If you don’t read a newspaper, you are uninformed. If you read a newspaper, you are misinformed. — Mark Twain (attributed)*
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. — A.J. Liebling
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A Best-Seller: When I turned on the news this morning, Steve Inskeep of “Morning Edition” was intoning the words “has been at the top of best-seller lists since it came out in November.” It tuned out, though, that he was talking with New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones about her book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. A fascinating interview, HERE.
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Another Best-Seller: It turns out I was wrong to write yesterday, HERE, that Robert F. Kennedy’s book is the subject of a mainstream media blackout except for the author’s talk with Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson. Wrong, although as far as I know the New York Times has yet to report or comment on it, it is on the Times’s own best-seller list. Publisher Tom Lyons says that it should be No. 1 on the list but is No. 7 because of the way book sales are calculated for that list.
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Angela Is Out, Olaf Is In: Another item on today’s “Morning Edition” is this four-minute one, HERE, on the transition in Germany. Inskeep interviews NPR’s correspondent there, Rob Schmitz, on Parliament’s vote making the Social Democratic Party’s Olaf Schultz chancellor, succeeding the Christian Democrats’ Angela Merkel, ending her 16-year chancellorship. (Merkel, who did not run for re-election, got a minute-long standing ovation.)
It was noted in the interview that Schultz will govern in a three-party coalition government — the other two parties being the Greens and the Free Democrats, described as “environmentalist” and “libertarian,” respectively. That could never happen in the United States; here, the media frames our political tendencies as “red” and “blue,” for Republican (or Republican-leaning) and Democratic (or Democratic-leaning), which is kind of a fiction because registered voters who are unaffiliated with either major party represent, in fact, huge percentages of registered voters — not to mention the sizable percentages of citizens who don’t bother to register to vote, possibly because they’re demoralized by the system dominated by the two major parties and the mainstream media.
— Mark Channing Miller
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* Often ascribed to Mark Twain, the saying is also attached to others, as THIS account attests.