All the news that doesn’t fit

It’s often said that the world is divided into two types of people. Pepsi people or Coke people (make mine Diet, no caffeine). Morning/evening and cream cheese/butter on a bagel people (I’m the latter in both). It’s true in shul, with it’s too cold/it’s too warm people (I’ve learned that’s a female/male split) and 7 a.m./9 a.m. Shabbat morning minyan people (although I’ve recently joined our 8:45 a.m. minyan, which finishes, with a sermon, promptly at 10:15; the best of all possible worlds). Literature too — I love books I can hold in my hand people versus I love to fill dead time with audiobooks people (once again count me in the latter). And who can ignore the political divide between the I love Trump/I despise Trump people (although those who anger me the most are the “I don’t like Trump; he’s a terrible person, but . . .” people)?

In the New York metropolitan area, we have our own local divisions. In sports there are the Yankees/Mets, Knicks/Nets, and Giants/Jets people (almost poetic splits). And until just very recently in the world of radio news: WCBS/WINS people. Alas, that has vanished, with the former becoming yet another sports talk radio station (as if we really needed another one). Having been a WINS listener for many decades, I didn’t feel this loss the same way that many others did, including the editor of this paper, Joanne Palmer, and my friend Michael Feldstein, but any time any news outlet dies, I feel a small pang of sorrow.

I must admit, though, that such pangs, while increasing in number because of the steady closures and mergers of news facilities, have been decreasing in severity because of the substantial deterioration of the quality of the news provided. For example, I’m certainly not alone in thinking that cable news often is impossible to watch. That wasn’t always the case. Once, with MSNBC ridiculously biased on the left and Fox even more ridiculously so on the right, I gladly listened to CNN’s mainly neutral reporting.

But those days have long passed, with CNN now strongly left-leaning while also becoming, to paraphrase WINS (which I’ll get to shortly), all (anti-)Trump all the time. Though I still find it useful to watch CNN’s saturation (and too often oversaturation) coverage during major breaking stories like October 7 or the January 6 insurrection, once the particular event has subsided I quickly switch back to “Only Murders in the Building,” “Bridgerton,” or “The Gilded Age.”

As for WINS, while I probably would be sad if it reverted to its Alan Freed rock & roll days, I rarely listen to it now. In an age of Google and Apple Maps and Waze, who needs 10 percent of each hour, even at midnight, devoted to traffic reports? Why should I have to wait to hear an NYC AccuWeather report when a Teaneck-specific one is immediately available on my iPhone AW app? Plus, the news actually reported in the few minutes remaining after traffic, weather, sports, and ads have used up their allotted time is too heavily devoted to fire, murder, and sexual misconduct stories. Perhaps a return to Alan Freed might not be so bad after all.

Once upon a time I would still have had my trusty daily fix of the New York Times to fall back on. (Nope; stop; don’t even think it — I’m not going to discuss its coverage of Israel. I’ll leave that to my good friend Gary Rosenblatt, whether or not I agree with him.) But it’s no longer the savior it once was. After being a daily subscriber to the print edition for about 60 years, I finally cut the cord — or at least loosened it — and switched to print on weekends only, together with 24/7 digital access. The main cause of that change wasn’t saving $1,000 annually, although my bank account appreciates that benefit. Rather, my disappointment with the Times had been steadily growing in parallel with the paper’s disregard of its print subscribers. Just see its outsourced sports section, which doesn’t cover New York sports teams any differently than, say, those of San Diego or Toronto. If you simply want to know if the Yankees won — not an unreasonable request of a New York newspaper — you have to go online. (Ten-minute Yankee game recaps on YouTube have therefore become a staple for me.) For sports, the NYT could very well be USA Today.

Even more disappointing is its lack of coverage of any news occurring after about 9 p.m. New York time. As far as the print edition is concerned, late-breaking news might as well never have happened; the Times can’t be bothered to make an extra effort to get a mention into the next day’s paper like it used to, and by the following day it’s stale, having already been covered online. If that’s the case, I thought, why pay so much more for so much less?

I therefore have little choice but to slowly get used to reading the Times on my phone 57 percent of the time. It’s often confusing, with articles appearing online on Wednesday and then showing up in the Sunday paper. And notwithstanding my audiobook addiction, I still like reading most things on paper (despite newsprint-stained fingers). So I end up reading more articles over the weekend than digitally. But I’ve also discovered that I’m much less obsessive about not missing anything important. That, of course, leaves me more time to be obsessive about other activities (like editing and polishing my columns yet again).

Sure, doing crossword puzzles on my computer is a challenge, but I’m improving. And the timer on the page incentivizes me to finish faster, allowing me to post a rare especially good time on our Kaplan Crossword Buddies text group.

While online news is to blame for much of the weakness in today’s news reporting, there’s a silver lining to internet news — the ease of getting the story directly from primary sources. To learn what a presidential candidate really said, a link embedded in a digital article or a Google or YouTube search usually provides a relevant video or pdf within minutes. And, as is often the case for a retired litigator, when I’m interested in the judicial system’s actual response to any of the myriad of critical issues, or the myriad of Trump cases pending before the courts, the decisions and sometimes even the pleadings, motion papers, and oral arguments are just a click away.

Once upon a time I devoured the New York Times daily (with a peek at the N.Y. Post’s sports section, comics, and columnists — where have you gone, Jimmy Wechsler?); I read the Jewish Week and Time magazine weekly, watched the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. news, perused the Wall Street Journal, which was available in my law firm library, and listened to WINS, to which I gave 22 minutes while it gave me the world. But no longer. Better? Worse?

Different, certainly, but it is what it is.

It’s a truism that the good old days often were not nearly as good as we remember them. Nonetheless, I yearn for the paper of record, the New York Times, living up to its “all the news that’s fit to print” credo; I yearn for more information and less yelling, more balance and less partisanship, more light and less darkness. I yearn for several doses of Walter Cronkite’s trustworthy reporting and his “and that’s the way it is” sign-off.

And it was once. But it is no more.

Joseph C. Kaplan, a retired lawyer, longtime Teaneck resident, and regular columnist for the Jewish Standard and the New Jersey Jewish News, is the author of “A Passionate Writing Life: From ‘In my Opinion’ to ‘I’ve Been Thinking’” (available at Teaneck’s Judaica House). He and his wife, Sharon, have been blessed with four wonderful daughters and five delicious grandchildren.

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