Scene: North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Time : mid-week at 11am. Place: the North Rim Gift Shop
"Do you have USA Today?"
"No, but I have USA yesterday"
Very funny. The lady had a sense of humour. I could wait a day.
However, the incident has a more troublesome side. In all the Navajo reservation, which is rather large, we could only find local papers, none of which carried any national news to speak of. In fact everywhere we went for three weeks in the South West, actual newspapers were hard to come by. USA Today was the only paper available, and it isn’t a bad paper. It has some interesting stuff in it. But it is the only paper on sale, it seems.
No wonder people still think that Saddam Hussein was about to blast the US off the face of the earth with rockets. No wonder they think Saddam actively supported al Queda and had all those WMDs. This is all the American public hears about from local papers, which are choosey about what they include and exclude. Left wing media? Phoooey!
Democracy cannot survive without accurate information and lively debate about the meaning of events. You cannot expect the public to spend hours on blogs or even news websites. It is an alarming situation, but few seem to care. Indeed, there are content to see news that fits their own prejudices hog the media. It is not Epicurean to care, of course, but if you wish well to your country it is hard to stand by and say nothing.
What is amazes me is that despite the virtually criminal abdication of press responsibility since the mid-1990s, the American public is now strongly opposed to the Iraq war. Equally notable, the percentage of Americans who favor impeachment of Bush and Cheney is also rising significantly. Both developments in the face of a near-blackout of meaningful reporting on TV or the majority of newspapers.