Media Collapse is Inevitable, and it's a Good Morning in America! Part III

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags: My Media Commentaries

 

I'm lumping NBC and MSNBC together because they're part and parcel of the same package, and what we're seeing is a lot of hand wringing and gnashing of teeth now that Trump has been elected.   

Chuck Schumer has been disgusting with his a record of lies, vile hate speech, and even threats against conservative SCOTUS jurists promoting violence. But now, all of sudden, little Chuckie Schumer has had an epiphany.  Now he's all about bipartisanship.  "Please don't do to us what we did to you, let's all be happy and embrace unity." Ya just gotta see the humor in that.  

• Trump: From 'Fascist' to 'Let's Do Lunch'

But he's not alone, the media, both print and electronic, are wetting their pants. It turns out someone at MSNBC has decided those two nitwits, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski need to kneel and kiss the ring!   Here's what happened when Crazy Mika and Psycho Joe met with Trump, with Trump saying:

 

I am not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly, or even badly beyond comprehension," ...... "I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line." 

That's a mistake.   Napoleon once said never interfere with an enemy when he's making a mistake, and these vile characters deserve no compassion.   As J.D. Rucker points out MSNBC is desperate, and terrified because they fear for their continued existence as a network, and rightly so.  Now that the norms are back, they fear the administration will use the DOJ against them, which they applauded when the Biden administration pushed censorship of all conservative views.   They've worked to destroy the norms, vilified the norms,  and yet want the norms to protect them.  Here's a taste of who and what they are.  

1. MSNBC’s Maddow: Is Trump Trying to ‘Destroy the U.S. Government’ with Cabinet Picks?
2. MSNBC’s Scarborough: ‘It’s Insanity’ — White Elitist Dems Are Setting Up Party to Lose
3. MSNBC Anchor Wonders How to ‘Live With’ Family and Friends Who Voted for Trump
4. Joy Reid Says Black Women No Longer Interested in ‘Saving America’ After Betrayal by White Female Voters
5. MSNBC’s Wallace: Even Though Trump Has a Mandate, He ‘Doesn’t’ Understand Power in Washington

MSNBC is garbage, and NBC turned it into garbage, deliberately, and as a result their audience is draining faster than they can tell lies, which is really fast.  And along with Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, there are:

 

"Mike Barnacle, Claire McCaskill, Willie Geist, Al Sharpton, Donnie Deutsch, and whoever else they shake out of their chardonnay slumber early in the morning to round out their throuple or whatever they call in early-morning orgy of lies – are irrelevant in the overall scheme of things, or at least they used to be.  Now that mommy and daddy went to meet with Adolf Hitler Jr. and didn’t try to von Stauffenberg him might lead to an awkward Thanksgiving meal and an excommunication from the left.".......  “What we did agree on was to restart communications,” ........"They’re heroes, just ask them."

 

And now they're facing a payola scandal involving Al Sharpton:

First, there was the revelation that Al Sharpton pocketed a tidy sum from the lavish-spending Kamala Harris campaign, where the bad reverend was granted $500,000, and he repaid Kamala when he delivered a tongue-bath interview on October 20. This is a severe breach of journalism ethics, and the network heads have not addressed this payola scandal in any fashion.

 

But the fact remains, they need viewers to stay in business, and their numbers are staggering, all because of their unflinching commitment to fake news has caused their viewership to crater, and now they're on the market to be sold, and they've admitted they have no clue how to win back their audience.   

 

Here's the real issue for them, without subscription cable where people were forced to bundle paying for shows they didn't want and never watched, they can't survive....."for nearly a half-century, Hollywood somehow convinced 100 million American households to pay a fortune for TV channels they never watched......you are subsidizing hate outlets like CNN and MSNBC. A piece of your monthly cable bill goes directly into their pockets. CNN could not survive in a merit-based system. Too few people watch CNN for it to make any real money from advertising......"

 

America is abandoning cable for streaming services, and no matter what you may not like about them, it's merit based.  You only pay for what you want, and as the author points out the reasons:

 

..........millions and millions are canceling their CSTV packages is the insane amount of free programming through streaming. If you have a Roku box and high-speed internet, you’re blown away by all the free stuff. Pluto, FreeVee, and Roku TV are basically free versions of cable TV with fewer ads. There’s news, sports, classic TV, binge channels of newer shows, true crime, movies galore…

 

It turns out Crazy Mika, Psycho Joe, and the "execrable" Joy Reid may not have jobs much longer, as it appears Comcast has decided to leave this sinking ship behind, rats and all.

 

As for the print media, they're even in more trouble as newspapers are trying to go out of business as fast as restaurants.  Jeff Bezos is shaking up the Washington Post, which one writer described saying he's seen restaurant menus that are bigger, a common trend for all newspapers now. He lost 250,000 subscribers because he wouldn't endorse Kamala, and lost $77 million over this last year, and has been losing tens of millions every year.  His solution is to call for more conservative writers.  It's too late, his readership are all far left lunatics, they won't stand for it, so he's either going to keep losing tens of millions of dollars every year forever, or close down the newspaper. 

 

The Los Angeles Times refused to endorse Kamala, but not because she's so far left.  The owner didn't think she was far left enough, and now the owner is going to fire his editorial board and hire "an all-new editorial board" saying:

"I will work towards making our paper and media fair and balanced so that all voices are heard and we can respectfully exchange every American's view."....."Coming soon, a new Editorial Board. Trust in media is critical for a strong democracy."

So what exactly was he saying here? He said he knew his newspaper was blatantly biased, corrupt, totally unconcerned with facts, truth, or reality, and was nothing more that a Pravda media mouth piece for leftist Democrats.  But in spite of all that everyone can now can trust him to do the right thing.  What a load of horsepucky.  

 

This isn't a singular event, it's nationwide, The Dallas Morning News another leftist rag reports they suffered "a net loss of $3.9 million for its third quarter of 2024"...."compared to the $1.4 million loss in the same period last year", two and a half times, an almost 10% decrease in revenue, and that kind of loss will only grow, because of who and what they are, and their readers won't be coming back. 

The print and electronic media are heading for a crash!

 

Update 11/22/24:   MSNBC headed for hospice care - November 22, 2024 by Silvio Canto, Jr. - The moral of the story is that hatred will eventually destroy the hater. 

 

Washington Post Staffers Go On Strike From Destroying America

December 7, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments

Finally a strike we can all support. For one day, the Washington Post’s staffers will take a one-day strike from promoting Hamas terrorists, supporting race rioters and the leftist effort to destroy the country.  Sadly so far it’s only one day.  Washington Post staffers are unhappy that they’re not being paid enough to destroy America. You can’t expect them to be evil for free. And finally, this is one strike that I think can we can all get behind........To Read More...

The Media’s Political Suicide

Daniel Greenfield  August 02, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

 

McClatchy had bought Knight Ridder for $4.4 billion to create the second largest news company. After going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, McClatchy was won in an auction by a hedge fund, which also owns the National Enquirer, in a secret bidding which started with $30 million cash and $270 million in debt.

None of this says anything good about the future of its D.C. bureau, or the Miami Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star, and other hollowed out husks of major urban papers carrying huge loads of pension debt and even bigger loads of radical left-wing politics.

Earlier this year, Warren Buffett had dumped 30 newspapers that he had bought for $344 million for $140 million. The Newseum, a $450 million media museum, backed by Gannett, was sold off last year.

Gannett, the biggest newspaper chain in the country, lost $80 million in the first quarter of the year even after a merger in which it slashed jobs at some of the hundreds of newspapers which it controls.

Over 20,000 media jobs have been wiped out in the previous two years and it’s just getting started.

There’s too much content chasing too few advertisers and subscribers. The internet took away the death grip that local papers had on certain kinds of advertising and made other kinds irrelevant. And people have a lot more options for breakfast reading material than just subscribing to the local rag.

The media radicalized even as it became more economically vulnerable, alienating print subscribers who tend to be older and more conservative. Papers have been chasing digital subscribers, who are more likely to be younger and leftist, but that’s only a viable strategy for a handful of national papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, which embraced a radical agenda and a vow to bring down Trump.

The Times and the Post can drive conversation, dominate the news cycle with an anti-Trump conspiracy theory, or turn historical revisionism like the 1619 Project into a curriculum, a TV show, and a movie. But that’s not a realistic option for the Sacramento Bee or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Advertisers will flock to the Times and the Post because they have affluent readers and drive the conversation. But local papers will go on bleeding older and more conservative readers while the hedge funds that own them slash jobs, eliminate entire papers, and eventually give up on the whole media venture as a bad idea.

Warren Buffett did.

Local papers are dying. Formerly influential national news magazines are irrelevant. When was the last time you heard anything from Time except around its annual Cause of the Year publicity stunt?

And it’s not just the dead tree media that’s in trouble. Digital darlings like the Huffington Post, Vice and Vox have been cutting jobs because clickbait doesn’t win over subscribers who will pay for content. Network television and cable news are on their last legs as cable subscribers cut the cord and content providers set up their own Netflix rivals. What happens to NBC News or CNN in a marketplace defined by Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, CBS All Access, and whatever other platforms will pop up?

The media hasn’t had a viable business model in a long while. It’s a zombie that kills even as it dies.

What we think of as the media, a series of private companies reporting the news to customers willing to pay for their services, is evolving into a political movement that views its platforms as a public service.

The for-profit media is still around, but not for long. The non-profit media is the rising model and it takes many forms, from old brands like the Washington Post and Time owned by dot com tycoons for the power and prestige, to non-profits like Poynter which combines a newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times, a journalism school, and a partisan fact-checking network. Google, Facebook, and other dot com platforms have been pouring millions into subsidizing media outlets to create a hybrid model.

Other hybrid models include, Report for America, a left-wing non-profit that embeds its activists into local newspapers, and Courier Newsroom, a left-wing fake news network set up by Acronym whose arm is a PAC, that combine non-profit status and political advocacy with some of the trappings of the media.

The media has redefined journalism as advocating for left-wing policies and the advantage of this is that in the age of the internet, political activism has a better business model than journalism.

Less money is being spent on advertising and subscriptions, but the cost of elections is soaring.

In the recent past, journalists had to choose between working in the legitimate media or doing opposition research for dark organizations like Fusion GPS. But as the distinctions between the news and editorial desks have broken down, so have the distinctions between reporting and generating hit pieces. The only reason to bring in an organization like Fusion GPS is for media strategy and coordination.

To the big money pouring into elections from New York and California, media outlets are dinosaurs in terms of profitability, but redefine them as digital campaign operations and they’re suddenly hot.

Investors who wouldn’t put money into a local paper without deep cuts will pour millions into Report for America or Courier because non-profit journalism has redefined the purpose of investing in the media from profits to politics. As a political non-profit, the media can be more viable than it has in years.

The transformation of the media from for-profits to non-profits sheds any commitment to the marketplace, to a community of readers who pay for its services, and instead puts it at the service of dot com tycoons who want to invest in left-wing causes. The experience of reading or watching the media’s content also changes from information to indoctrination. As is the case with so many of the dot com giants which finance the media and on whose platforms the media depends, the reader and the viewer are no longer consumers, they are the product that is being sold to the media’s political backers.

Even as the non-profit media claims that it’s now free to pursue journalism as a public service, it’s not providing a service to the public, it’s serving a small class of donors by trying to influence the public.

The media still insists that it’s objective, trustworthy and seeking the truth. But those slogans are the leftovers of an older generation that at least believed in hypocritically mouthing such pieties. The new generation, the one leading the purge at the New York Times, doesn’t even believe in the pieties.

The campaigns, like those that hijacked the Times, are coordinated by political allies from different media outlets across social media. The participants in this new collegiality view journalism as a form of advocacy for their political agenda. They have no commitment to the organization they work for, only to the larger movement of which they are operatives, coordinating to undermine their own organizations.

In the leftist non-profit realm, organizations are just shells for an agenda and they can be jettisoned, renamed, or swapped out at the right time. As the media falls into that category, publications become mere brands to be tied to a fake news narrative, and tossed aside when they’re no longer getting clicks.

The weight of the name on the masthead matters much less than the ability of the activists it employs to appear influential by picking fights on social media. Media publications no longer serve a community, but a narrative, and constantly swapping out publication names helps make the narrative seem fresh.

The end result is State News, a product that closely resembles the government news networks in China or Russia, but which is still distributed across a variety of organizations and which is controlled by social media narratives coordinated across social networks rather than by a central government agency.

At least for now.

"Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor," Bari Weiss wrote in her resignation letter to the New York Times.

Twitter is the media’s editor. Its platform provides the content that fills the media, but it also makes the infrastructure of the media surplus to requirements. The medium is the message and the medium of Twitter is 280 characters. As Weiss notes, “the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space.”

But the real performance space is on Twitter where content is consumed and debated much more rapidly in short form than in the long form pages of the New York Times. As the media transforms into a pure instrument of political advocacy whose antics play out on social media, there’s less and less use for the expensive billion-dollar operations, the newspapers, channels, and even the sites of the media.

Media bosses keep saying that their future is digital. But that digital future is a Twitter debate.

The only reason to read long form articles is to find out the details of a story or experience new ideas, but when writing exists to reinforce what readers already believe, then it doesn’t need to be read.

Hardly anyone bothered reading Soviet papers because everyone already knew what was in them.

A media that exists to tweet articles about Trump’s terribleness and a story about an oppressed person whose plight proves the need to have open borders, no police, and free everything is unreadable. Not just to conservatives, but to everyone who isn’t looking for a righteousness or rage fix in the morning.

The media envisions its own transformation into public service non-profits subsidized by dot com tycoons and then eventually the benevolent socialist state that will pay its members to put out propaganda that nobody reads. This act of literary suicide for power and profit is its real legacy.

The media has been killing cities and the country to buy a little more time for its existence. But it is becoming a zombie that is killing the basis for its own existence and then the very thing that it does.

The members of the media began by killing their ethics and morals. They tossed away the truth as a value and a goal. They turned on their colleagues, incited mobs, celebrated violence and terror. And then they set out to destroy the organizations they worked for and the country that they live in.

Their final act of political suicide will be to kill their own writing.
 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

 

62 Million Americans Voted for Trump, Only 6 Newspapers Endorsed Him

By Daniel Greenfield 2 Comments Thursday, February 27, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Warren Buffett started the year by dumping his portfolio of 30 newspapers in a fire sale. After having spent $344 million on a stable of local papers including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Buffalo News, and the Omaha World-Herald, the Oracle of Omaha had to let them go for a mere $140 million.

“They’re going to disappear,” Buffett said of the papers. “It went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to ... toast.”

In February, McClatchy, the country's second largest local newspaper chain, the owners of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, the News & Observer, the State and many other major local papers, filed for bankruptcy.

We’re barely into 2020 and the apocalypse which wiped out 7,800 media jobs in 2019 is speeding on. That was down from the 15,000 media jobs lost in 2018, but only because it’s hard to cut jobs that don’t exist anymore. By the end of the decade, there will be no local newspapers. Only a few national ones.

The internet is certainly to blame, but digital media took nearly as bad a beating as dead tree media with the Gawker relaunch, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and many other lefty digital darlings bleeding.

On CNN, the Miami Herald's Julie Brown claimed that the lack of local newspapers, "has contributed to the divisions that we're experiencing around the country."

The media has been making similar claims for a year now based on a dubious study. But the problem with the papers in the McClatchy, Gannett, Tribune, or other media stables is that they’re echoes of the same national agenda repackaged for a local audience. In the age of the internet, readers are cutting out the middleman and watching CNN or MSNBC, or reading the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Who needs a third-rate local lefty version when you can just buy access to the real lefty thing?

Local papers aren’t really local. They’re investments owned by lefty tycoons like Warren Buffett. As the investments become hopeless, they’re turning into non-profits owned by lefty tycoons like Jeff Bezos. If the local paper is just going to consist of recycled talking points from the Washington Post or the New York Times, then who needs the “local” paper? Local communities don’t. That’s why they’re dying.

The local newspaper is dead. The national media writing its eulogies long ago fired the fatal shot.

What local media markets are really missing is diversity. Vital media markets used to have dueling papers. There are fewer dueling papers and even fewer conservative ones. Of the 100 largest papers in the country, only 2 endorsed Trump in 2016. Only 6 papers endorsed Trump across the country.

It’s telling that “local” newspapers wouldn’t support a candidate that local communities voted for.

How representative are local papers when 62 million people voted for a presidential candidate who went on to win the election that only 6 papers endorsed? Who are those papers really representing?

Why would any of those 62 million people bother reading newspapers that have nothing to say them?

The 6 papers that endorsed Trump were mostly locally owned. 4 were either family-owned local papers or had a single owner. Another was a publishing group of 2 papers. Only one was a smallish media group. These are true local papers because they are locally owned and represent the local population.

The local newspaper died long ago when it vanished into the maw of national media groups which made them interchangeable. The absence of political diversity was a reflection of hiring practices that reflected the political views of national corporations, instead of the perspectives of local communities.

McClatchy is headquartered in Sacramento, California. Tribune is based out of Chicago. Gannett is run out of McLean, Virginia, less than a half hour away from Capitol Hill.

There's nothing local about any of this.

The media groups hollowed out local papers. A single dominant local paper with national standing because of its role in a media group often functioned as a virtual monopoly for a particular area. But these miniature versions of the Washington Post weren’t widely read outside local government and business leaders. They were local chapters of a national influence operation with a bad business model.

That’s why the media is upset at the decline and fall of the corporations that controlled local news.

The media keeps insisting that local newspapers are a vital civic institution. But, as the other Marx once said, “Who wants to live in an institution?”

People invest in institutions to the extent that they reflect their values and worldview. Civic comes from the Latin ‘civis’ or citizen. Civic institutions that are not rooted in the civitas are foreign bodies. No institution that usurps the citizenry can be anything other than an engine of cultural colonialism.

Partisan civic institutions are, like the Holy Roman Empire, neither civic nor institutions. They’re the propaganda operations of a political faction which are maintained with money diverted from taxpayers and with funding from wealthy interests connected to that faction. They have no institutional future.

The Left launched its bid for power by hijacking institutions and, in doing so, destroying their legitimacy. Hijacking institutions allows radicals to temporarily wield their power at the cost of crashing the plane. That’s how the institutional legitimacy of academia, the media, and the entertainment industry died.

America is not divided because local newspapers are dying. They’re dying because they’re on one side of the divide. True institutions reflect the diversity of the civitas. False institutions reflect only themselves.

The newspaper business is much more vital and interesting in cities like New York and Boston that still have conservative papers. Discussion and debate are dynamic when there’s more than one point of view. That’s another reason why the people who used to read newspapers moved on to the internet.

The media is an echo chamber. A false institution that does not listen to the citizenry, only hectors it.

And the voice of its echo chamber is losing power.

Trump won even though only a handful of papers endorsed him. He won the White House over the opposition of the big media conglomerates that are racing each to bankruptcy court.

The media makes much of its endorsements. But how much do they really matter?

In one survey 69% of Americans said that a newspaper endorsement of a candidate would have no impact on their vote. 14% said that it would make them more likely to vote for and 14% more likely to vote against. Newspaper endorsements of political candidates couldn’t possibly matter any less.

An older survey however noted that endorsements by “independently owned papers seemed to influence readers more than larger and group-owned papers”.

True local newspapers can still be trusted. Conglomerate papers posing as local aren’t.

Local papers were once local. When they went national, they stopped being civic institutions. The lack of endorsements for Trump and the lack of political diversity are symptoms of the problem. When newspapers became a partisan institution, they stopped being relevant to the lives of much of the country. And they also stopped being interesting even to those readers who agreed with their politics.

As Buffett put it, they “went from monopoly to franchise to competitive to ... toast.”

Trying to subsidize them as non-profits with tech money from Silicon Valley, as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are doing, won’t change that. Take it from Warren Buffett who lost a fortune trying.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

Pittsburgh now the largest major city without a daily newspaper

By Rick Moran August 28, 2018

One of the oldest newspapers in the country told its readers that it is cutting its production schedule from seven days a week to five. The 232-year-old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will still post a digital edition of the paper but will no longer publish a print edition every day. This means that Pittsburgh will become the largest city in the nation without a daily newspaper.

The Hill:

"It's the year 2018, and with the way people review and expect to review information and news, we think we're doing the right thing," said Keith Wilkowski, vice president of legal and government affairs for Block Communications Inc., the company based in Toledo, Ohio, that owns the Post-Gazette, on June 27. "We will be publishing a (digital) newspaper seven days a week," Wilkowski added. "And, frankly, we reach more people via online than through the print publication."

The union representing newsroom employees made sounds like a dinosaur braying at the moon as it sank into extinction............. Read more

My Take - One thing this writer fails to really bite into is the fact newspapers became promoters of false narratives......in short.....they lied.  Lies of commission and lies of omission, and the internet exposed them.  Once that happened, and the public became aware, that was the beginning of the end. 

Now they have to compete with bloggers.  And the bloggers are winning. 

Truthfully, I like a newspaper. In years gone by I would read the whole paper. Now, if I buy one I casually peruse the news and editorials and move on to what I really bought them for in recent years -  to do the crossword puzzles and read the sports page. 

But now I've stopped watching sports, including my beloved Cleveland Browns,  I now buy a paper to do the crossword puzzle.   And at the price they're now charging.....if I have to pay that much to read the news I'll pay more and read the Wall Street Journal. 

Newspapers are going out of business.  I believe most of these papers that are dropping their production schedules will be out of business within ten years and many in five.  If you look at the age of their subscribers you will find a huge percentage of them are old like me and older.  Time isn't on their side.  One friend told me he doesn't know anyone who subscribes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer on his street any longer.   At one time the PD was largest newspaper in Ohio.

The time will come where there will be no subscribers on any street for a lot of newspapers in this nation. 

Is it really tariffs that are killing newspapers?

June 9, 2018 By Jack Hellner

Members of Congress and newspapers themselves are complaining that the tariff on paper from Canada is killing the newspaper press. In this Washington Examiner article, they give an example of a newspaper with 20,000 copies per day having an increased cost of $250,000 per year. I have to wonder why journalists don’t tell us what that is per day for the cost of each paper. Why do they use the gross annual cost instead of the unit cost which is the relevant number? The answer is 3.4 cents per day. Most newspapers cost around $2 per day and most are getting smaller in size, and we are supposed to believe that 3.4 cents per day is bankrupting them? These newspapers routinely support tax increases and certainly would not care if a tax increase cost someone 3.4 cents per day. Yet according to a headline in the Washington Examiner: Trump's tariff on Canadian newsprint is killing US newspapers, Republicans warn ...............Newspapers have been going downhill for years because of the Internet, not tariffs. They've also hurt their credibility - and circulation numbers - through their devotion to one party. Now they blame Trump for their problems. What a crock. It is always someone else's fault. Sort of like blaming Trump for what Samantha Bee said. ................ Read more

Newspapers Are Doomed

By Rich Kozlovich

On May 16, 2018 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.  posted the article, "Why We Don’t Read Newspapers", talking about how newspaper editors fudge reality to appease offended audiences.  In his commentary he makes the point that the world of the left has changed - at least the world of the left that was in the open.  He goes on to say:

"Things were different in America. Liberals were different then. For one thing Liberals were Liberal. Now of course they are Progressives, and feminists, and, forget not, some are socialists. Who knows, maybe some are Marxist-Leninist socialists."

In reality the things they acted on in the open were different, but they were exactly what they are now, insidiously hiding who and what they were in order to slowly work what was harmful to society.   

But the real reason we don't read newspapers any longer is because the Internet has exposed them as liars, propagandists, ideologues and subversives bordering on treason - and it's not electronically texted to them. 

First, newspapers have to appeal to an audience that's largely illiterate.  Those between 18 and 50.

When was the last time you were at a social event and the conversation turned to the latest best seller? Does anyone know what the latest best seller is?  When was the last time you saw a blockbuster movie based on a best seller?  These people don't read books.

The audience they have to appeal to is largely ignorant. 

Ask them who is the Vice President of the United Sates and I'm willing to bet over fifty percent won't know.  Ask them what the line of succession is if the President dies in office.  Most have no clue, and I will guarantee you not one in ten thousand will know who the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is, or for that matter what he does, and where he is in the line of succession.

Let me help.  Orrin Hatch and not much other than getting paid more, and he's third after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. How scary is that having Paul Ryan and Orrin Hatch second and third in the line of succession?

Their knowledge of history is so stunningly abysmal it's to the point of idiocy.  Give these people an I.Q. test based solely on history and the vast majority would be considered morons.  But I'm willing to bet their teachers wouldn't do much better.

For some reason they can't seem to function for five minutes without constant texting.  What's worse, these young people are stunningly arrogant in their ignorance.  And to make an already bad situation worse - they don't care. 

Now the price of newspapers is now out of hand, which means fewer are buying them at newsstands and outdoor boxes, if there are any left.  Their subscription base is made up of old people who will be passing off the scene.  In Cleveland, I don't see what used to be ubiquitous newspaper trucks out on the road any longer, and that's because few have it delivered to their homes any longer. 

Newspapers as we know them are doomed, get over it, move on.  As for those who really are interested in the news, the truth, history and real solutions - they're finding that from bloggers - so why bother getting a newspaper? 

 

Newspapers Are Not Sacred Institutions!

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

We need to understand something.  Newspapers are not a sacred institution.  They're a business, and if they do good business they can survive to do whatever good they deem necessary.  But is it their job to do good or is it their job to do good and honest reporting?  Yes! 

The reality is the owners of a business determine what they want their business to do.  In days gone by there were far more newspapers and in many cases they were openly supportive of one party or the other.  Now it's all dishonest and undercover in an attempt to appear unbiased.   However, some newspapers are blatantly left wing and some are blatantly right wing, and it's their right to be either, both or neither.   But we have to understand - in spite of the hyperbole from the editors and other self interested media talking heads - news and opinion reporting is a business and must face market forces to survive.  Newspapers are not sacred institutions!  Churches shut down and so do newspapers. 

On May 3rd. Brett Samuels posted an article entitled, "Denver Post editor resigns after fiery editorial calling out owner" saying:

"'The editorial page editor at The Denver Post resigned on Thursday, a few weeks after he wrote a column criticizing the paper’s owners.The Denver Post reporters and local news outlet Denverite reported that Charles Plunkett resigned from his post, the latest casualty at a paper that has been ravaged by layoffs in recent years. “It’s a tragedy what Alden Global Capital is doing to its newsrooms and what it’s doing to The Denver Post,” Plunkett told Denverite. “It’s an act of apostasy to our profession and I could no longer abide it.” Colleagues praised Plunkett for his work and fearless attitude."'

An act of apostacy?  Really?  Should we all drop to our knees and ask for redemption? But, from whom should we be praying for that redemption? 

Letters posted here in the Denver Post mostly praised the Post and it's reporting and villified the owners for being corrupt and greedy, and some were hoping Jeff Bezos would do for the Denver Post what he did for the Washington Post, and that's buying a left wing organ to make sure the leftist drumbeat continued irrespective of profits, and if that's what someone wants to do with their money that's their business. 

 

However, one letter from Bob Kinney of Greenwood Village noted:

The Denver Post is reaping what it has sowed. The editorial arrogance and left bias has rendered it irrelevant. In my opinion, The Post’s demise results from its failures in objective journalism. It’s a shame journalists have forsaken a sacred constitutional right to a free press and deprived us of objective reporting. Journalists’ opinions are unnecessary. Facts, and only verified facts, are needed. We can then form our own opinions based on those reliable facts. It’s no accident many of your former readers now rely on other news sources. Some humility could be called for by asking some of The Post’s critics how it may become relevant again.  Then those who remain at The Post may earn their way back to prosperity the old-fashioned way, albeit with a smaller newspaper with only quality news.

Mary Kay Cassidy of Aurora said:

While I can’t claim to be a long-standing Post reader, since I only moved here seven years ago, I feel many share my point of view. The media in general has become a one-sided beast, not reporting the news with neutrality but choosing a political agenda. I definitely agree that a local news agency is important to a metro area as unique as Denver. But is it possible that many readers have tired of the biased reporting we have experienced in recent years? When news becomes one-sided, is it actually news or is it more like the yellow journalism of America’s past? Maybe it is time for The Denver Post to become the people’s news rather than choosing a left-leaning agenda. We can get plenty of that from Los Angeles and New York.

Regarding the newspaper's whine about having to face reality Kevin Payne of Denver wrote:

I have long been a reader and fan of The Denver Post and I believe that in addition to being a great paper, it also has an important role in the community. However, I find your editorial about your  job losses and the tenuous future of The Post to be misplaced and a bit arrogant. It reads to me as if you are stating the loss of your colleagues job is somehow sadder or more unfair than others in the community who have lost their jobs. In addition, you are putting the burden of your future on your ownership group and your customers, and that is just a miss. If you put out a relevant and good product in the form that your customers will buy and your advertisers will invest, you will survive. If you don’t, you wont. That is the same environment and level playing field every business plays on. Why should it be different for The Denver Post?

I don't really know if the Denver Post would be considered biased in favor of leftist policies and politicians or not, but I did look up a few things.

First their position on the legalization of marijuana, which has been partially legalized in Colorado.  They apparently published an article outlining what the impact has been on the state and it wasn't positive.  But in my view - that's a plus for them, however I don't know if they supported that move before it became law or not.

However, in 2012 they endorsed Barack Obama for a second term saying:

"And though there is much in Mitt Romney’s résumé to suggest he is a capable problem-solver, the Republican nominee has not presented himself as a leader who will bring his party closer to the center at a time when that is what this country needs."

"His comments on the 47 percent of Americans who refuse to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” were a telling insight into his views and a low point of the campaign."

"Obama, on the other hand, has shown throughout his term that he is a steady leader who keeps the interests of a broad array of Americans in mind."

"We urge Coloradans to re-elect him to a second term."

"Regardless of the outcome on Nov. 6, America is once again confronted with a daunting economic picture that requires bold action even before the next president takes the oath of office."

What could be more delusional than that?  Is this the kind of gobblygook Colorado readers contended with for so many years?  If so, the Post needs to go out of business.

In Cleveland we have the Cleveland Plain Dealer (PD) and it's been a rag for years, but a very successful rag, until the Internet.  Before the Internet began exposing what was really going on in the world we had to pretty much take the paper's views as legitimate reportage.  Now we know better, but I continued to buy it for the crossword puzzle and the sports section. 

A friend of mine who once worked at the Plain Dealer asked if I thought they'd be in business in five years, and I said no, I didn't think so.  He said on his street he didn't know anyone, including him, who was subscribing to the paper. 

The price of newspapers had always been minuscule because the real money came from advertising.  That's changed as the price of the daily edition of the PD is $1.50 and $2.25 for Sunday editions.  Is it any wonder no one is subscribing, and that price is not worth the crossword puzzle, and since I've stopped watching sports - I don't care what's in the sports section.  If I'm going to pay a lot for a newspaper I'll pay more for the Wall Street Journal and get real news. 

I also wonder at the demographic of those who are still subscribing.  Do we really believe the younger audience, who can't seem to look up from their phones to know if the rest of the world is even awake, are going to be their subscribers now or in the future?  I doubt that.  My 93 year old mother is still a subscriber and I'm willing to bet that's a big demographic for their subscriber base.  Time is not on their side.

Then advertisers got tired of paying extremely high prices for small results and when readership declined and the Internet became the source for news and opinion, not to mention the source to search for virtually everything everyone buys - advertisers left - and the PD dropped down to publishing four days a week including Sunday. 

Here's the reality for newspapers, publishers, editors and staff - just like the Yellow Pages, newspapers as we know them are doomed, and for a host of reasons, but make no mistake about this - competition will bring us the news we need and want, whether it's in print form or not, and the liberal bias that exists in their little world of head nodding self congratulations will go the way of the dodo, and the rest of us won't much care because newspapers are not sacred institutions!  Welcome to the real world!

That's progress!

The Not-So-Glossy Future of Magazines

By SYDNEY EMBER and Michael, M. Grynbaum  SEPT. 23, 2017

One evening in mid-September, a gaggle of writers and bon vivant editors gathered by the outdoor fireplace and ivy-covered trellis of a West Village tavern. Steak was served, and the toasts lasted late into the night, the revelry trickling out to the nearby sidewalk.

 

It could have been a scene from the Jazz Age heyday of the Manhattan magazine set — or even the 1990s, when glossy monthlies still soaked up millions of dollars in advertising revenue, and editors in chauffeured town cars told the nation what to wear, what to watch and who to read.

 

This night, however, had an elegiac tinge. The staff of Vanity Fair was saluting the magazine’s longtime editor, Graydon Carter, who had announced that he was departing after a 25-year run. In the back garden of Mr. Carter’s restaurant, the Waverly Inn, star writers like James Wolcott and Marie Brenner spoke of their gratitude and grief.........To Read More....

 

 

Why Now? Tangled Webs: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the Internet Giveaway, and the Wild, Wild West of Information

by Steven Neill @ American Policy Center

The use of lies and deception, or as the new term coming into vogue; fake news, has been a standard tool of the trade for over a century by the government and their willing and/or unwilling stooges in the main stream media. (1) A few examples include Newspaper owners William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, with the unspoken blessings of US President, William McKinley, spreading lies to stir up the masses enough to start a war with Spain. (2) This allowed McKinley to start an American empire by taking over the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico at the close of the 19^th century. In the following decades, the media has obediently followed along coving up such things as the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin (3) incident, the governmental attack on the Branch Davidians, (4) 9/11, (5) and the Obamacare fiasco. (6) In spite of the lies and distortions presented by the government then spread by an obedient media, there were still some journalists who were doing their job by reporting the truth.

In 1983, fifty companies controlled 90% of the American media, today it is just six multinational corporations. (7) They are Viacom, Comcast, Time-Warner, Disney, CBS, and News Corp and these companies are working very hard to make sure that the news you hear is the news they and the government want you to hear. From the anti-Muslim video that “caused” the killing of four Americans at Benghazi, (8) lying about the state of the economy before the 2008 meltdown, (9) to the massive push to promote Obamacare, (10) the main stream media is relentless in pushing the government/corporatist agenda to its audience. This control is the dream of every tyrannical state in history and the US government has almost achieved it.

Only, they have, like the American Army in the WWII Battle of Arnhem, (11) pushed their power too far and too fast causing the American people to no longer trust the main stream media. In the spring of 2016, a major poll was conducted by the Media Insight Project, a partnership of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute; they found that just 6% (12) of those polled have confidence in the main stream media for news. The bias and outright lies have become so bad that even a 30 year insider like Sharyl Attkisson (13) commented on it: “There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere. By well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations. I think all of that comes into play.”

“ICANN is arguably the single most powerful institution in the world”Jeff Baron (14)......To Read More....

Useless Spayd Work

George Neumayr  

 

During the summer of the 2016 campaign, the “public editor” for the New York Times, Liz Spayd, criticized the paper’s transparently unbalanced coverage. Even though the criticism was ventured hesitantly, it still rankled reporters. “Mostly I was met with a roll of the eyes,” she said about her attempts to ask reporters about the paper’s liberal bias. Nor did the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, want to hear about it. “He doesn’t believe that the coverage on most days has a liberal cast, nor does he think campaign ads or the rare front-page editorial create that perception,” she wrote.

Spayd worried that the paper might become the “New Republic gone daily” and asked: “Imagine a country where the greatest, most powerful newsroom in the free world was viewed, not as a voice that speaks to all, but as one that has taken sides.”  It wasn’t hard to imagine. Its conversion to liberal advocacy had happened a long time ago. It still pretended to be an “objective” newspaper — indeed, the ombudsman’s job is itself part of that pretense — but for all intents and purposes, it had become a publication of, by, and for liberals.........the reporters have made it clear to Spayd that they don’t need to change their attitude; she does. ......Spayd is a “public editor” at a paper that doesn’t want to hear from the public......To Read More....

 

My Take - The NYT is doomed.  They worry about the "crisis in journalism", and the threat to press freedom", but their worries never focus on them or what they're doing.  It's the Internet "journalists" who are at fault.  The "crisis in journalism" was as a result of unending levels of hubris and distain for society.  The "threat to the press" is self inflicted, because they created a vacuum of reliable and truthful information.  In short - they printed lies of commission and lies of omission regularly. 

 

No matter what journalists say - it's no longer the newspaper of record, nor is it a Gray Lady.  The NYT is an old gray hag.

Newspapers and magazines all over the country have failed their readers and have ceased physical publication, and have either disappeared or have gone to the internet, just as Newsweek. The internet has given society the means to find out what is true and what is spin.

And now we know they have not told the truth; they have deliberately misrepresented the facts and they have done everything in their power to obfuscate the facts with emotional arguments that are mostly logical fallacies, and emotion will outweigh logic every time. Fantasy is far more attractive than reality; that is why works of fiction are so popular. They represent innocent temporary escapes from reality. But in the information business fiction is called by a different name; it’s called “lying”. And most of what passes for news can be construed as lies of omission.

The media, as a whole, are filled with leftists, and the left has never had a close relationship with the truth. The left is more than willing to change itself into an angel of light if that is what works to get them power. Whatever is popular is what it is they believe…for as long as it suits their goal for attaining power.

The Progressive Movement in United States was socialism American style. When Woodrow Wilson was President of the U.S. the binding force for the Progressive Movement in America was…..believe it or not…..religion. European socialism was atheistic in nature and that just wouldn’t float in America, so it became the Progressive Movement and the rationale was that socialism was the practical application of Christian ethic. It was later called Liberalism and by that time the true socialists within the movement was able to kick the religionists to the curb because they didn’t need them any longer. After WWII the binding force for Liberalism was psychology. If you disagreed with them you were insane.  

Mark this down. I predict the day will come when the New York Times will cease publication.
 

A day for rejoicing.

 

 

Media Corruption

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

Everything we read in the newspapers and see on the news is a lie. Not necessarily lies of commission, although they have been guilty of that, but mostly lies of omission. What is even more disturbing is when they deliberately alter the events to give their lies solid foundations that appear as facts. I know the media are largely immune to libel laws compared to the rest of society, but you would think that they would at least make a stab at writing history correctly. I have concluded that they aren't very bright, very brave or very honest. Why? Two reasons! First they simply aren't....and secondly, they are hired by people who also aren't any better going back to the days of Hearst and Pulitzer, both of whom were contemptible in many ways. The foundation for newspaper corruption goes back to the founding of the nation. Hearst and Pulitzer made yellow journalism a science. The interesting thing is that due to the internet the media is probably better than ever in American history.

That's really frightening!

Thomas Sowell wrote an article recently, News versus propaganda, wherein he says:

"Since so many in the media cannot resist turning every tragedy into a political talking point, it was perhaps inevitable that (1) someone would try to link the shooting rampage at the Batman movie in Colorado to the Tea Party, and that (2) some would try to make it a reason to impose more gun control laws. Too many people in the media cannot seem to tell the difference between reporting the news and creating propaganda. NBC News apparently could not resist doctoring the transcript of the conversation between George Zimmerman and the police after the Trayvon Martin shooting. Now ABC News took the fact that the man arrested for the shooting in Colorado was named James Holmes to broadcast to the world the fact that there is a James Holmes who is a member of the Tea Party in Colorado."

This has been the pattern forever. Newspapers, just like politicians, lie....constantly. And they do so because they are corrupt, and largely immune in their corruption. If you were to go back to the presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams and read the various newspaper articles from both sides you would be aghast:

 "By the time the votes were cast, both men would have wild stories circulated about their pasts, with lurid charges of murder, adultery, and procuring of women being plastered across the pages of partisan newspapers."

Although the charges against Jackson were largly true, and the charges against Adams were largly false, Adams lost. However, Jackson, who is still considered a great American hero, revelled in the mud slinging, the sleazier the better, whereas Adams was repelled by it. And the outright partisanship of the newspapers was amazing, even compared with the valueless claptrap spewing out of newsrooms today.

This is what we must take away from all of this. Everyone who writes articles leave things out. Sometimes it’s because their simply isn’t room. Sometimes it’s not part of the theme you are working with, and an article can’t be a book. However, sometimes it’s because they don’t want the correct information clouding the conclusion they are driving you to with the narrative they are painting for you. How do we overcome that? We must read both sides to see what the other side is leaving out and why. We must read books because a much broader picture can be painted. We must read history because the pathways of the past are the stepping stones to the future.  The pathways of the past are solid and immutable foundations giving us the confidence to step lightly into the future remembering that these stepping stone can't be a permanent part of the pathway until we pass them. Finally; we must keep this in the forefront of our minds.

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.

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