David McElroy

I have an idea. Instead of letting everyone make his own choices about which products to buy, I think we should extend voting to consumer products. We’ll call it Consumer Democracy.

Since it’s obviously inefficient and confusing to let greedy companies produce different brands and different models of phones, computers, televisions and so forth, we’ll let the companies stage a campaign for their products. Then we’ll vote — and everyone will have to buy that product for the next four years. It will be the only product of its kind allowed on the market. Wouldn’t that be a great idea?

If you don’t think this is a good idea, why would you believe in a system that does exactly the same thing for what are supposed to be the most important decisions in our lives?

Governments generally control our protection against crime and fire. They control where our roads are going to go. Many of them control the water we drink and other utilities that come to our homes. They decide which companies and people are going to be given the money they take out of our pockets.

And they get to decide how much money to take out of our pockets. Not only that, they can send people with guns to our homes to throw us into jail if we don’t co-operate with their theft.

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As you get ready for Christmas goodies, keep in mind that some people in your life need you to bring a different set of aesthetic sensibilities to the decorating part of the project.

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When I was a little boy, I was an avid newspaper reader. As far back as I can remember, I would scour the newspaper every day, looking at the stories, pictures and (especially) “the funnies.” It always amazed me to realize that there was exactly enough news to fill all the pages.

When I finally started working on newspapers myself, I found out the awful truth. Stories were savagely cut to fit the space available. If an ad size changed, a story had to change to fit the space left over. The news wasn’t the primary purpose of the paper. The ads were. The news content existed only to attract readers to look at the ads.

The New York Times’ famous slogan is, “All the news that’s fit to print,” but when I was an editor, we sometimes said our slogan was, “All the news that fits, we print.”

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I’m increasingly aware that the explosion of available “news hole” for media outlets hasn’t resulted in better news for the public. Instead, it’s resulted in financially struggling media companies spreading their resources even thinner — which has produced shallow content with little original reporting and even less in the way of context.

Here’s an example. The local newspaper here is a typical medium-big metro newspaper owned by the Newhouse chain (with the same poorly designed website that all of the Newhouse papers use). I read a story there earlier today that’s a perfect example of news outlets just filling up space. Take a look. It’s called, “Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport sees less traffic in October, November.” Interesting, huh?

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