On newspapers and their perspectives

Several weeks ago I became addicted to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is now my preference over the New York Times, whose prejudicial opinions constantly bias the stories it presents--not just in the area of politics, which one can only expect, but even in what you'd assumed to be the completely objective area of science. The NYT skewed its reportage of science articles I had previously read in their original venue so often that I lost every ounce of trust in their ability to report anything else reliably, as well. It just got its facts wrong.

But then one day I started browsing the Wall Street Journal at a friend's house. I was completely fascinated. I had always thought of the WSJ as a financial report--and it is that, too--but it also carries really interesting coverage of top news events and culture. The WSJ has proved to be really good resource for letting me know what's going on in terms of current culture, which, as the resident literary theorist at San Diego State, I find absolutely fascinating.

So now I'm addicted. I have to read the WSJ every day. I've found out all sorts of interesting things I wouldn't have known about Obama's health plan, for example, like yesterday's story about how the hospitals are reacting to proposals to cap the costs of hospital stays. Apparently it's not just about insurance premiums--there are all sorts of little industries and microcultures involved, in a kind of wave-effect where every little nuance, including even deviations from carefully-scripted PR announcements, affects everything else. I would never have known this from the New York Times alone, which was my sole source of news for years and years.

The NYT likes to look at the big picture, whereas the Wall Street Journal looks at details you never would have noticed. I'm inclined to think that the microanalysis of the details may actually give you a better picture than any attempt to accurately render the big picture. Big pictures mean that the author picks and choose what to emphasize and what to suppress, and it means that an author's personal biases inevitably affect the overall portrayal of an event. But when you focus on a detail, you leave it to the audience to create the big picture and to decide what it means. A long time ago I'd have had absolutely no interest in The Gap's scaling down because of the recession. Another newspaper would have heralded the announcement in one of those one-sentence side paragraphs I usually ignore: "Gap cuts mall rentals." Boring! But when the WSJ presents that same factoid as "Retailers have a new strategy to increase profits: shrink to fit," I see the Gap's move as an interesting detail that comments on the reaction of the micro-pieces to the "circulating energies" at large. This doesn't make the Wall Street Journal any more reliable a news source than the Chicago Union Tribune or the Los Angeles Times. They've all got their biases and agendas. But it makes for awfully interesting reading.

It's a daily offering of the New Historicism, right here in contemporary culture.