Swat a Fly

Michael Kinsley editorialized in the LA Times Remember: You Can't Swat a Fly With a Computer

And without them the canaries would have no place to poop

Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers.

In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal. But when the United States faces a danger to its most important institutions and values, Americans can count on the newspaper industry to put aside petty differences and speak with one voice. Now is such a moment. The enemy is invisible, indeed inexplicable, but could be fatal to all we hold dear. In short: Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers! Newspaper circulation figures, which had been drifting decorously downward for years, have started to plummet. At the current rate of decline, the last newspaper subscriber will hang up on a renewal phone call that interrupts dinner on Oct. 17, 2016. And then it will be over.

This alarming possibility threatens all of us, because reading newspapers is, in the end, what makes us Americans. We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense — more downright American — than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piled into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there so that a network of newspaper deliverers can go house-to-house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away?

You left out the fourth set of trucks that haul the left over papers out to a landfill to rot.

Newspapers are essential to every American, and none more so than the fools and ingrates who have stopped buying them. It is up to us, as members of the last generation that experienced life before computer screens, to make sure that future generations of Americans will know what to do when it says "Continued on Page B37." In a recent survey of Americans under age 30, only 26% said "Look in Section B," and a pitiful 13% chose the correct answer: "Look for Section B. It's around here somewhere."

As a service to humanity, and because I like my job, here is a seven-point plan to save the newspaper industry.

Point 1: The government must step in to stabilize the newspaper market through a program of newspaper circulation supports. These would be similar to the agricultural price supports that have preserved a treasured American lifestyle (working from dawn to dusk seven days a week, except for a few brief hours a day down at the diner complaining about big government and welfare chiselers). By paying newspaper publishers not to publish newspapers, the government can reduce the dangerous excess supply and preserve the beloved journalistic lifestyle (drinking at lunch, ruining the reputations of innocent Republican politicians and filling out expense reports).

Point 2: We must establish a Strategic Newspaper Reserve to reduce the nation's dangerous dependence on foreign news. At a time when brides in this very country are fleeing their marriages on buses and pretending to be kidnapped, it is nothing short of scandalous that so much ink is being spilled about some war in distant Iraq. As with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the government would buy vast quantities of newspapers on the open market and store them somewhere for a rainy day (when they can be delivered sopping wet, as the newspaper industry prefers whenever possible). One possible location for the reserve might be my mother's apartment, where there are already neat piles of newspapers dating back to Watergate that she is going to get to soon. (If you go to inspect the reserve, please don't tell her how the 2000 election came out. She wants to be surprised.)

Point 3: The No Child Left Behind Act must be amended to guarantee that everyone in America graduates from junior high knowing how to read a newspaper.

I would be happy if they just learned to read anything - a book, a newspaper, a computer screen, or anything else.

Skills such as turning to Page D3 while standing at a bus stop with a Starbucks latte in one hand and a shopping bag in the other are in danger of fading away as the younger generation is seduced by the siren glow of the computer screen. When a tradition like fighting over the comics or noticing that your ex married that guy — unbelievable! — disappears from our shared memory, it is gone for good.

Point 4: Floyd Abrams, the nation's most prominent and enthusiastic 1st Amendment lawyer, must come up with a reason why canceling your newspaper subscription, or failing to renew it, is unconstitutional. C'mon, Floyd — you've kept a straight face through claims about the rights of journalists that are almost as audacious as this one. Now is your chance to go for the gold.

Point 5: Find someone else to come up with three more points