Sunday, November 19, 2006

Bland, uninformative articles annoy me.

Magazines like Time and Newsweek present a special challenge for journalists. The weekly magazines present news to the masses, people who are more interested in current events than the most apathetic portion of the population, but who pay for their news magazines as sources of entertainment. They'll only keep reading as long as it's interesting, and the writers have to reduce complex stories to their most important parts and frame them attractively to keep readers. This either results in brilliant philosophical brevity, or unfortunate pieces like this one.

To be fair, this is a summary of the Time story on Pope Benedict XVI and Islam; the whole story might be more substantial. But I came away from this one having learned nothing and feeling like my time had been wasted. Take a chance! Do something proactive! This article just describes the situation as it is with minimal historical context. Boring.

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