Truth be told, The Washington Post has never been my go-to paper. I’m still devastated to see it collapse into a slender shadow of its former self. A third of the staff at this legendary newspaper were laid off yesterday. It’s been described as American journalism’s worst day ever.
Truth be told, I do not do business with Jeff Bezos. I don’t have an Amazon account, and truth be told, I don’t really understand why anyone does.
Ok, one person I know, who has some significant health limits, orders pet food through Amazon because, so they tell me, if they went to the store to buy a bag of pet food the same size, they would not be physically able to lift it. I understand, and this is still not a valid reason to be financially supporting this uniquely destructive entity.
Buy smaller bags of pet food. Please.
Telling people I don’t have an Amazon account elicits a similar reaction to telling people that I did not have a television set. Back in my Venice days, I had a very small living space, and no real interest or need to have a tv set. I’m basically a reader, and if I have a pile of books, my entertainment is assured.
I will confess to be pretty addicted to watching lectures on YouTube, but that is a 21st century habit.
When people would ask if I saw this or that (it was the era of Friends, it was the era of Seinfeld,) I would say no, I don’t have a television. Some people would respond as if I had told them I did not have a telephone, or indoor plumbing. I would say I didn’t really want one, it was pretty easy to live without one, really.
Living without an Amazon account; pretty easy, really.
I was also, during much of that time, an employee of Barnes and Noble. When Amazon first came on the scene, they were quite literally the opposing team. Why would I do business with them?
During the many years that I have not worked for B & N, Amazon has grown from a book delivery service to a disease that is crippling civilization. I’ve stayed quite content with my habit of shopping in the real world, rather than shopping online.
The cost of all this to the information economy, as evidenced by the near-death experience of the Washington Post, is that sources of accurate information are continuing to dwindle, while the sources of disinformation get bigger every day.
An ounce of prevention, in this case, is even better than a pound of cure. Subscribe to real news sources, and read them. Do even more than that – write to them. If you wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times half as often as you offered your unvarnished opinions to Meta or Musk, your elected officials would be reading them. Instead of Zuckerberg & company using them to decide what you might want to buy online.
I know, it’s true the LA Times is not the healthy, robust news source that it once was. Refusing to subscribe to it will only speed up decline.
You don’t have to forsake the Internet to unplug yourself from the sewage system. You do have to make some conscious choices about the world you want to live in, and how you are willing to help create it.
You can subscribe here, too; recent stats show that up to 80% of our readers are not subscribers, and that makes it very hard to provide content.
The First Amendment is pretty clear about the need for an independent press. Democracy isn’t something I’m willing to do without.
Judith Martin-Straw
Photo – LA Times, Nov. 21, 2007
Daniel Blume /WikimediaCommons
