In 1982 a newspaper was created, upsetting a stogie old industry. Traditional newspapers represented city and regional interests; more accurately, they represented partisan interests with every paper acting as the communication arm of a political party or economic interest. That was a tradition going back centuries, everyone knew it and it served a function. By 1982, newspapers were already on the ropes, being squeezed between changing advertisement demands and a deepening loss of subscribers, a migration that would only increase over the next decades. Into that mix came USA Today.
I grew up reading a local and also a regional paper, the Baltimore Sun. It was a love hate experience. I loved the practice of a slow read on a Sunday or an occasional review during the busy week, but I hated that the content seemed to deteriorate in quality and that was even before I understood many of the devices of bias used by media. The Baltimore Sun was and remains fully liberal. USA Today was an alternative to the old paper routine. This was accomplished three ways: First, the paper made the edgy decision to print much of the paper with color images. Prior, all papers were in black and white with just a single-color addition to the classified ad section and a separate full color magazine add-in. Second, all of the USA Today articles were limited to a brief synopsis of a story– just the basic news. (An idealistic notion that gets tried over and over again and then ditched as editors can’t resist the impulse to be a player in politics). Third, all of the content skipped the ideological baggage expected and found in all of the city papers. While my lifestyle at the time didn’t accommodate a daily read of USA Today, I made a point to pick up a copy whenever traveling as a means to be updated on anything that was important or entertaining for the country as a whole.
Fast forward several decades. Paper newspapers had become quite troubled and were being replaced by new media, Internet based news, eventually to include social media. My own reading habits were no different as I then acquired an increasing share of my news sources on-line by the late 90s. In the interest of keeping a base of neutral news in my daily routine, as if I was on a travel day, I started my day by viewing the headlines of USA Today.
Fast forward again, to some vague point in the past 5 years, I have to lament that USA Today, by then, had a well-defined editorial viewpoint. As is true of all other big media, it skewed liberal progressive, but not quite in-your-face, not very often anyway; it still tried to appear middle of the road, maybe under the radar. There were occasional conservative views aired, maybe enough to keep up the ruse.
For my last fast forward, it’s now the past year, the past six months, the past six weeks. USA Today not only has an ideological bent, but it’s difficult to find any news of any consequence that isn’t an offensive assault toward reprogramming the minds of its readership. It’s ‘woke’ beyond imagining, it’s a scold, a day in a reeducation camp, lorded over by party revolutionaries. The concept of ‘propaganda’ is hardly sufficient.
I kept USA Today at the front of my news feed for the past approximately twenty-five years, just to know how, maybe, some of the rest of the country felt or saw the world around them. That’s no longer the case. USA Today has become nothing more than a mouthpiece for a room of bigoted ultra-progressives and the orders you’ve received to dictate the new woke narrative to what you perceive as a stupid, passive, gullible audience. Your editorial staff appears to feel like they exist in a vacuum, as if it would never occur to your readers to cross-check your daily curated decrees. That reader almost doesn’t exist anymore.
I’ll no longer be perusing USA Today as a first look at the mood of middle-USA but then, it’s now been years since I found real and untainted news on your pages. It’s just that now, your content doesn’t reflect any citizenry at all, it now only speaks your master’s wishes.