers. (I used to write a column for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper and was paid 450$ a column. Then wrote for Ames Tribune in Iowa (where I live) -- paid 50$. Now Tribune has no letters to the editor, scant local news. Might as well read USA Today.)
Having a son with college loans, I am one of the one's whispering in Biden's ear. Sorry. We are in agreement, however, on coverage of Trump. Journalists were all over Biden after the first debate, but Trump gets a pass after talking about pet eating at the second?
I have SHARED THIS EVERYWHERE. Thank you for writing this and for saying what is so incredibly important out loud.
There is no other story at the moment than front page every day for the next 48 days :
KEEP THIS PERSON AS FAR FROM POWER AND THE PRESIDENTIAL IMPRIMATUR, AS POSSIBLE, FOREVERMORE.
What is more frightening than dribble WaPo does publish is what it does not tell us. One gets an idea of it from reading the foreign press or the occasional piece of solid journalism one gets in other sources, e.g. sometimes the New Yorker. Every American should read this and consider what is at stake in the upcoming election: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war-in-the-arctic
Thank you for this link!
Pay to see :(
If you can afford a subscription, it is well worth it.
Michael Mike, you may want to check out getpocket.com (and the Pocket app). It allows you to save links to your personal reading inbox, and for some sites (the New Yorker is one) it will show you the content of articles behind paywalls. I'm not sure how/why it works, but it does. A similar service is called Instapaper. They are both free.
Thank you!
How do you do all this editorializing and now in your 80's?
Your former PP editor, Mr. Walt Streightiff, groomed you well: Walt knew in his heart that nothing was in most others. They grommeled and tried to explain, and circled over and over as does Trump today. Now he can no longer play a round of golf. What a world we are in....and you do help us see it better. That's what a good writer and talker do. Walt would be proud of you as you stepped into the spotlight and opened up. We loved it!
Best new term for what the mainstream media are doing for the orange menace: sanewashing. They try to make his word salads into some sort of policy pronouncement that we can compare with the clear and sane statements of VP Harris, like he's some variety of normal. He has no interest in governing; he's running to stay out of prison. Let's put him there and out of our misery asap.
May we all be able to find that room from which we can eat our "midnight lunch".
Dear Mr. Keillor,
I love the "work" (it's work for you but great fun and joy for us) you do. It is brought joy to my life on many occasions as well as, I'm pretty sure, millions of other Americans.
But you're way off base about the student loan situation in America today.
First, many young people, smart and motivated, need to take out loans to fund their education because tuition at colleges and universities have gone sky high in recent years. This is what happens in a capitalist system that puts profit maximization ahead of education. Tuition needs to be brought under control. It has risen in recent years well above the rate of inflation.
Second, young people are one of the most profound assets of a nation. Educated young people are the heart and life of a civilized nation. Many civilized nations such as Germany essentially pay their able young people to pursue education knowing that to do so will benefit everyone in the long run.
Third, big banks are making a killing off of peddling student loans to unwary students. These banks charge well above market rate interest and burden and oppress young people who then can't afford a house or even marriage because they are working to pay off student debt.
Fourth, the amount of money the government loses to forgive student loans is relatively trivial. All student loans could be forgiven for less than our (U.S.) cost of funding the Ukraine war. The "defense" budget is aprox. 850 billion a year. With an additional "black budget" of about 500 billion a year. The U. S. economy produces about 23 Trillion (with a "T") worth of wealth a year in goods and services produced by its hard-working people. Forgiving all student debt would cost the U.S. a relatively paltry 400 billion dollars and unburden millions of young Americans to live productive lives rather than be burdened by interminable student loan debt for 20 or 30 years of their adult, productive lives.
The student loan business in the U.S. is a racket. Big banks prey on young, vulnerable students extracting money from them as they, the young people, desperately try to educate themselves to "get ahead" and find opportunity is a society of increasingly limited and constrained opportunities. And the institutions of higher learning are just as guilty; charging tuition well beyond the background rate of inflation as they opportunistically prey upon vulnerable students trying to find opportunities in America through higher education.
If America fails, as many commentators increasingly see happening in coming years, one of the reasons it will do so is because the youth of society were burdened and oppressed and thus constrained in living their lives, by the student loan racket involving big bank lenders and institutions of higher learning more interested in profiting (really more appropriately profiteering) off of students than in providing a solid, affordable education.
As the mother of a 50 year old teacher/former police officer who is STILL paying student loans for herself as well as her daughter- Thank You!
Thank you. we were able to use college funds established when our kids were infants in '68 and '70 to send them to college anywhere in the country. By the time they went to college, '86 and '88, scholarships paid half (our son, athletics and performing arts, our daughter academic -- Div III college), 1/4 by the college fund, and 1/4 out of cash flow. We couldn't support our daughter's grad school education and psychology didn't get the grants that this chemist did in the '60s, so she accumulated student debt. Both she and her husband, both PhDs, were working in areas where student loan deferment was easier to get ("depressed" areas professionally) and she got his deferred and hers deferred during that brief period when Biden's loan deferment was active.
As far as I know, chemistry graduate students still get tuition remission and quite generous pay as teaching or research assistants.
A tad bit curmudgeonly this morning, Mr. Keillor. I hope your mood lightens because your usual good humor helps us make it through these horrible days were all suffering.
Your post is aggravating.
Looks like we’re ALL on edge.
Wow! First time I've ever seen a typo and a punctuation error in your article.
While your periodic references to God and Christianity make me a bit nervous, coming as they do from an ex-journalist, I agree that WashPo exists to expose all layers of our government. And they do a good job. Please check out my Substack column about Sid Olson from Utah (a Mormon!) who won the hearts of Eugene Meyer (Washington Post) and Henry Luce (Time Inc), and documented the final months of WWII in Europe. He ate his lunch at midnight too, and had a hard time believing in God when he ran through Dachau in the first hours of its liberation. He enjoyed your radio broadcasts very much.
I agree they (WashPo) do a good job. I get free feeds but without a subscription I get to read only a few articles. Their OpEd opinions are great and usually come up with "don't vote for Trump and here's why". One must read past the headlines. I have a digital subscription to the NYT and they do a pretty good job as well.
And always read Alexandra Petri. Her weekly columns alone are worth the price of a subscription.
Love Alex!!
Good morning, Garrison. Thanks. Thanks, a whole bunch. rr