Getting The News

I read The New York Times every morning, always have, since I acquired the habit from my mother of whom I have the strongest memory of her sitting in the living room every morning reading The Des Moines Register and Tribune.  I notice, however, in my dotage that I seem to be less well equipped to handle the extravagance of the prose that the copy editors routinely allow into the published pages.  Here is the opening of the fourth paragraph taken from a background article on Gertrude Bell found on page A7 of the national edition published August 15.
     "Today though, her legacy which has always been fragile, is at risk of being undone amid the renewed sectarian violence that has already seen Sunni militants effectively erase the border she drew between Iraq and Syria and raised the possibility that Iraq will fracture into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish territories. Seen through the experience of Iraq's tumultuous recent past, the decisions made by Miss Bell, as she is still affectionately referred to by Iraqis, and others working for the British and French to reorder the Middle East after the Ottoman Empire collapsed nearly a century ago, hold cautionary lessons for those seeking to bring stability or seek advantage in the region now." (I think there is a little problem with the verb "is" doing duty for the clause beginning "and others," but we'll let that pass.)
It is always remarkable to go from the Times to television's morning news which I do when I walk the treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club somewhat later.  Apart from the fact that those stereotype glamorous women with the long hair drooping over their face would never in a million years go near a topic like Gertrude Bell, intent as they are in offering over and over again the miniscule sound bites about the day's catastrophe whether the destruction of a whole people or a little child in some American suburb who fell off his tricycle in front of moving van, I doubt that they could read sentences of this complexity.  What a refreshing difference in intelligence Rachel Maddow and her short hair offers in the evening.  I know, I know she's a dyke, and it's just like the pansy males know about books and the arts while real male announcers know about the Red Sox and Tiger Woods (but I am forgetting suave, elegant, handsome Anderson Cooper always at the center of a newsworthy disaster).  Those were asides, back to the real issue, which is that I find myself nowadays struggling to get through those high minded long winded long sentences, there is so little time left, and I am not sure I want to spend it parsing complexities, verbal ones, that is.  The malaise has spread to my reading of The London Review and The Times Literary Supplement. I read the paragraphs over and over struggling to prop up my concentration, and at the same time reaching for my correcting pencil to write as I did so long ago on student essays "wordy, wordy."  Maybe I need to switch to the Post or the Daily News.