All the News that's Fit to Print

Spoiled for choice!

    Just got back from my morning outing to take David to work and pick up the newspaper.  As you can see from the photo, there are a lot of them, and in many languages, too.  There's English, of course, plus Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil.  English-speaking folks around here read either The Star (the local rag that has Penang happenings in it) or The Straits Times (a more serious one that originates in Singapore).  There's a new little upstart on the racks these days called The Sun, which Wikipedia characterizes like this:  "Malaysia's first national free daily newspaper in tabloid form"    


     Like any other town's papers, each has its own little quirks and idiosyncracies, but all three have excellent online presences, so you do have to wonder why so many people in this highly tech-savvy country even bother to buy newspapers.  But they do, even me.  There's just something about holding newsprint in your hand, leafing through it over a cup of " teh tarik"  (the local beverage here) or coffee.  I'll never give it up, although the two main Malayisan newspapers do pop up on my iPad screen every morning, begging to be read.   
   

   One thing that constantly amazes me is what these reputable Malaysian newspapers are willing to print.  They show photos of mourning relatives, mothers carrying their injured children to the hospital and worse.  They'll tell you how much a family makes, what relatives said about a lurid murder in the family, what the sentencing options are for malefactors (a fine, time in jail or number of strokes of the cane.)  The papers tell you all they know, which might be more than you want to know.  And they tell you so much more than American newspapers.  In arrest photos like this one, they normally don't "pixilate" people's faces.  Just to make my point, I was planning to insert a picture from The Star of an accident victim but it was too graphic for ME, much less my gentle readers!


    It's not fair, I know, but I can't help but compare the abundance and size of newspapers here to the  English-language newspaper I used to get back in Japan (and pay a very high price for!)  The  Japanese one there was small in size and suffering from the lack of readership that afflicts so many periodicals these days.  It seemed to shrink a page or two each month, and it was a day late by the time it reached our city, which was a bit far from Tokyo, where it was published   Adding insult to injury, there were several "newspaper holidays" per year so delivery persons could sleep in.  By the time all that happened, the "news" wasn't "new" any more.  Not so here!


    The only problem is that this newspaper abundance is hard on me, a person who borders on obsessive.  I can't get through even one of the daily newspapers completely, much less the two that I buy because they're dirt-cheap -- 40 cents (US) daily and 50 cents on Sundays.  So, they pile up and I can't bear to toss them out until I've read 'em, but I never get a chance to completely read 'em and so a vicious circle ensues.  A plethora of riches, you could say!


    Well, off I go to peruse today's paper, and yesterday's and maybe even the one from the day before. . . .