| Product: |
General Comments |
| Date: |
22/03/01 (24 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: I'm sure I don't have to tell you to read, you're doing it now aren't you?
Disadvantages: I'm not actually saying anything... sorry
In the Union shops of the LSE, in Kings and in UCL, there are huge piles of the Guardian, of newspapers across the political spectrum, ranging from sizeable mounds of the Times to more modest collections of the Daily mail right down to… two copies of the Sun. But why? Is this ample proof that we read what most closely correlates with our self-image? Or that students are being driven into a touchy feely liberal - or at the other FT induced extreme - investment bank obsessing hell?
I hope you don’t mind if I spout a bit about papers on sale at my university do you?
The other day, I spotted someone reading the Sun. The front cover featured a large picture of five young posers below the heading: POPSTARS! With the usual promise of hot gossip on this current media sensation, I was sufficiently taken to decide on buying myself a copy.
Sitting on the bus, with the aforementioned crime against humanity and the Guardian in my bag, I was too embarrassed to take the former out preferring G2, which I’d already flicked through. Why did I feel this way? Why does the Union shop stock over two hundred copies of the Guardian yet only two of the Sun? These two intertwined questions need answers
‘We’re always running out of copies of some papers early and get some left over every day, but generally we’re meeting demand.’ Says a member of staff at the LSE Union shop. I can assure you that although even the enormous quantities of the Guardian are sometimes insufficient, the Sun is rarely seen after eleven. Yet the same number arrive every morning. On the supply side, it is just expected that we prefer broadsheets, and also, that we lean left. The popularity of the Guardian everywhere can be partly explained by the two thirds reduction in price by those nice independent people who happen to run that particular paper. Let us all note that us free thinkers are getting manipulated in the simplest way possible. Vi
siting Kings and UCL, the only paper that appears to vary proportionately across universities is the FT, with the LSE taking the most, then UCL and finally Kings. The difference is small, but I’ll also ask you to draw the same conclusions that I have.
Papers and their readers have long had a dialectical relationship of nurturing the same ideas and hence the same cherished identities in each other. Why haven’t we managed to get beyond this self-worship? The ultra middle class and stunningly superficial Mail is a epitome of this, hammering all that their readers dislike to turn mild opinion into vociferous petrol loving and asylum seeker bashing. This is bad – since most of us only read one paper we need, if not two viewpoints, at least some show of balance. In between Paul Dacre’s (editor of the Daily Mail) authorised rampages and the worried scientists complaining of global warming/immense suffering in war torn countries in the Balkans and Africa, where is the analysis that connects these interrelated topics?
Everyone must… Keep reading. Of course we could sneak all those subsidised papers to sink estates across the country and steal their red tops, but we all know: We get what we want deep down.
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