Alfred J. Lemire - 08 May 2008 09:54 PM
Some things that newspapers might do to boost readership this reader surely would dislike and some things they should do, like providing fair and truthful news coverage, they surely will not do.
This was seen, years ago, when small circulation local papers began folding. Prolifers had offered to write columns, and had suggested other facts be included in their news stories, on related subjects. These papers refused any such help, it seemed then to the point of having to fold. That’s how political they’d become, that is choosing sides in a political debate and sticking with that side, the liberal side.
But there’s another way to look at it. The liberals have money. But it’s an interesting separation. Liberalism seems a third world model. You have the ultra-rich entertainment and sports liberals, and you have the same Wall St. liberals. And the rest owe their fortunes to government contracts and money. And the vast majority of libs seem the complainers who vote Dem in the hopes of handouts and patronage. So while libs can afford lib bias, there just aren’t that many who can afford it. And also, perhaps ALL libs know how phony the liberal line really is. They tolerate the slanted ‘news’ for political convenience, and because the ‘lie-is-sacred’ to them. But they know these are lies. And they won’t be lied to themselves. If that’s true, the papers have NO real audience, whatsoever, going forward.
The oldsters who trusted their WWII reporters, who got into the habit of the newspaper, are dying off, losing their eyesight, or their mental capacity. These with the ‘old ways’, in this case very socially destructive old ways, were precisely the voters that the papers tried to influence, along with the rest of the leftist establishment. But tv now has replaced the paper. And the paper’s online divisions are desperate to get ad rates up to anything comparable to the massively overpriced rates they got away with for print. After all, online traffic can be followed.
Time magazine is a good example, too. Not a newspaper, but an old magazine whose liberal editors and writers may still try to pick man of the hour (Obama) or man of the year. But the magazine is barely newsstand worthy. It’s a like a lot of the old revered competer magazines from the 1980s. Twenty pages of desperation and ‘shouldn’t we just pull the plug on publication now’?
The leftist establishment has nothing to fear, however. Print was replaced by the vapid muppets of local news, decades ago. ‘Culture’ for those ‘of habit’, even in ‘fly-over’ country, is so suffocatingly liberal and pointless, feminized national gossip, that it’s surely proved much more effective in brainwashing those who vote. The very idea that Al Gore or John Kerry got as close as they did to the WH is evidence.
In this election, just btw, unless the GOP right the wrong done by their ‘process’, it’s not the leftist establishment trying to con the voters, but a fix from the smoky back room that’s to blame. In fact, in covering all the candidates, to date, the tv-people have attempted the usual character questions, but have done so legitimately, calling Hillary on her John-Kerryesque exaggeration, and Obama on his failure to follow Oprah’s example and make a stand against his ‘reverend’. Instead of faking the news, instead of fake memos, instead of entirely blacklisting participants in a story as the press attempted initially with the Swifies, in this cycle one is getting fairly unbiased reporting. But the subjects of that reporting are leading the world to wonder if it’s finally over for America.
