Search This Blog

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Dying Dinosaurs

The Internet as news source may be creating a problem defined by the defenders of the dinosaur media as "The Daily Me." But Marvin Olasky asks
True, we miss out if we read only The Daily Me, but the good old days of reading only The Daily Liberal were not so good. I don't believe that America will be worse off with fewer breakfasts of propaganda on newsprint, over easy.

For example, I posted yesterday about an editorial in the Virginian Pilot that contained pure propaganda disguised as analysis. And, basically, that's pretty much the content of the MSM today. We are being fed a daily dose of intellectual poison.

The desperate remedies that newspaper writers and editors are searching for: tax breaks, endowments, public funding are at the bottom nothing other than a desire to save their jobs. Nothing wrong with wanting to stay employed. But I feel sorrier for the people who work in cigarette factories. Poisoning your body is not nearly as bad as poisoning your mind. Forget about all the high sounding rhetoric about the "need" for newspapers.
So, let's be frank about motivation: Many liberal journalists are concerned not so much about newspapers in general but about saving their jobs. Even with endowments and contributions, many of those jobs in their present form will disappear. News distribution via computer is so much cheaper that even an endowed New York Times would not last all that long in paper form. Goodbye, survival of the fattest.

Newspapers as currently produced and distributed - primarily as local monopolies - are on their death beds. But there will always be a market for news. We can create our own news sources. And we will be read.

No comments: