Bill, since my comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, my experience is not all that different from yours in terms of the Iraq/WMD fiasco representing a turning point, although I'd have never characterized myself as a loyal reader once I got out of grad school. And I still periodically glance at the online version because there's often interesting cultural stuff worth a read. But since Iraq, I tend to approach the "gray lady" already informed by more reliable sources, hence it's almost a game of seeing how aghast I can be by how much the Times can distort reporting, or in Max Blumenthal's vernacular, how much journalistic malpractice I can accuse them of. Pretty sad.
I'm pretty much in the same boat now, but when I left grad school, I had shaken off the loyal reader posture (Ivy grad school replaced my working class intellectual elite identity and confidence needs) but I was very, very, very narrowly focused on my work.
Bill, since my comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, my experience is not all that different from yours in terms of the Iraq/WMD fiasco representing a turning point, although I'd have never characterized myself as a loyal reader once I got out of grad school. And I still periodically glance at the online version because there's often interesting cultural stuff worth a read. But since Iraq, I tend to approach the "gray lady" already informed by more reliable sources, hence it's almost a game of seeing how aghast I can be by how much the Times can distort reporting, or in Max Blumenthal's vernacular, how much journalistic malpractice I can accuse them of. Pretty sad.
I'm pretty much in the same boat now, but when I left grad school, I had shaken off the loyal reader posture (Ivy grad school replaced my working class intellectual elite identity and confidence needs) but I was very, very, very narrowly focused on my work.
The parallels in our experiences seem fairly robust.