From Michael de Petrovsky.
TODAY, I discovered why it is so difficult to find an Observer newspaper, in Jersey, on a Sunday. Your article ‘Are you red-top, broadsheet or in between?’ would seem to imply it is because, politically, most of Jersey is right of centre. I am left wing and so is the Observer.

Although your view of Jersey politics is probably correct, I would disagree with your assumption that most people choose a newspaper that reflects their political leanings.

I would suggest this hypothesis is more applicable to a few political extremists, and maybe a few thinkers, than to your average man or woman.

Starting with the fact that the average reading ability is that of a comic, it is not difficult to reason that half the population prefers pictures to print. What print there is has to be simple, frequently lurid, and emotionally disruptive and influential on easily manipulated minds.

As roughly half this group will be male, low earners and probably the purchasers of the family newspaper, they will fall into the SS brigade, namely Sport and Sex.

Hence the huge sale of the gutter press issues, with their emphasis on sex and scandal, while containing numerous pages devoted to sport and betting. The women in this group will no doubt enjoy their horoscopes, the scandal and agony aunts’ columns, plus a fair amount of lurid violence and scare mongering.

It is not difficult to see just how disastrous this can be in an election.

We can now move up to the ‘easy reading’ tier – your Daily Mail and Daily Express. Here we find reasonable news stories in basic language balanced by a certain amount of simple drivel, rarely any naked ladies and not a lot of thought provoking content. This is well suited to the middle layer of educational attainment.

In the past, it is said, some 4% of the population went on to university and probably a somewhat larger percentage to the polytechs.

This would seem to bear some relationship to the sales of the more intellectually demanding Independent, the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times, the reading of which makes considerable demands on concentration, perception and judgment on a world scale.

In view of Jersey’s relationship with the finance industry, the small percentage sales of the Financial Times was somewhat surprising. Perhaps there is a free supply to the relevant firms.

A parallel may be drawn with the Sunday newspaper sales. The Mail on Sunday and the News of the World take prime places, while the more intellectually demanding papers are in small demand. As a child, the News of the World was banned from our house as ‘filth’.

Today, as a ‘compassionate atheist’, past the ‘troisième age’ and one who sometimes agrees with both ‘left’ and ‘right’ and has a lot of spare time, I browse through as many papers as possible to try to come to some sort of rational understanding of what is going on in the world outside our little plot of land, where political apathy seems to reign supreme.

Out of all this, arises the fundamental necessity of teaching our children to read, think, count, and analyse in the hope that they will be capable of reading the Times, the Sunday Times, Guardian, Independent, Observer  and, of course, the JEP  with open, questioning and critical minds and be able to reach practical and compassionate conclusions, irrespective of personal gains.