The Times Debuts in US

Mike Royko, the late, great Chicago newspaper man, once said, “No self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a [Rupert] Murdoch paper.” So traumatic was Mr. Murdoch's purchase of The Times a couple decades ago, many former readers switched to the Independent, what the old paper used to be. Mr. Murdoch brought London’s Times to the US yesterday, launching a New York-printed edition, which will add to the caliber of dailies in the US if only because the Murdoch-owned New York Post is weighing the average so very far down.

To Los Angelinos, Washingtonians and others who come from towns where the local paper is called [insert your town’s name here] Times, it always galls the way New Yorkers refer to their own version as it if were the only paper on the planet using “Times” in the title – or indeed as if it were the only paper in the world period. Effective immediately, the locals must now specify that they read the silly story about dog psychologists or a review of a Chinese restaurant with a transvestite waiting staff in the New York Times. True fans of journalism, though, gave up on the squalid rag ages ago – shortly after Tom Wicker left DC and a small suburban paper called the Washington Post scooped the world on Watergate. The NYT’s complicity in hyping the run up to the war in Iraq borders on a war crime itself and should have been the nail in the coffin.

The Times, though, isn’t what it was (and probably wasn’t even then). In the old days, when most of the map of the world was British red, The Times was a broadsheet with no photos, the ink came off on one’s hands, and the court circular and classified ads appeared on the front page. No more. Southern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe, and there are color photos in The Times, which is a tabloid size now. There were a couple of obvious US-oriented stories, but most of the paper was still British cosmopolitan in content and view.

The Financial Times has printed an American edition in the US for years with some degree of success, most of which can be attributed to its focus on international business. If it has a rival in the US, that rival is the Wall Street Journal, which couples the best reportage in the nation with an editorial page somewhere to the right of where a good hostess would place the Riesling glass for a proper dinner party. The Times' reach is likely to be more niche than that, focusing on ex-pats and Yankee anglophiles.

Oddly, having read the paper (along with 10 or so others) everyday on-line, it was refreshing to hold a hard copy. Despite Bill Gates, there is still no better random access data storage device than print for things like news. Even if it is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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