I take no pleasure in the misery of others, but as someone who recognizes that the mainstream media is the arch-villain in the fight for human liberty and the survival of an America that doesn’t resemble a European socialist country – yesterday, it was impossible for my heart to do anything other than leap for joy when I read that the New York Times lost $40 million in 2011.

No one wants to see anyone lose their job, but the New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, and all the rest are nothing more than lairs for arch-villains, and when these hollowed-out volcanoes are bankrupted, the virtue of this outweighs what happens to the faceless henchmen who are now out on the streets looking for work. I wish them luck. I wish things were different. But this is about saving our country and humanity.

Over in England, some are openly panicking over the future of newspapers:

The Chicago Sun Times has received your message loud and clear, dear readers. As much as admitting that they are biased and they know it, the long-time Windy City staple has decided that hence forth it will no longer endorse candidates for political office.

In a Sunday editorial, the 71-year-old paper announced its new policy amusingly touting the Old Media’s party line that it engages in “unbiased news coverage” and that newspapers today wish to “appeal to the widest possible readership.”

“They want to inform you, not spin you,” the editorial avers. Yet, the editorial goes on to admit that it has heard from readers who seriously doubt that dedication to unbiased news coverage. And when you note that over the last several decades few national news papers have endorsed a Republican for President — most especially the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times — it is easy to doubt that purported dedication to just-the-facts reporting.

The Sun-Times is so dedicated to helping Democrats get elected, it even endorsed disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for reelection. Yes, even after his troubles were well known by even the most uninformed Illinois voter. After reelection Governor Blagojevich ended up being convicted on several counts of fraud and influence peddling when he tried to sell the Senate seat that Obama gave up to become president. Blago will begin serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison this February.

Yet, even before Blago’s convictions for selling the Senate seat he was involved in numerous scandals and still the Times endorsed him any way saying. “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration,” the Times then wrote. Going on, the Times said, “We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”

It is a bit hard to escape the feeling that the “number of reasons” the Times endorsed the corrupt Blago was spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T!

One has to doubt the commitment to vetting candidates, anyway. All too often the editorial board’s entire decision rests solely on the candidate questionnaires as opposed to any deeper study of candidate’s records or campaigns. Worse, when it comes to judges the Sun-Times most especially would just rely on the left-wing endorsements of the Chicago Bar Association, a horribly biased source for information on judges.

The Times did make an interesting point in its announcement, but only by accident, it appears.

(more…)

- And the media begins moving a little less discreetly to cram Mitt Romney down our throats:

Sara Murray of the Washington Wire asks: “Can tea partiers grow to love Mitt Romney?”

Iowa’s Des Moines Register (dude) endorses Romney.

Why even hold a primary? It’s evident you cats have your candidate all selected, you apparently promised Nikki Haley the moon to get her endorsement, all you need now is Marco Rubio to bring that tugboat to shore. I’m not going to pretend that this man is the nominee and no one else stands a chance. He isn’t, and others do.

- A new study predicts the death of newspapers in five years.

- Media Matters gets epically owned after they trump up baseless attacks on others in an attempt to deflect for being called out on their growing antisemitism–and continual employment of writers who call Israel supporters “terrorists.”

- I almost choked on a Christmas cookie while reading this, considering the source:

While granting anonymity to sources is justifiable under certain circumstances, providing a candidate the opportunity to rebut criticism from his opponents while posing as one of his own aides does not meet any reasonable journalistic standard for the practice.

Yes, the same CJR that publishes Jay Rosen.

(more…)

- Logo test: Which newspaper brands do consumers trust most? Yikes. Not USA Today!

Despite having the second-highest circulation of any U.S. newspaper, the USA Today was the least trusted brand among both consumers and local service professionals, actually

- Crushing progressive media minds all across the blogosphere: Bill Ayers admits to the Obama fundraiser that the Obama camp had called a “myth.”

- Media inquiries forced forward Cain’s latest accuser.

- Ann Coulter heavily censored on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

- Eliot Spitzer returns to cable news.

- Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas “uber moron emeritus“:

When it was reported that Republicans had signaled they might go along with an extension of the payroll tax cuts, Markos jumped on Twitter to declare a victory for Occupy Wall Street. He then cranked out ablog post which comes off like someone who has never done an end zone dance trying to do the Ickey Shuffle for the first time.

In the world where Occupy had never happened, Republicans would’ve held these tax cuts hostage without suffering any ill repercussions. Why would they? The chattering class and Beltway media would be droning on endlessly about deficits and other things that didn’t matter.

See that? “Deficits and other things that didn’t matter.” This is actually mainstream Progressive belief. Remember this the next time a Democrat pretends to care about fiscal responsibility. They don’t care. But I digress.

In this world, Occupy has thrust income inequality to the forefront of the political debate — so much so that typically immovable Republicans are afraid to feed that narrative.

In other words, a ragtag bunch of hippies with supposedly no demands have done what Democrats have never been able to do — get Republicans to cry “uncle”.

Yeah, Markos. That ragtag bunch of hippies have gotten the evil Republicans to say they’ll probably back the extension of a TAX CUT.

NEW YORK (AP) – The rapid growth of smartphones and electronic tablets is making the Internet the destination of choice for consumers looking for news, a report released Monday said.

Local, network and cable television news, newspapers, radio and magazines all lost audience last year, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization that evaluates and studies the performance of the press. News consumption online increased 17 percent last year from the year before, the project said in its eighth annual State of the News Media survey.

The old way of getting the news.

The percentage of people who say they get news online at least three times a week surpassed newspapers for the first time. It was second only to local TV news as the most popular news platform and seems poised to pass that medium, too, project director Tom Rosenstiel said. Local TV news has been the most popular format since the 1960s, when its growth was largely responsible for the death of afternoon newspapers, he said.

“It was a milestone year,” he said.

People are just becoming accustomed to having the Internet available in their pockets on phones or small tablets, he said. In December, 41 percent of Americans said they got most of their news about national and international issues on the Internet, more than double the 17 percent who said that a year earlier, the report said.

(more…)

Democratic Party front group Media Matters for America has published yet another attack on Republican Sarah Palin. This one a dishonest portrayal of media coverage of her recent slip of the tongue regarding the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In a Thanksgiving Day message posted Nov. 25th on her Facebook page, Palin opened her post with a tongue in cheek send-up of President Barack Obama in which no fewer than ten of his verbal gaffes and misstatements were included and sourced.

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that …

The point Palin was making was that though everyone occasionally goofs up — including the President, you might not remember hearing about his, “because for the most part the media didn’t consider them newsworthy,” Palin wrote.

Such is not the case when it comes to Palin who in the course of a radio interview with Glenn Beck, mistakenly referred to South Korea as North Korea, but then quickly corrected herself. Media Matters blogger Oliver Willis, writing at his personal blog, posted the audio clip of Palin’s slip. Willis is one of several liberal bloggers who met recently with President Obama at the White House.

(more…)

Like you didn’t know.

The New York Times cultivates an image as the preferred read of the intellectual elite, but at least one of the paper’s higher-ups seems to think its customers aren’t all that bright.

During a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood New York conference, Gerald Marzorati, the Times’s assistant managing editor for new media and strategic initiatives, explained why the paper’s print business is still robust. “We have north of 800,000 subscribers paying north of $700 a year for home delivery,” Marzorati said. “Of course, they don’t seem to know that.”

As evidence that Times subscribers don’t realize how much a subscription costs, he pointed to what happened when the paper raised its home-delivery price by 5 percent during the recession: Only 0.01 percent of subscribers canceled. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they’re literally not understanding what they’re paying,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the credit card.”

The NYT is mocks its readers. In so many ways this scenario reminds me of the London premiere of Banksy’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

(more…)

Gallup puts out the statistics that affirm the the outrage we share with you on a daily basis:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.

The 43% of Americans who, in Gallup’s annual Governance poll, conducted Sept. 13-16, 2010, express a great deal or fair amount of trust ties the record low, and is far worse than three prior Gallup readings on this measure from the 1970s.

Trust in the media is now slightly higher than the record-low trust in the legislative branch but lower than trust in the executive and judicial branches of government, even though trust in all three branches is down sharply this year. These findings also further confirm a separate Gallup poll that found little confidence in newspapers and television specifically.

Nearly half of Americans (48%) say the media are too liberal, tying the high end of the narrow 44% to 48% range recorded over the past decade. One-third say the media are just about right while 15% say they are too conservative. Overall, perceptions of bias have remained quite steady over this tumultuous period of change for the media, marked by the growth of cable and Internet news sources. Americans’ views now are in fact identical to those in 2004, despite the many changes in the industry since then. (more…)

Newspapers and television stations reaped a financial windfall from the BP oil spill — and continue to benefit as the company spends millions on advertising to repair its battered image following the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP spent $93.4 million on ads between April 1 and July 31, according to Politico. That’s triple the amount from the same period one year ago. The information was included in a letter from House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Fla.) to Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.).

BP began its flurry of ads shortly after the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 and has continued to target national and local outlets seven weeks after the well was capped. Newspapers and TV stations have been the biggest beneficiaries. (more…)

Trying to write eight-ten articles a day makes one something of a news junkie. Between 7 a.m. and 1 a.m., whole days are spent reading one of the 607 news feeds I have input into my feed reader, following up stories on the phone and maneuvering the TV remote between CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and when I can find it, even the BBC. Thanks to an agile thumb, at times I can follow the same story on all the networks at the same time.

Watching that mostly distorted coverage can drive a blogger crazy. And worse it makes one think really nasty things about the media. But no longer, no more negative thoughts.  I’ve had an epiphany. Now I feel nothing but sympathy for these reporters who used to be the object of my scorn. You see they can’t help themselves. The mainstream media is not biased, they have tiny brains. That’s why the tunnel vision.  These reporters are taught to categorize things into neat little boxes and do not have the capacity to think beyond those categories.

Take a look at the coverage of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally.  The press could not comprehend that people would actually travel to Washington, D.C., and attend a rally that was about concepts such as Honor and Faith, so they had to put the event into their little Tea Party or Conservative box. Despite the fact that Beck has never been part of the Tea Party movement, or the host’s declaration that the rally would not be political, reporters still got all tied up in their underwear looking for a way to stuff the rally into the boxes they know: (more…)

*** Corrected

By now, readers of Big Journalism are more than familiar with the liberal media’s exercise in conspiracy, collusion, and confusion that was the JournoList.

For most on the political right, the leaked emails being exposed by Tucker Carlson and his DailyCaller website serve as proof that the Mainstream Media has jumped the shark, compromising its traditional credibility and betraying a deep, passionate left-wing bias beneath what was supposed to be objective journalism.

Matthew Yglesias, JournoList tough guy

But while all of that is certainly true, I believe it is based on a flawed premise. Specifically, that the Mainstream Media has ever been – or even should have ever been – credible and objective.

The historic reality is that media in America has always been a tool of partisans. During the years proceeding the American Revolution, the revolutionary founders used the pages of the emergent colonial newspapers to rally support for their petitions against the crown. In fact, newspapers were perhaps the most powerful tools in moving public opinion in favor of independence, both through publication of stories hostile to British intentions, or editorial tracts promoting revolution. (more…)

How quickly it all happened: five years ago, and certainly ten, the idea that the daily newspaper would no longer be part of our morning routine would have seemed unthinkable to the majority of Americans.  And yet, in retrospect, it was inevitable: the speed and versatility of the internet, plus its inter-activity, made the daily newspaper obsolete, racheted up the speed of news to near the speed of light and put a premium on old-fashioned journalistic virtues that had gotten lost in the “professionalization” of journalism during the latter half of the 20th century.

More about that in a moment, but first this breaking news from the Wall Street Journal:

The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014.

The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report, which PwC plans to release Tuesday.

Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.

(more…)

A few weeks ago I noted the President’s support for an Organizing for America letter-writing campaign for health reform. This involved a web form and a few talking points which at least 72 papers around the country were fooled into reprinting as letters to the editor. Now I’ve I received notice of a follow up campaign by OFA, this time promoted by Vice President Biden. He writes in part:

Believe me, senators and their staff read the letters page — because they know just how influential it can be. Your letter could make a tremendous difference….

It’s just the first step, but one letter from a constituent is worth a hundred paid advertisements. So please make sure your friends and neighbors understand the benefits this law will bring to ordinary Americans — take three minutes and write a paragraph or two now:

http://my.barackobama.com/SenateThank

Thanks,

Vice President Joe Biden

While this campaign may be new, the talking points that appear in the sidebar of the OFA website are not. They appear in this March 24 e-mail sent out by the President: (more…)

The Chicago Tribune company, which also owns the Los Angeles Times,  is on the verge of bankruptcy. In hock to a Lebanese-Mexican billionaire, the New York Times is trying desperately to stay afloat, laying off staff even as it pays its executives exorbitant salaries while mulling the option going behind a pay wall while still employing Frank Rich.

Times, in other words, are tough in the formerly lucrative racket of Joseph Pulitzer, Col. McCormick and William Randolph Hearst:

Now the Philadelphia papers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, are on the brink as well.  They’ve declared bankruptcy and are battling now to stay afloat. Here’s Brian Tierney, CEO of the company that owns them both, discussing their bleak future: (more…)

Would you pay to read the MSM?  Not if you’re like most people, according to this AP report of a Pew Research study:

Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons,” a new consumer survey suggests.

That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday.

There’s more: (more…)

We used to think of the British and European press as far more politicized than ours; after all, their newspapers freely chose up sides and when you picked up a Tory paper such as The Telegraph, a center-right paper like The Times, a center-left paper like The Independent, and a leftist paper like the Guardian, you pretty much knew what you were getting.

American newspapers, on the other hand, were “neutral” and “objective,” like The New York Times and the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francsico Chronicle.

Right.

So how to explain this minor paddling of the “objective” American media by the equally “objective” Columbia Journalism Review: (more…)

We already know true journalism is dead, with but a few courageous reporters carrying the last beacons of light in the apocalyptic landscape of the Fourth Estate.   In recent years, however, newspaper editorial boards have vastly overstepped their boundaries in commentary on issues of which they know nothing.  We really should change the name of the Opinion Editorial to Informed Opinion Editorial.  After all, do we really want the Village Idiot telling us what he thinks?

Specifically, I refer to an irresponsible screed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in which they call on the FDA to ban bisphenol-A (BPA), a common building block of in plastics found in great abundance in our everyday products.

It’s bad enough that any outside entity should try to exert influence over the FDA’s decision-making process.  Thankfully, the FDA ignored the Journal Sentinel, and just announced that it considers BPA to be safe, while reasonably calling for continued studies.

This doesn’t change the importance of rags like the Journal Sentinel from meddling in something they know nothing about, and hoping to influence an independent body. The ramifications of the Journal Sentinel’s behavior go deeper than the message it’s sending.  By attempting to pressure a body charged with protecting the public, it sets a dangerous precedent that affects each and every one of us. (more…)

The elephant in the room should be anchoring the evening news.

Seriously. I never cease to be amazed how those who say they are there to protect us are totally unable to see what is killing them.  Oh, viewers will be told to watch out for mad cow disease and deadly tennis rackets (you’ve seen the promos), while those same “experts” are incapable of self reflection. Right now, the media needs the paddles but they refuse to call the EMT.

One of two things is happening here; a) The leftist activist old media is on a mission to push their agenda and nothing else matters, or b) they really don’t know what they’re doing and the stories just take on a life of their own and like NASCAR , they just happen to take left turns nearly all the time. (more…)