I'll Take Newspapers!

Clark Hoyt, eloquently spells out what a journalist's job is all about in his March 15Th New York Times column, "Bad News and More Bad News."

It was great fun to watch television during the election campaign for President described often as a "horse race" or where statistics were displayed, a "magic board." As I watched the reporting and listened to the coverage and the candidates they reminded me, for the most part, of a favorite saying of my grandmother, an imigrant, "Only in America."

But since the election, I have turned off the television. I find, with few exceptions, its theatrically staged news reports and its shallow but "authoritative" pundits often shrill and less than accurate.

I still look to my newspapers, even as their numbers grow smaller, for factual reporting as hard as the news is to read.