Print media

The New York Times job is to keep us interested in the world so the world can go on.

It's the intenton of the publication to take itself seriously so that we take ourselves seriously enough to be interested in ourselves as a people operating within a system of which The New York Times is a principal mouthpiece.

That The New York Times 'sells' its front page--albeit in a modest low-key manner and always to a dignified, affluent advertiser--is a measure to the length it will go to keep us interested in the world from which it derives sustenance.

The current issue of The New Yorker has celebratory articles on Laurie Simmons, an artist; a sports-talk radio host from Alabama; and the daughter of Rupert Murdoch. Each article is, in its own way, more glorification of its subject than an examination, tending to confirm the belief that the media is nothing more or less than a confirmation of the system that we are supposed to be interested in so the world as we know it can go on.