Newspapers are really a social network

From Unqualified Reservations on "official journalism":

"These days I read the (New York) Times not because I think of it as true, but because the Times is the collective reality that, for better or worse, most of the educated planet lives inside. I read the Times to know what Times readers are thinking, much as an atheist might read the Bible to know what Christians are thinking."

It isn't just personal habit that keeps people reading newspapers: it's a collective, consensual habit whereby the clerisy agrees that informed opinion will be based on an least passing knowledge of whatever information happens to be in the newspapers and calls that information "current affairs". Even people who don't like newspapers read newspapers so they can join in, much as people who don't get Facebook or MySpace have joined these sites (because they don't want to be left out, even if they openly confess their ignorance as to what they might have otherwise been left out of).