Barack Hussein Obama, Public Financing and the Virginian Pilot

Pravda was a beacon of journalistic truth and technical prowess compared with the Virginian Pilot

The Virginian Pilot has now gone four days without any reference to Barack Hussein Obama breaking his pledge to go with public financing for the general election campaign. This, of course, is par for the course for the Virginian Pilot as well as most of the MSM.

Here is a list of items that the Virginian Pilot finds more worthy of editorializing on

 New wild areas benefit all
 Headquarters pitch requires caution
 A bad idea on the Internet
 An original idea on road funding
 More space for state prisoners
 2011 is too late for ORV plan
 Call to responsibility for black fathers
 No easy answers for high gas prices


And the headline grabber for today: APM's headquarters pitch requires caution.

What will be interesting this year will be to see if the drive-by-media will be able to drag this empty suit over the finish line ahead of John McCain?

Now I grant that John is not a great campaigner. In the past his main constituency has been the media who have cheered him when he was busy being a “Maverick” by stabbing his political party in the back. But given a choice between a corrupt Chicago pol who trails a string of racist, radical and crooked friends and associates, but has a (D) as his party affiliation, the MSM have thrown “Maverick” John overboard and are busy holding his head under water.

But as I said, what will be interesting to watch is whether the national network of information gatekeepers still has the power to get their choice into the White House. That’s because newspapers are failing at an accelerating rate due to shrinking ad revenues leading to shrinking staffs leading to shrinking readership leading to shrinking influence.

Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue
Monday June 23, 11:35 pm ET
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.
On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.
Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.
“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

This embattled industry combines its failing fortunes with a hubris that comes from decades of being in a position to decide what people should think about and then telling them what to think. That sort of power is virtually impossible to surrender even if it means losing you livelihood. Dictators never seem to know when it’s time to go. The media has responded by venturing half-heartedly into the internet. But the Internet is an interactive media and the MSM are not capable of understanding that people are no more willing to be being preached at by people with musty Leftist ideology using pixels instead of printer’s ink.

As a result, the MSM has become more rather than less ideological, perhaps believing that a small paper appealing to a rabid group of readers is a better business model than the one they had before. Perhaps; but that means that their political influence to the “moderate middle “will be reduced. So we may be seeing the last scream of the dinosaur media as they gather around Saint Obama.

As I said, it’ll be interesting.