From Sunday Papers to the 24-Hour News Cycle

I am old enough to remember a time when news was just news. When stories about celebrities were written by gossip columnists, and gossip columnists were viewed with complete contempt -- at least in my house.

I am old enough to remember a time when the National Enquirer wasn't even sold in supermarkets, and when it finally did come, was viewed as the sort of thing read in households where the husbands refused to work, and the wives bought the lowest-quality brands on the supermarket shelves. We were working class, but we weren't low class.

Against that backdrop, this song seemed wildly-exotic and decadent besides -- a peek into a world I should never have been looking at in the first place.

And now?

Since rag magnate, Rupert Murdoch, breached our defenses and trashed our sense of decency by figuratively hanging famous folks' dirty laundry out in public, this plays like just another pop song, albeit an exceptionally well-crafted one.

I wish it didn't, but I would rather die than go backwards. With all the rage that people harbor these days, I wish they'd harbor some rage against the machine that is Rupert Murdoch. I wish we'd all go forward having learned a hard lesson about letting others decide for us what entertainment is, what decency is, what our boundaries should be, and what others' boundaries should be. I wish we would all get as disgusted as Joe Jackson is here, and I wish we'd all turn our back en masse on everything Rupert Murdoch sells and everything he stands for.

From January 1979, this is Joe Jackson with "Sunday Papers".