Does Losing Newspaper Readership Mean Losing The Big Picture?

By: Vaughn Ververs
Topics: Stuff We Like

Columnist Georgie Ann Geyer today says America is losing focus on the big picture because they're simply not reading enough newspapers often enough, or as she puts it, "too many Americans no longer seriously read newspapers, and thus don't have any idea what is happening in the world" (hat tip, Romenesko). More:

My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives. You may only read a few stories thoroughly, but you are inexorably exposed to ones you don't choose -- labor news in Detroit, deaths in Darfur, economic successes in Finland, a zoning excess in your own community.

Whether you like it or not, all of those headlines and leads stay with you; they wash around your head and force you to be a bigger person than you are -- and to know and react to a world bigger than you are.

Think for a moment of what might have happened had we had better (really, any) coverage of Afghanistan during the 1990s, when the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were cooking up a second attack after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Could we then have been so amazed by 9/11? Wasn't it criminally irresponsible to be so amazed?

Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.

Is Geyer correct, do Americans need newspapers – their editors, reporters and filters – in order to get a clear picture of what's happening in the world? Or has the burden of self education gotten a little heavier in this new media world, where there is so much information but also so many places to get it?