`The Stalest Repetition'

Considering the amount of time I once spent reading newspapers – six or eight a day until about 15 years ago – I ought to be a gentleman of leisure. I was a reporter and each morning customarily read the paper I worked for and the other dailies in the region, and on the way home stopped at the newsstand for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe (mostly for “Zippy”) and New York Newsday (mostly for Murray Kempton). I read the newspaper eccentrically, as journalists often do – never sports or financial news, seldom politics, but as though it were a grand buffet and I was grazing for the toothsome. Then, not at first quite aware of it, I stopped looking at newspapers. The change was slow and unplanned, and certainly not a matter of principle. It’s fashionable today to complain about and dismiss the “mainstream media” but I’ve never felt that way. I lost interest, just as I once gave up stamp collecting and watching television.

Today, my reading time is devoted to books, a couple of magazines, a handful of favorite blogs and the occasional online article someone recommends. I didn’t enter journalism because I was interested in news. I wanted to earn a regular paycheck by writing, and I had an interest in a good journalist’s two essential media – language and human beings. News has usually bored me. As Thoreau says in “Life Without Principle”: “I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.” Someone said there’s more news in The Iliad than in the daily newspaper, and most days I think he was right. This, too, is from “Life Without Principle”:

“The news we hear is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.”