Be of good cheer, Arthur Sulzberger! Simmer down, Lee Abrams! (Eat shit and die slowly, Ben Eason. Die very, very slowly and very, very painfully, you witless jerkwater brat.) The video above offers a glimpse of one young person's engagement with newsprint, the medium that no one under 50 is allowed to take seriously. He loves it!
If we lived in the United States, this would be unremarkable. The baby would grab the newspaper over his breakfast tray because that's what he would see his daddy and mommy doing every morning. But this is China, and the paper is the Xin Jing Bao. Daddy can't do more than puzzle out the headlines with the help of PlecoDict, and most mornings he doesn't even try. Mommy, like daddy, reads the news in English online, when it gets through the Great Firewall. The paper stays folded on the table--till Mack says "Bao! Bao! Bao!" and makes a grab for it.
("Bao" is a useful word for a toddler in a Chinese language environment. Depending on context, "Bao! Bao! Bao!" can stand for "Pick me up!" or "Bread!" ["mianbao"] or "baby"--but when we pick up the newspaper at the front gate, it means "newspaper," and he says it over and over and clutches the Xin Jing Bao close to him.)
Note that the baby cannot read the paper. On a good day, he maybe recognizes half the alphabet--and the newspaper isn't even printed in that alphabet. All he can do, as a reader, is page through it in the hopes of seeing a zero in a headline, which he announces as the letter O. No, he likes it because it is an attractive object (the Xin Jing Bao is a handsomely designed paper). It is a nice thing to hold in one's pudgy little hands. It works.
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