The Long Decline

I read with amusement the hand-wringing implicit in the article “Newspapers in Turmoil” by Brian Lambert [October]. What is noteworthy is that this is newsworthy at all. I have been avoiding the likes of the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press since 1985, when I first moved to Minneapolis. Even by the standards of American journalism—notoriously self-centered—such newspapers have not been serving their readers well for these twenty years. Sure, there was an occasional investigative article in the Pioneer Press that was informative, but by and large these two papers wrote at a sixth-grade level of English and required about the same level of complexity of thought. That their standards have declined even further because of the onslaught of weblogs and pressure from the right-wing pressure groups should come as no surprise. There was not much of a core to sustain.
Bharat Pant
Minneapolis