Leading off

We mild-mannered denizens of a distinctly non-charedi neighborhood the Givat Sharet neighborhood of Bet Shemesh have been treated of late to a stream of charedi weekly newspapers, giving us a taste of the sheltered life and times of the non-alphabetically ordered ramohs of this town.

Admittedly, no newspaper is a mirror image of its intended audience. Newspapers have been called "draft histories" and as such seek to highlight the new, noteworthy and exceptional, not the rule. But the charedi press, in tiring Artscroll fashion, seeks not to identify new trends but to impose its sanctioned view of what society should be, often by highlighting the mundane and ignoring what mainstream reporters would see as the main gist of a news item.

We Anglos are so accustomed to a free press (even with a thinly-veiled agenda) that the Ancien-Régime of a mass media controlled and censored by the top of a monolithic power structure is a sad novelty.

Happy reading.