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Posted by Kate Butler May 22, 2007 |
Over the long weekend here in Canada, I was able to spend 3 days down in Portland, Oregon. Much to my delight, the hotel at which we stayed provided guests with a complimentary edition of the New York Times every morning.
Now as any Canadian mass media aficionado knows, the New York Times is of an entirely different breed than anything we currently have in Canada. This is not to say that the Globe and Mail and National Post are unworthy, or that they do not live up to whatever expectations we might hold for them; it is just to acknowledge the simple fact that our American neighbors have the infrastructure, population and history to run some of the best newspapers in the world.
Of course, I do not always agree with everything written in the Times, or with the very columnists that I get so excited to read whenever I get my hands on a hard copy of the Times (the online version is good, but for nostalgic reasons, I prefer to the old-fashioned print edition, and I like it better when I can buy it when I’m actually on U.S. soil). In fact, these writers and journalists often make me realize how glad I am to live in a country where certain opinions are far less commonplace. With this said, it is the impressive gravity and intellectual weight of the Times that draws me to it every time I visit the U.S.A.
However, it is evident that the New York Times, that paper with which I yearn for when I am not in the States. Last time I was in America, I spent 3 interesting weeks driving through 8 states, visiting both big cities as well as small. In many of these places, including medium-sized cities, smaller towns, and at gas stations along the way, I never stopped looking for the Times; much to my dismay, it was nowhere to be found.
Although I might personally hold the Times up as a beacon of light in my mass media perusing, it is clearly not the paper of choice for much of mainstream America. My regard for the paper, or the regard of an interested mainstream media observer, is somewhat irrelevant, in that Americans themselves have shown that they prefer USA today, or their local daily, to the Times any day of the week (literally and figuratively speaking).
I will still always hold a special place in my heart for the Times, as its’ history and sheer intelligence continue to impress. At the same time, the limited nature of the readership of this paper, without going into specifics about red states and blue states, means that this impressiveness means little to many.