Friday, April 20, 2007

Post versus the Times

Today I had to order some equipment for my day job and this put me on the phone with B&H Photo in New York. They are one of the biggest so-called “box-houses” for video gear anywhere. And in this case they were the low bidder.

After punching in who knows how many different #s to get to the right department I ended up on the phone with a real live person.

A very nice young man. While he was processing my order he asked where Missouri was. He said he meant to ask where Springfield was but he was new in the country and still learning about all 50 states.

Several times he mentioned that he was from Israel or that he was an Israeli.

After I told him where Springfield was he asked if we had a baseball team. I mentioned the Cardinals and of course our minor league Springfield Cardinals. He had just read an article about the size in dollar amounts of various baseball teams. Seems the Yankees are a $1.2 billion/year enterprise. We talked about A-Rod (10 homers already? Wow!)

For some reason I asked what paper he was reading: I said “Times or Post?” And he said Post. He then went on to say (again) that as an Israeli, he found the Post to be more pro-Jewish.

Funny but while I read the NY Times front page on-line every day to get the international headlines, I’ve never looked a the Post and from my naïve Missouri POV, would never have thought to think that one of those papers would be more pro – or anti – Jewish in their journalism.

I guess here in our very white waspy community, those type of considerations would just never come up. We talk about our local paper’s biases but it is usually a conservative v. liberal and now Libertarian thing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i like what you write. i've said that before but it's still true.