Too Much To Dream

Obviously no Florida papers have any pretense of being "national", unless there's a Spanish-language broadsheet out of Miami that pitches All Anti-Castro, All The Time (which strikes me as at least possible), but the real question is this: Are Florida papers provincial? Does, say, the Tampa Tribune get hopelessly lost outside a 50-mile radius? Is there any reason to read the Miami Herald other than Dave Barry? And does anything published in Orlando ever say anything unflattering about Mousewitz on Reedy Creek?

I would hardly call our local papers "papers." They are more like collections of advertizing, along with week-old articles reprinted from... the New York Times.

I think the Tampa Tribune did a relatively good job reporting the Sami Al Arian/Islamic Jihad at USF story, both recently, and when Sami first drifted into the public eye in the mid-90's. The St. Petersburg Times ain't a bad paper, liberal though it may be. Certainly. both Tampa Bay area papers are way better than my current local rag - The Charleston Post & Courier.

FWIW, I can only think of a few papers that even come close to having a national presence, and yes, the NY Times is one of them. USA Today and Washington Post are the other two. Both the NYT and WaPo have local news sections (several, in fact, for the various locations they serve) but they have bureaus all over the country, and they are probably the most-republished papers in the country (meaning their articles show up in other papers). Most of the other papers rely on them, or on wire services such as AP or Reuters for news outside their coverage area. ButVP is right, the NYT needs to eliminate some of their parochialism if they wish to be able to cover the country west of the Hudson River, or south of Newark International Airport.

I thought "national presence" meant a viewpoint that was not limited to the outlook of the population of a small section of the country. I don't know if that is possible to attain. I can get the newspapers of several countries in the library of the local university here in Podunk, Nowhere. That doesn't mean I expect that, say, the Jordan Times (or whatever that country's newspaper is called) will read like the Chicago Tribune.

My point is I don't understand where the shock about the NYT's parochial outlook comes from. We do have a "national" newspaper. It's called "USA Today." I leave you to decide whether or not that experiment in representing a country of over 275 million people is a success or not.

By the way -- I realize I didn't fully answer the question about Florida's papers. I haven't read them all, but I grew up in Miami. Yes, the Herald is more Castro- (and other matters of interest to its most influential minority) focused that other papers in the country. You'll also read a lot more about Santeria matters, as well as about drug busts in the Everglades. And when Janet Reno was cheif prosecutor or whatever it was of Dade County (I have expunged the memory from my mind), it was a Janet fest every day. But I have barely paid attention to that paper since I moved out of South Florida four years ago, so I don't know if it is blander than it was before.

The NYT attitude (and that of a goodly number of Manhattanites) reminds me of a Mad Magazine bit from about thirty years ago. It was a subscription letter from New Yorker Magazine, started off:

"Dear Yokel,

We understand that you people west of the Mississippi are still on the barter system..."

BTW, whenever I need a fix of "Manhattan Lite", I go to San Franky or just read the Chronicle. Same attitude with a whiff of dope.

What, Andrea, just because the Sentinel doesn't actually have any local writers of talent? Well, except Mike Thomas and Jake Vest, but those guys don't write in the editorial section, do they?

I like Mike a lot, even though I mostly disagree with his political leanings. He gives them hell in such a way that it's hard to see which way he leans.